“Son, the times they was so hard, you couldn’t hardly crack them.”

Grace Caudill Lucas

What if you had never learned to read? Can you imagine going to a school where there were no books? What if the only books you had access to were those that libraries didn’t want anymore that, once discarded, had passed through the hands of hundreds more people and come to your house on the back of a horse in a burlap bag?

Kentucky’s Pack Horse Library Project was part of Franklin Roosevelt’s Work Projects Administration (WPA) begun during the Great Depression to help put people to work. The Pack Horse Library Project started in 1935 in two Kentucky counties and lasted until 1943 (having spread to thirty counties), when World War II brought the U.S. economy back to life. 

“The way it worked was simple. The WPA paid the salaries for the librarians to maintain a headquarters library, usually at the county seat, and to carry the books on horseback throughout the county. Their circuits were worked out so that new books were dropped off at Center 1, the books already there were taken on to Center 2, and so on. A center might be a school, or community center, a post office, or even a home. . .” 

The way it worked may have been simple, but the way the work was accomplished was certainly not easy. 

 “The carriers went out three or four times a week, taking a different route each day, and then repeating those routes every two weeks The routes were roughly eighteen miles long, so a pack horse librarian was used to traveling fifty to eighty miles each week. Once a week all the carriers met at the headquarters to write short reports and help mend and clean the books.”

These routes were ridden in the Kentucky mountains in all kinds of weather to remote places that could only be reached by horseback or on foot. In other parts of the country, bookmobiles were already serving poor rural areas, but bookmobiles require roads. In the remote Kentucky mountains, the only roads were often game trails or creek beds. This reminded me of Ellis Credle’s picture book, Down, Down the Mountain. In this story, two children are allowed to ride from their mountain home to town for the first time. Just as they come to a place where they can no longer find the road, a woman comes along who says, “Follow the creek. That’s all the road there is in these parts.” 

The text of Down Cut Shin Creek is informative and descriptive, but it is the photos that truly tell the story. We see the people the librarians were serving: a little girl with one bobby pin holding her hair back from her face and rough hand stitching holding her rougher clothing together; a man sick in bed, his walls covered with newspaper for an extra bit of insulation; four children in a similar room lying in bed together in order to stay warm; a one-room schoolhouse with chairs but no desks; a woman wearing all her winter garb inside her cabin taking a book from a librarian through the glassless window.

The hunger of the mountain people for learning and contact with the outside world is truly touching in our age of having all the knowledge in the world at our fingertips.

“It would be difficult to estimate how much this good work is doing to brighten the lives of the people in our Kentucky mountains.” Gladys Lainhart, 1937

The text of this book is accessible for children who are at the chapter-book stage. It is excellent for a family read, as many of the photos depict a way of life that may seem like ancient history, and deserve much discussion.

That Book Woman is an excellent picture book companion. The authors list Down Cut Shin Creek as a resource for writing their book.

Down Cut Shin Creek is available at Purple House Press.

You may learn more about this book at biblioguides.com.