Here’s how the Prince George’s County Memorial Library System got its start

This is the first article in a series about the history of the Prince George’s County library system. Read parts 2, 3, 4, and 5.

Today, Prince George’s County — like all Maryland counties — has a county-run public library system. But it didn’t have to be that way: in much of the country, public libraries are operated by municipalities or special library districts. Maryland is one of only seven states where public libraries, which serve as community institutions and some of our most enduring forms of truly public space, are organized at the county level. In 1946, the Prince George’s County Memorial Library System became the first in DC’s Maryland suburbs to be run at the county level.

So how did Prince George’s County get its library system off the ground?

Public libraries came relatively late to Prince George’s County

The Boston Public Library, the first large, free municipal library in the US, opened in 1854, but the years after the Civil War were when urban public libraries took off across the US: Detroit in 1865; Chicago and San Francisco in the 1870s; Baltimore in 1886; and Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, New York, New Orleans, Brooklyn, and DC in the 1890s.

Smaller cities and towns throughout the country opened libraries during this same period. The first public library in Montgomery County opened in Rockville in 1869, and several other towns in the county opened over the next three decades. However, Prince George’s County (and much of Northern Virginia) did not get its first public library until the early years of the 20th century.

The first public library in Prince George’s County was established in 1908 in downtown Laurel by a citizens’ group, the Laurel Library Association. The library was housed in several different rented quarters until 1929, when a resident donated a building to be used by the library association and the Laurel Women’s Club.

In the years before World War II, three additional libraries opened in the county, all run by community groups or city governments. In 1921, the Women’s Club of Hyattsville opened a small public library in space donated in the J.C. Hawkins Electric Shop on Baltimore Avenue in downtown Hyattsville; in 1923, the city took over providing space for it in city hall.

The Greenbelt Library was established by the City of Greenbelt in 1939, only eighteen months after the city itself was founded, and was housed in the Greenbelt Center School, now the Greenbelt Community Center. In 1942, the unincorporated community of Beltsville also got a library, established by the Women’s Community Club and housed in a room in the local elementary school. However, the space was soon taken back by the school system and this first Beltsville library dissolved.

A 1945 Maryland law gives county libraries a boost

By 1945, three counties in Maryland, as well as Baltimore City, had established library systems. Baltimore’s Enoch Pratt Free Library pioneered the trend in 1886, followed by the Washington County Free Library in 1901 — only the second county-run public library in the country — then later the Anne Arundel County Public Library in 1921, and the Howard County Public Library in 1940.

In 1945, the state ensured this trend would continue when it passed a law creating a library division in the state department of education and offering funding to the state’s counties to support public library systems.

The state agreed to provide funding for books at a rate based on county populations. To participate, counties were required to establish county library systems, pass a property tax of two cents per $100 of assessed real estate value to support these libraries, and — crucially — to make their libraries open to all.

Race and public libraries in Maryland

The requirement that libraries established with state funding be “open to all” meant that county library services funded by the state could not be racially segregated. This was hardly a foregone conclusion in Maryland, which had a rich history of Jim Crow laws: Baltimore banned white and Black residents from living on the same blocks in 1910, and the state did not pay Black and white teachers equally until required to by court order in 1941. The state’s schools did not begin to desegregate until after the US Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling.

Racism seems to have delayed the implementation of the public library law in some places in Maryland. In 1952, residents of Calvert County threatened to burn the Anne Arundel County bookmobile if it served their county, due to anger at the fact that the books would be available to Black residents. But if there was concern in Prince George’s County over the idea of an unsegregated public library system, it didn’t make it into the newspaper.

The birth of the Prince George’s County Memorial Library System

Unsurprisingly, a number of new county library systems were established in Maryland shortly after the passage of the 1945 law. Prince George’s County, in 1946, was one of the first, following Harford County in 1945. Other counties followed: Baltimore County in 1948, St. Mary’s and Charles Counties in 1950, Montgomery County in 1951, and Carroll and Calvert Counties in 1958. Many of these library systems took over the operation of existing libraries that had been established by municipalities or private organizations.

When the Prince George’s County Memorial Library System (PGCMLS) was established by the county commissioners in 1946, there were initial proposals for a central library either in Hyattsville (near the county center of population at the time) or in Upper Marlboro (the county seat), but the new library system did not have the budget to acquire or maintain a library building.

Instead, the library system began more humbly: with bookmobiles. The first bookmobile was purchased in 1947 with donations from the public and a second was purchased in 1952 with county funds.

In addition to bookmobiles, the library system began to operate branches by providing books and librarians for libraries in spaces provided by local communities. The Laurel library became the first PGCMLS branch in 1947 and the Hyattsville library joined in 1948, along with newly-opened branches in city-owned buildings in Fairmount Heights and District Heights.

Because of the difficulty private organizations had in finding long-term funding to rent and maintain space for libraries, the library system’s early branches were largely limited to municipalities with governments willing to pay for space. For example, the Paint Branch library in College Park joined the system in 1951 in a space rented by a community organization, the Paint Branch Library Association, but the organization struggled with funding and, in 1955, the city of College Park took over providing space for the branch.

Although these municipally-owned branches have nearly all closed or been relocated to PGCMLS-owned spaces, one still remains. The Mount Rainier branch opened in a city-owned building in 1952; it is now the only remaining PGCMLS library in a building owned by a municipality.

Takoma Park remains an outlier

Although the city of Takoma Park is now entirely in Montgomery County, until a 1995 referendum part of the city was located in Prince George’s County. When the Takoma Park Women’s Club organized a town library in 1935, it was located in a house on Jackson Avenue.

The Takoma Park library was evidently unusually well-funded for a privately-organized library, since it did not join PGCMLS, nor did it join the Montgomery County Library System, which was established in 1951 and absorbed its last independent library, Rockville, in 1957. Instead, perhaps in part because of the city’s unusual situation of being located in two counties, Takoma Park took over the library as a department of its city government in 1963.

The Takoma Park, Maryland Library is still run by the city, making it perhaps the only public library in the state not operated by a county or the City of Baltimore. However, people who work, live, or go to school anywhere in Montgomery County are eligible to receive library cards.

For further reading:

Information on library system types in different states is from the Institute of Museum and Library Services’ 2017 Public Libraries Survey.

Much of this account depends on information from the internal PGCMLS document “History of Prince George’s County Memorial Library System,” which was provided to me by the librarian John M. Krivak from the Hyattsville Branch and by the library system’s public relations department.

The early history of the Takoma Park, Maryland Library is described on the Takoma Park city website. Information on the history of the Montgomery County Library System can be found in the Montgomery County Archive document “Guide to the Records of the Department of Public Libraries.”

A number of Washington Post articles also provided useful information on the early history of public libraries in Prince George’s County, and in Maryland in general.:

• “Magruder Offers to Donate New Library for Hyattsville,” Washington Post, (24 December 1936).
• “New Local, State Taxes Asked to Support Md. Public Libraries,” Washington Post, (28 January 1945).
• “State System of Libraries is Approved,” Washington Post, (5 May 1945).
• “Prince Georges Meeting Called on Library,” Washington Post, (31 August 1945).
• “Prince Georges Library Drive Opens Jan. 18,” Washington Post, (8 January 1946).
• “Md. State Aid Libraries Serve 63% of People,” Washington Post, (26 May 1946).
• “More County Library Aid Urged in Md.” Washington Post, (16 November 1948).
• “Montgomery Council Passes Library Bill, 5-2; More Than Dozen Other Measures Also Voted,” Washington Post, (31 May 1950).
• “5 Montgomery Libraries Put Under System,” Washington Post, (27 June 1951).
• “Free Library at Hagerstown 50 Years Old,” Washington Post, (4 October 1951).
• “Calvert Foes Threaten to Burn Bookmobile: Some Residents Of County Support Tour, Hundreds of Others Opposed,” Washington Post, (20 April 1952).