By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
The Wood County District Public Library trustees met early this week for the first time in the year that the library is celebrating 150 years since its founding.
On Jan. 21, 1875, “a group of prominent local men,” having signed up 75 subscribers for the new venture, officially established the Bowling Green Library Association.
Each subscriber paid $5 — about $150 in today’s dollars — for the privilege of borrowing one book at a time. The library moved from location to location until 1888, when the venture folded.
After years of agitation to revive the library, the women of the Shakespeare Round Table launched a fundraising drive in 1911with the new library opening in 1914.
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Gifts are what helped sustain the institution from that time since. Fittingly at Monday’s meeting, the trustees main piece of business was officially accepting all the gifts that were received in 2024.
Those include in-kind gifts of flowers for landscaping, coupons for pizza and ice cream cones, and gift cards. Library Director Michael Penrod said that “a lot of the magic” worked by children’s services, including the summer reading program, is made possible by in-kind gifts.
The library also benefited from monetary donations of $280,507… and four cents.
The biggest contributor is the WCDPL Foundation, which contributed $265,180.
That money helps to support the 1,000 Books Before Kindergarten program to large print books. The money benefits local history and a range of youth programming including the library’s participation in the Dolly Parton Imagination Library.
The foundation also spearheads the largest library fundraiser Novel Night held in midsummer. That brought in $130,000 this year. Those funds all go toward the purchase of new books, large print books, eBooks, audiobooks, and picture books.
Those donations mean the library has more than $155,000 to spend on new books, and that means patrons can get the reading material they want and not linger on a wait-list, Penrod said.
That doesn’t include the almost $34,000 spent on material for the very youngest patrons including babes born at Wood County Hospital.
And a third of the funds are expended on programming for young people and adults. That includes tech support, tutoring, and story times.
Penrod noted: “That level of giving is very rare for a library our size.”
Ken Frisch, president of the trustees, noted that donations also fund visits by authors, including best sellers such as Erik Larson who is scheduled to speak in BG on Sept. 10.
