Packhorse Librarians in the Blue Ridge: A WPA Story
An installment in our Appalachian History and Culture series
In 1938, the Blue Ridge Mountains still held pockets of people far from any public library. Roads were rough, mail was slow, and a borrowed book might pass through several hands before finding its way back to a shelf. Into this gap came the Packhorse Librarians: women on horseback or mule, carrying books into places other delivery systems couldn’t reach.
Packhorse Librarians in the Blue Ridge: Jobs and Training
One of them starts her run at a small community center in western North Carolina. She knows the route well; the WPA hired local women who could find their way along backroads and ridge trails. Her pay is $28 a month, steady work in a time when jobs for women are scarce. Before she ever rode out, she learned to log each book, repair a cracked spine, and assemble scrapbooks from donated clippings and recipes. There’s no uniform, only a list of households and schools to visit and the expectation that she will get there.
Carrying Books Across the Blue Ridge
The saddlebags she lifts onto the mule hold an assortment: Robinson Crusoe, a worn farm bulletin on raising chickens, a Bible storybook, and a scrapbook of canning recipes collected from families along her route. The first miles follow a creek road toward a few farmsteads. She leaves the farm bulletin with a tobacco grower whose son is keeping hens, and the boy gets a thin reader with bright illustrations. A schoolteacher down the road accepts a battered atlas, promising to return it next month. At a crossroads store farther on, she leaves a small stack for families who live even deeper in the hills.
The route turns uphill toward a ridge school where thirty children crowd onto benches. The WPA didn’t buy new books; everything came from donations. Some of these volumes arrived from church drives, others from distant libraries clearing out their shelves. Today she brings Heidi, a Bible story collection, and a primer for beginning readers. She stays to read aloud before moving on, noting which books are close to wearing out.
Rain later in the day turns the road to slick clay. She dismounts to lead the mule through a narrow bend, stopping at an isolated home well past the last wagon track. For that family she’s brought a scrapbook—sewing patterns, home remedies, and news clippings bound between bits of cardboard. These handmade volumes are a hallmark of the Packhorse Library Project, tailored to the needs and interests of the households they serve.
Along the way, she accepts offers of help. A storekeeper keeps a few books behind the counter for neighbors to collect. At another stop, a family offers a place in their shed to keep books dry between deliveries. Cooperation like this is what makes the service possible. In scattered mountain communities, the librarian is as much a messenger as a book carrier, passing along news or letting a neighbor know someone will visit.
Some stretches take her over the county line. Official boundaries mean little to her borrowers. Oral histories tell of packhorse librarians bringing books into neighboring valleys at the request of relatives or teachers. Today her saddlebags carry Little Women, a manual on hog care, and the same Robinson Crusoe she delivered weeks ago, now headed back to its original borrower in exchange for something different.
Books, Scrapbooks, and Records of the WPA Riders
By the time she reaches the community center again, she’s covered more than a hundred miles in three days. The riding is only part of the job. The days between trips are spent logging books back in, mending what can be saved, and sorting through donated titles. She sets aside replacements for books beyond repair and chooses more challenging readers for children she’s seen making progress. The notes she keeps—what each household wants, what they return—shape the next run.
Across the WPA program, popular titles include Treasure Island, the Bobbs-Merrill Readers, and practical manuals on agriculture, child care, and home repair. Religious texts are always in demand. Children’s picture books are rare enough that some librarians make their own, pasting magazine illustrations onto sturdy paper. Every book, no matter how modest, is read and reread until the next delivery.
The Packhorse Library Model in the Blue Ridge
Although the largest concentration of packhorse routes is in eastern Kentucky, the Blue Ridge shares direct ties to the project. Counties like Madison, Yancey, and Mitchell in North Carolina, and Grayson and Carroll in Virginia, adapt the model to their own needs. Teachers use WPA methods to start small lending programs until state library systems expand in the 1940s and 1950s. The principle remains simple and effective: if people can’t get to a library, the library goes to them.
Packhorse Librarians’ Legacy in the Blue Ridge Today
By 1943, WPA funding is ending as the country turns its attention to wartime production. Many packhorse routes close. Improved roads mean bookmobiles can reach places that once needed a mule, and by the 1950s, library vans are operating in much of the Blue Ridge. Yet the riders are remembered for more than the miles they covered. They brought reading material chosen for the needs of each household, built trust in communities that had little reason to expect government programs to reach them, and showed that knowledge could travel any road.
The idea has never entirely disappeared. After Hurricane Helene, the 21st Century Packhorse Librarians Project begins in North Carolina, delivering free books to families in mountain communities. The transportation is modern, but the method—taking books directly to the reader—remains unchanged.
The work of the packhorse librarians in the Blue Ridge and across Appalachia proved that access to reading didn’t have to depend on proximity to a building with shelves. It could ride in a saddlebag, cross a ridge, and arrive at a cabin where it was wanted. The service was measured not just in miles traveled, but in the difference a book could make in a home.
More Appalachian History & Culture
Find more stories from the region’s past on the History and Culture page.
Appalachian History and Culture Collection
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