As a rule, libraries aren’t supposed to be dramatic. Yet the long road to creating a free public library in Saint John was fraught with chaos, conflict and challenges.
New Brunswick’s first-ever library was established in Saint John in 1811. However, it wasn’t free. You had to pay for a subscription if you wanted to borrow a book.
While the City Market was under construction in the 1870s, Dr. James Hanney, columnist for the Daily Telegraph (now the Telegraph-Journal) newspaper, launched a petition asking that a room in the new building be set aside to become a free public library.
Common Council received that petition with some exasperation. Construction on the City Market, the most expensive project Saint John had ever undertaken, was well underway. In effect, the city’s response was: couldn’t you people have thought of this earlier?
Before a decision was made, the 1877 Great Fire destroyed 2/5ths of Saint John.
Practically before the embers had cooled, the rather eccentric Col. James Domville, who was not only a sitting member of Saint John Common Council but, oddly enough, was at the same time also the federal Member of Parliament representing Kings County, penned a manifesto demanding a free library.
Domville highlighted that the Great Fire had reduced many books to ash, and argued that now more than ever Saint John needed a library, declaring: “The possession of a Public Library, accessible to all classes of society, is a want which at no time a city, having any claim to enlightenment, should allow to remain unsatisfied; but, under the circumstances in which the City of St. John now finds itself placed, it becomes almost an absolute necessity.”
For Domville, a library’s physical location wasn’t as important as its book collection, which should be free and accessible. So he launched a highly unconventional effort to acquire books.
Despite the printing press having been around for hundreds of years, Col. Domville took it upon himself to personally write out his pro-library manifesto by hand, copying it over and over (often while he was sitting in Parliament), and personally mail copies to Saint Johners all by himself.
His handwritten letters called on ordinary citizens to personally reach out to governments in Canada, Britain, and the United States, as well as to “literary and scientific societies … various public libraries, literary and scientific institutions, and great publishing houses” to ask them to send Saint John free books.
This curious campaign was a huge success, and, according to a 1905 article in New Brunswick Magazine, “many cases of books arrived,” totalling some 3000 books, many courtesy of the American government.
This first Saint John Free Public Library’s home was two little rooms inside of the City Market. It held its grand opening on May 18th, 1883; the one-hundredth anniversary of the first landing of the Loyalists.
Col. James Domville was not invited.
Although book lovers aren’t generally considered to be especially belligerent folks, Domville was certainly an exception. A series of embarrassing high-profile scandals in Ottawa, including getting into fistfights with fellow MPs on the floor of Parliament and a repeated habit of falling victim to business scams saw Domville not only lose his re-election but become publicly ostracised.
In the years after, as its collection grew, the free library later moved to a “temporary” location in the Masonic Hall on Germain Street. The promised new library building didn’t materialize, and that “temporary” location became the free library’s home for nearly two decades.
With no sign of a new library on the horizon, in 1901 exasperated Head Librarian Richard O’Brian asked the city’s mayor to pen an unsolicited letter to the richest man in the world, asking if he would personally pay out of his own pocket to build a new library for Saint John.
Mayor J. W. Daniel agreed and wrote a letter to Andrew Carnegie, a Scottish-American steel magnate who had just sold his business for $300 million (about $11 billion in today’s money) and had publicly vowed to give 90% of his fortune away.
The mayor opened his letter with an extremely dull lengthy list of statistics about his city’s economy, before finally getting to the point: “In re-building the city, every dollar was required for what were considered absolutely necessary purposes, and thus it is that St. John is still without a suitable building for a library … which now contains about 14,000 volumes.”
After decades of wrangling over a building library, things suddenly moved very quickly.
Only one month later, a letter from Andrew Carnegie arrived in Saint John.
The steel magnate replied that if the city acquired the land for a library, and decided how much it would spend on it, he would match that donation ten-fold. Carnegie had only had one string attached: the city had to voluntarily give up all power over the library, and allow it to be run by the community.
Mayor Daniel hadn’t actually informed Common Council that he was asking Carnegie for money. Nonetheless, the surprised Councillors promptly got on board and earmarked $5000 for the new library.
Almost immediately, a shadowy Carnegie representative from New York named A. R. Franks appeared in Saint John carrying $50,000 in cash. He kept an eye on the library’s construction, doling out the promised money in $5000 increments as work progressed, to make sure his boss didn’t get ripped off.
That new library was opened in 1904 on the 300th anniversary of Samuel de Champlain’s arrival in Saint John. That building is now the Saint John Art Centre and can be found at 20 Peel Plaza. Meanwhile, the Free Public Library is found today in Market Square.
In an effort to rectify a past oversight, an elderly Col. James Domville was a special guest at the grand opening. There he was finally recognized for “the work done in starting the movement for a Free Public Library in St. John,” and presented with a library card.
