If plans for the Fort Frances Public Library’s 100th anniversary celebration come together, area residents will get a stylish glimpse into the past next month.
Members of the “Friends of the Library” are preparing for the centennial festivities June 26 from 2-4 p.m., which will include a museum display, a history of the local library compiled by Alice Widurski, and afternoon tea and cake.
The tea will be hosted by “Friends” dressed in fashions reminiscent of 1898, the year the Fort Frances library was established under the “Mechanics Institute.”
“Some of us will be in long dresses or skirts, and we’ll be pouring the tea from a silver teapot,” convener Pat Bird noted. “We are hoping for a feel of the period, and we want library lovers to come out and share in it.”
The tea will be held upstairs in the Carnegie wing–the oldest section of the present site built in 1914.
Honoured guests of the anniversary celebration will include descendants of some of the library’s earliest employees and board members, as well as the current mayor and town council.
Another special touch will be a “memory book” set up inside the entrance. People will be encouraged to write down their fondest and oldest memories of the library.
“It will be there for people to perhaps write down what they remember as a child about the library,” said Bird, who noted she would be adding her own thoughts to the book.
Bird, who moved here 10 years ago with her husband, Mike, and their children, vividly recalls the library as one of the first places she visited upon arriving in a new town.
“We always moved a lot and libraries were places I always [looked] for,” she said. “At the library here, it was Andrea [Avis] who made a tremendous impression on me.
“That is going to my memory,” she noted.
In related news, the annual Teddy Bear Picnic also is slated June 26 from 11 a.m.-1 p.m. on the library grounds.
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