Elizabeth Taber Free Lending Public Library

            On Spring Street in Marion, the Elizabeth Taber Library has stood since the year 1872. It is an historic landmark of Victorian architecture and houses both the library and the Natural History Museum.

            The building was donated by Elizabeth Sprague Pitcher Taber (1791-1888). She had grown up here to become a schoolteacher and eventually marry a New Bedford clockmaker named Stephan Taber. Their three children all died before they reached the age of five. During the Civil War in 1862, her husband died, leaving her a childless but wealthy widow by her own astute financial investment in railroads.

            At the age of 79, she returned to Marion with resources and the determination to buy ten acres of land on Spring Street from Captain Allen. Then she donated $4,000 for the library building, as well as $15,000 for its endowment. The building served its dual purpose well, and, in the 1980s, two wings were added to expand the children’s area with meeting rooms for educational programs.

            According to the present children’s librarian of 15 years’ experience, Rosemary Gray, the emphasis on children’s programs, books, and activities has always been a main library objective from its very founding. Last year, children’s books and related materials added up to more than one-fifth of all lending.

            The Library recently hired a very well qualified new director, Elisabeth Sherry, from the Mattapoisett Library. She was highly recommended for her record of eight and a half years as the adult services and reference librarian. She had been trained and actively instrumental in handling the electronic and technical advancement of the Sails Library network. This network allows patrons to checkout and return books at some 50 other member public libraries, as well as 36 academic libraries. In one year with this access, 16,904 books were received from other libraries, and Mattapoisett provided 38,904 to other libraries as part of the service agreement.

            To show my own appreciation to Ms. Sherry for her expert and willing electronic research, as well as e-mail transmission of my articles and illustrations to The Wanderer, both she and Elizabeth Taber are rendered in my illustration. From my previous research on my articles on the Mattapoisett and Fairhaven Libraries, Taber’s contribution to Marion is no less than that of George Purrington and Henry Huttleston Rogers to Mattapoisett and Fairhaven, respectively. They all were motivated by a remarkably profound literary insight into the future of the written word for the future, especially now in modern times for children. Their contribution to their community, in my opinion, earns them the esteem of worthy members of a class of benefactors that I regard as the greatest generation of late 19th century industrial benefactors, alongside Rockefeller and Carnegie, better known to all. Each of them wanted to give back to the public what they had achieved. To quote from Rogers’ friend Mark Twain’s address at the Fairhaven Library dedication, “A public library is the most enduring of memorials, and the truest monument for preserving the language of books, that will always speak in a lost tongue to our posterity.”

            In Marion, a statue will be dedicated to Elizabeth Taber on the edge of Bicentennial Park on Spring Street facing the buildings she created. And inside her library, her husband’s grandfather clock is still a working timepiece. It is wound by hand and key weekly, and ticks on into the future like the sound of a living heartbeat for the wellbeing of the library.

By George B. Emmons

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