Lunch in the Rest Room

 by Susan Zehnder, Education Director

This curious headline from the Elmira Star-Gazette was published on April 27, 1920. Today it conjures up images of late-night comedy sketches, but at the time, its meaning was clear to everyone. It is a good reminder that context is important to understanding history.

The context behind this headline is not a joke but involves a new group hosting a lunch. The group, calling themselves “Mark Twain,” was the local chapter of the New York Home Bureau. The bureau, formed in 1919 by educators from Cornell University, was a state-wide system that provided the latest information to the community on household economics and farm management. It was geared for rural women interested in improving their lives. While much of the country’s economy and day-to-day living still revolved around agriculture, advances in technology were shaping 20^th century farm life to look very different than earlier. The Cornell educators, mostly women scholars, saw a public interest and need for reliable, scientific information and wanted to help.  

That an organization like this came from Cornell University was a natural. Cornell is a land-grant institution, and like other land-grant colleges and universities was created as a result of the first Morrill Act signed in 1862 by President Abraham Lincoln. The original 69 institutions were financed by the sales of federally owned land, often land the government had seized or acquired through treaty or cession from Native American tribes.

Land-grant institutions used a new approach to educating students. Earlier, American universities relied on a European model that required students to study the classics, often in Greek or Latin. Topics like classical archeology, art history, history, literature, philosophy, and religion were thought to provide students with what they needed to succeed in life.

The new American model of education offered students practical courses in agriculture, science, military science, and engineering. Also in their mission, the new institutions offered university knowledge to the wider community. With this in mind, Cornell educators reached out to rural farmers. Through organizations like the Home Bureau, Farm Bureau and later Cornell Cooperative Extension, they shared the latest information. Today there are 106 land grant institutions throughout the country.

During World War I, a group of Chemung women who were interested in learning about better ways to preserve food formed the Mark Twain chapter of the Home Bureau. By May of 1920, the chapter had over 400 members.

Canning jar from CCHS collection

It was an active chapter which undertook all sorts of projects. Notable among them, with help from Steel Memorial trustees, was the establishment of the Chemung County Library system. This was the first county-wide library system in New York State. Other projects they pursued were improvements in school nutrition, including hot lunches in schools, food preservation, clothing, and crafts. By 1923, Chemung County had 31 Home Bureau chapters.

The Home Bureau doesn’t exist anymore, but Cornell Cooperative Extension continues to have a presence in all 62 New York counties.

So why, in 1920, was the Home Bureau chapter holding a luncheon in a rest room?

The Rest Room in question was not a washroom, but a room where rural women visiting Elmira could rest. It was maintained by the city and county, and located on the 2^nd floor of 120 Lake Street. Designed to be “a comfortable place where farm women could wait until all members of the family were ready to go home,” it was relocated to the Federal Building in 1930.

Just goes to show that curiosity can lead to some odd discoveries.

 

The Library Project

By Rachel Dworkin, archivist

 

Sometimes visitors ask me what it is I do all day. Each day is different, but I currently have an interesting project I’m working on. In addition to the over a million manuscript items and 14,000+ photographs in our archival collections, the Booth Library here at the Chemung County Historical Society also contains over 2,000 books. They include government publications, local history books, genealogies of area families, works by local authors, and scholarly works about topics related to our other collections. Right now, I am in the midst of a project to assess and update our holdings. It will be a multi-stage process. 

 

All of our books are cataloged on the Southern Tier Library System’s (STLS) StarCat catalog. In recent years, I’d built up a bit of a backlog of new books which needed to be added. In August, catalogers from STLS came to catalog the new books and add them to their on-line system. They assigned each book an item ID and a call number based on the Dewey Decimal System. Call number are assigned based on their topic: 000 is computer and information science; 100 is philosophy and psychology; 200 is religion; 300 is social science; 400 is language; 500 is sciences like physics, chemistry, and biology; 600 is technology; 700 is arts and recreation; 800 is literature; and 900 is history and geography. This system is used by libraries throughout the world. Each topic then subdivides so, for example, a history book on Chemung County would be 974.779 plus the first three letters of the author’s surname. Once the call number had been assigned I created a label for each book.

 

The next step is shelving which involved quite a lot of shifting. I started at the very top in the 000 section, adding the new books and dusting as I went. I’m also weeding as I go. Shelf space in our library is at a premium and I want to make sure that every book we have is relevant to our mission and up-to-date in terms of scholarship. Our mission is to document and share the history of the Chemung Valley. We don’t need a history of Albany County or a list of the heads of households in the 1790 census for Connecticut. The Steele Memorial Library has agreed to take any discards, so I am putting together a box for them. Once I’ve selected which books to pull from the shelves, I’ll contact STLS so that they can transfer the catalog records to Steele when I bring them the books.

Once all of that is done, I’ll be bringing back the folks from STLS to do a shelf read. They’ll go through each shelf to confirm that everything on the shelf is also in the catalog and add anything that isn’t. I hope to have this last bit completed sometime in the coming year. And now you know at least a little bit about what I do all day!

 

  

Check Out Your Library

by Rachel Dworkin. archivist

April 14^th marks the start of National Library Week.  Our county is home to the Chemung CountyLibrary District (CCLD), a public library funded by county taxpayers.  The District has 5 branches: Big Flats, Horseheads, Van Etten, West Elmira and the Central Branch in downtown Elmira.  The District was established in 2006, but the history of libraries in our county goes back much farther.

            The earliest area libraries were semi-private collections maintained by various societies, clubs and church groups including the Elmira Mechanics Society and the Park Church.  Books were available to members and their families who generally paid some sort of annual subscription fee for the purchase of new material and the upkeep of existing collections.  May schools also had a small collection of reference work and children’s books and magazines for use by the students. 

            The County’s first free public library was the Steele Memorial Library Association, founded in 1894 by Esther Steele in memory of her late husband.  Her own personal collection of over 5,000 works formed the core of the library’s holdings, but it grew rapidly as funds were raised.  The library’s first home when it opened to the public in 1899 was in the upper 2 floors of the Steele Memorial Building at the corner of Lake and East Market Streets.  The funds for the library came from the rents on the offices on the lower floors. 

1st Steele Memorial Library

1st Steele Memorial Library interior

 

 

In 1923, the library opened in its new building at the corner of Lake and Church Streets.  The building was constructed using funds from the Carnegie Library Corporation.  From 1883 to 1929, wealthy industrialist Andrew Carnegie funded the construction of 1,689 libraries in the United States with hundreds more across the world.  The new Steele Memorial Library building had been in the works in since 1917, but its construction was delayed due to America entering World War I. 

2nd Steele Memorial Library

Beginning in 1925, the Steele began lending to people outside the city for a $.10 borrowing fee.  People in rural communities could pick up books at the central branch or at any one of the 16 deposit stations throughout the county.  By the mid-1960s, these deposit stations had been consolidated into larger branch libraries on the Southside and in Big Flats, West Elmira and the Heights.  All of the branches were newly constructed buildings which offered the branches more space and a unified look.  In 2003, the Southside and Elmira Heights branches were closed due to funding issues. 

            The Steele Memorial Library building suffered extensive damage in the flood of 1972 and was beginning to outgrow the space.  In the fall of 1979, it moved to its third and current location at the corner of Clemens Center Parkway and Church Street.     

3rd Steele Memorial Library



 

The Chemung County Library District which was formed in 2006 was created by the merger of the Steele Memorial Library and its branches and the Horseheads Free Library.  The Horseheads Free Library was founded in 1944 by members of the Horseheads Women’s Club.  Over the years, it was housed in Brown’s Drug Store (1944-49), the Fire Station Annex (1949-61), the Marine Midland Bank (1961-62) and the Village Hall (1962-67) before moving into its own, specially constructed, building located at 405 South Main Street in Horseheads where it remains today.