It’s Time to Thank These Women for Founding The Everett Public Library

Editor’s note: Originally published June 4, 2019. Republished March 11, 2021.

It’s taken me a long time to write this post. And while there is no excuse for my sloth, there is an explanation. This is it: I hold these women and their organization in the highest possible esteem. So much esteem, in fact, that I was nervous to let them down with a blog post that didn’t do them justice.

After all, this more than 125-year-old organization is not only responsible for forming the Everett Public Library, but many of the women involved in the founding of the Woman’s Book Club also helped establish the city’s first hospital and, as a group, they have kept their organization together for more than a century.

If that isn’t awesome to you, then I don’t know what else to tell you.

Except this: I want to tell you a story that I have been telling anyone who (in the past few months) has wandered into my orbit. If you’ve run into me at the gym, you’ve heard it. At work. At the yoga studio. At parties. If I’ve been anywhere and encountered a person from Everett, they got an earful about the Woman’s Book Club.

This organization has a ton of history. So much history that I am frankly not up to the task of relaying it. So I’m going to just tell this one story that I love. I hope that the fine women at the Woman’s Book Club forgive me for not tackling a more comprehensive telling of their club history. And I hope that you’ll take the time to go to their website to learn more about them, and maybe even apply to start an affiliated book club of your own.

The Woman’s Book Club // Courtesy Everett Woman’s Book Club

The Story (finally)

It all started over 125 years ago on June 10, 1894. On that day, a group of local Everett women gathered in the living room of Mary Lincoln Brown. Like their modern-day book club counterparts, these ladies knew how to start a meeting right: serve something delicious. Once the eating portion of the meeting was accomplished, it was time to get down to the business of making a plan for a public library.

While many of these women had been swapping books, they wanted to expand both the number of books they had access to and to share the wealth with the entire Everett community—especially with the bored patients convalescing at the local hospital (which, as I mentioned earlier, many of these women had helped to establish earlier that very same year).

Phase 1 of the plan was to gather enough books. With letters dispatched to other women’s organizations across the country, books began to stream in. When they acquired 1,000 books, Phase 2 went into effect, and they petitioned the city for a space to set up a library. They were allotted a few small rooms in City Hall. When their growing book collection began to outpace the space, they applied for a Carnegie Library Grant and won the funds to build Everett’s very own free-standing library.

However, upon receiving the grant, the Woman’s Book Club was dealt a blow. While the city was thrilled to know that the grant had been won, they announced that the library itself would be run by three men, not the Woman’s Book Club after all.

The Everett Carnegie Library, now a part of the Snohomish County campus // Courtesy the Everett Woman’s Book Club

Yup. That’s right. It came to pass that as the Woman’s Book Club received checks from Carnegie, they would immediately turn them over to the men now in charge of the library they had envisioned, gained funding for, and founded.

Nice. Right?

It can’t have felt great. But the women rolled with it. The Woman’s Book Club continued and the library itself eventually moved out of the Carnegie building into the gorgeous building we all know and love at the corner of Everett and Hoyt.

Time marches on

Today the Woman’s Book Club is going strong. I attended a meeting recently where an incredibly interesting, retired Seattle Times columnist told story after story to a rapt audience of men and women over coffee and cake.

I guess it’s not really a surprise this group has thrived for over 125 years. I mean, after all, I can’t really think of many better things in the world than hanging out with a bunch of friends sharing books, community, conversation, and treats on a semi-regular basis.