Devotion: Long-serving Library Trustees
Devotion: Long-serving Library Trustees
Several years ago when the Heritage Commission was preparing State and National Register of Historic Places applications for the original 1907 Library building, we compiled a list of Library trustees and Librarians with their dates of service.
A few trustees stood out by the length of their service - Edward M. Smith, 30 years; Fred L. Dow, 34 years; Margaret B. Seavey, 13 years as trustee, 6 years as Librarian; Dorothy E. Hobbs, 41 years; Gordon S. Dow, 26 years; and Frances Chase Leavitt, 32 years. Here are their stories and what happened during their tenures.
Edward M. Smith served as a trustee from 1914 until his death in 1943. He was a civil engineer working for the B&M Railroad. The 34 year old Edward Smith attended the 1900 Paris Exposition. This world’s fair, attracting 50 million visitors over a seven month period, focused on celebrating the achievements of the previous century and highlighting some upcoming technological advances (moving sidewalks, diesel engines, talking films, escalators, and the telegraphone [magnetic audio recorder]).
Closer to home, Smith during the previous year had overseen the construction of the second line of B&M tracks from Amesbury to Greenland. Keep him in mind when the rail trail opens. By the way, Edward’s father, Morris Smith, was North Hampton Station Master for forty-three years.
Fred Dow began his stint as a long-time trustee even earlier, in 1904, just a year after the second S.A. Dow’s Store, now Joe’s Meat Shoppe, was built. (Fred was Samuel A. Dow’s son). Dow between 1904 and 1907 would have been one of the leaders of the effort to gain voter approval for the Library building. He remained a trustee until 1938 when his son Gordon was elected to the post.
Fred reportedly had the first Ford Model T in town. He had bought land on Atlantic Avenue from Frank Jones, the Portsmouth brewery magnate, and built a house in 1896 at 190 Atlantic Avenue. Listed in the 2018 town-wide survey of historic resources, one of the house’s features is a staircase constructed by Nathaniel Ridlon, minister of the Little River Church (then Christian Baptist denomination), and a noted stair maker.
As for the Library, it underwent major changes during those years when Dow and Smith were trustees. Although a new building, the Library required fixes as early as 1914. Among them, electrification throughout and concreting the basement floor as “in times of heavy rain the water is liable to come into the cellar and the consequent dampness is bad for the building and contents.” During the teens and twenties, additional shelving, necessitating rearranging the electric lighting, occurred.
Back then, like many libraries, there was no browsing. A patron would consult a list and ask for a book or books. The Library let people know about new books by having the information printed in the Exeter News-letter. Library cataloging progressed and was in the form of subject cards and author cards in two separate cabinets. In 1935, the library adopted the Dewey Decimal cataloging system with the aid of federal funding provided by the New Deal’s Civil Works Administration.
The creation of memorial tablets honoring residents who had fought in the Civil War and World War I also appears to have been at the trustees’ initiative. The two plaques were placed in the Library until the trustees in the early 1920s with voter approval ordered and had installed the granite monument in front of the Library.
Margaret B. Seavey was Dow’s and Smith’s fellow trustee for thirteen years, 1923 until 1936 when, upon the death of the Librarian Alice McFadden, she took over the position. Seavey also was an active Woman’s Club member; in the early 1940s she and Marion L. Carter compiled the Old Houses scrapbook, a digital copy of which can be explored on the Historical Society’s collections page. Margaret was born in Rye and married Chester Seavey in 1910; they lived at 260 Atlantic Avenue next door to Seavey’s parents’ farm in a house built perhaps at the time of their marriage.
Smith, too, was active in other civic affairs. In 1940 he and Raymond Hobbs, a surveyor and former scholarship student and proctor at Phillips Exeter Academy, created the first tax map for the town.
Both Seavey and Smith died in 1943, eulogized in the 1944 town report “the community has lost two of its outstanding citizens in the persons of our beloved librarian, Margaret B. Seavey, who had served for a period of twenty years, first as trustee and then librarian, and Edward M. Smith, trustee for thirty years and more responsible than any one person for the development of our library as it is today.”
Dorothy E. Hobbs replaced Margaret Seavey as a trustee and remained until 1976. Fred’s son, Gordon S. Dow, served from 1938 until 1964. Then in 1944 Frances C. Leavitt was elected. Both women and Dow were young – in their twenties or early thirties – with young children when first elected.
Dow, in addition to his responsibilities at Dow’s store, was a North Hampton volunteer firefighter, we think from the 1930s to 1950s, and also served part of the time as Fire Chief.
Dorothy Hobbs, like her husband Paul, graduated from UNH, she the class of 1930 with a degree in math: she later obtained a Master's in psychology. Dot served as President of the North Hampton Woman’s Club from 1936 to 1938. If that wasn’t enough, she also was on the three-member School Board -- from 1941 to 1951 -- during the time the current School was approved and built. Gordon Dow also put in time on the School Board and was chair at the time of the school dedication.
Leavitt, a graduate of Plymouth Normal School (Plymouth State University), was a teacher and principal of Center School, better known today as Centennial Hall. By the way, she agreed about the need for a new school.
The late 1930s to 1970s saw continued changes to the Library, operations and facilities. Until the 1920s libraries were intended for serious scholars, not young children. By 1936 the trustees noted: “The children are showing a great interest in the juvenile books and efforts will be made to devote a substantial proportion of our book budget toward providing for their needs.” In 1938 the Junior Woman’s Club provided children’s furniture in the reading room and shelves for children’s books were also added there.
Then in August 1944, “Anne Carroll Moore, a noted children’s librarian of New York, visited our library through the kindness of Mrs. Hobson. Twenty children and four adults enjoyed her story-telling. Programs for children are planned for the coming year.” Perhaps that year marks the beginning of such programming. Did new trustee Frances Leavitt approach Alice Hobson? Frances’ husband, Norman Leavitt, had worked with Mrs. Hobson in the 1930s in staging a major summer concert and opera series known as the New Hampshire Seacoast Music Festival. It attracted thousands to the Hobson estate on Little Boar’s Head. Norman was the choral director, and later, when Fabien Sevitsky was in Europe, festival director.
Back to the Library. Facilities improvements in the late 1930s included “final” resolution of the damp basement by installing a sump and electric pump and replacing the original wood-burning furnace with an oil heater to “provide us with a more convenient, efficient and economical heating system.”
In 1951 the Woman’s Club established a book shelf in the Library with books in memory of deceased members. Not to be outdone, The Junior Woman’s Club sponsored a story hour for pre-schoolers. Also in the 1950s the State bookmobile visited three and then five times a year. It was in 1955 that placing children’s books on shelves by grade level was set up. Then in 1958 the Woman’s Club sponsored a Library Services Committee - activities to include organizing a permanent picture and pamphlet file, Open House during National Library week in April, story hour for pre-school children, monthly exhibits, and loaning of book collections to school and shut-ins. This service committee transformed itself into the Friends of the Library in 1960.
In 1955 Hobbs, Dow, and Leavitt gained voter approval for an addition to the 1907 building. They hired Irving W. Hersey Associates of Durham and two local men, Harry Carter, the mason, and Reginald R. Leonard, the carpenter, built the addition. Designed in keeping with the Tudor Revival building with one of the original windows moved to the new back wall of the addition, the expansion provided the space needed for a rapidly increasing population, including their offspring, young baby boomers.
After Dow’s departure, Hobbs and Leavitt continued working to keep Library operations and facilities up to date. In 1966 the Library added the position of Assistant Librarian to supplement the work of the Librarian and student assistant. Joined in succession by Hazel Whenal, Jane Palmer and Ruth Griffith, Hobbs and Leavitt saw the current library building and constructed. But that’s a story for another day. The era of decades’ long service as a Library trustee had come to a close.