A Day to Remember at the Library

by Bill Peak

One hundred years ago, in October of 1925, Howard Carter reached Tutankhamun’s burial chamber to find the pharaoh’s features obscured by a mask of gold and lapis lazuli, Josephine Baker’s La Revue Nègre premiered in Paris, and the War of the Stray Dog broke out between Greece and Bulgaria. A tad less dramatic perhaps, but so far as our lives go here on the Eastern Shore, surely the most consequential event of that long ago month took place on the fifteenth, when the Talbot County Free Library opened its doors for the first time.

From the beginning, our library was a community undertaking. In 1922, a small group of Talbot County women, led by a retired professional children’s librarian, Caroline Burnite Walker, began to host parties and seek pledges to raise funds for the effort. Eventually, forty women pledged $50 apiece toward the project.

Think about that. Forty women, now nameless, now long gone, reached into their hearts and purses to endow an institution that still serves us a hundred years later, an institution devoted to sharing knowledge with their fellow citizens and ours, regardless of station or rank, absolutely free of charge.

Within three years, the ladies had raised $4,149, the first librarian had been hired (salary: $900 a year), two rooms had been rented in the Tred Avon Building ($15 a month), and, on October 15, 1925, the library opened its doors to the public for the first time. The collection size: 800 books. I would love to know what the most popular titles were.

The Talbot County Free Library will celebrate the 100^th anniversary of that signal event on Thursday, October 16, with a gala soirée inspired by the decade that gave birth to it, the roaring ‘20s—flappers, The Great Gatsby, Prohibition and bootleg gin. The evening will feature upscale hors d’oeuvres prepared by Royal Oak Catering, a specialty cocktail crafted by Lyon Rum, and wine and beer selected especially for the occasion by Wishing Well Liquors’ renowned sommelier Philip Bernot.

Music for the night will be provided by the Julie Parsons Project Jazz Duo with Darrell Parsons. Among aficionados, Parsons is known for his phrasing and skill at bringing new meaning to the great Jazz standards. He has performed on stages across the United State, Europe, and Asia, appearing in D.C. and L.A. Jazz clubs as well as the opera houses and concert halls of Vienna, Milan, Paris, and Seoul.

People attending the event are asked to “dress to impress” in cocktail attire—which in my case means the usual white shirt, tie, and blue blazer, but I’ll bet a lot of folks will really put on the ritz. Josephine Baker would have a ball.

To purchase tickets for the gala, please go to https://www.tcfl.org/CentennialTicketsSponsorships/

As if to showcase all that the library has achieved for our community over the course of its 100 years, a fair amount of the month’s library programming will feature Talbot County history.

On Tuesday, October 7, at 6 p.m., along with its community partners, the library will bring Carole Boston Weatherford and Jeffrey Boston Weatherford to the Todd Performing Arts Center at Chesapeake College to talk about this year’s One Maryland One Book, Kin: Rooted in Hope. Combining remembered family stories with her gift for imagining, Weatherford has brought the lives of her Eastern Shore ancestors to life in verse. And her son, Jeffrey, has illustrated that verse with his luminous scratchboard art. In addition to being a Coretta Scott King Honor Book and this year’s One Maryland One Book, Kin won the Boston Globe’s Horn Book Poetry Award.

And then, on Saturday, October 25, at 11 a.m., as part of our community’s celebration of Tench Tilghman Week, the library will sponsor a talk by Professor Richard Bell in its Easton branch about one of our county’s most important founding fathers. The Tilghman family’s internal conflicts during the Revolution presage those suffered by families during the Civil War. Tilghman was George Washington’s most trusted aide-de-camp, while his father, James Tilghman, remained loyal to Great Britain and one of his brothers served in the British Navy. Add to that the fact Tilghman’s uncle, Matthew Tilghman, would become known as the “father of the revolution in Maryland” and you’ve got a recipe for some pretty calamitous family gatherings.

Finally, I’m not sure it really qualifies as Talbot County history, and it won’t take place till December 1^st, but on that date, at 6 p.m. in the Easton library, the official launch of Adventures in Shelving, Vol. 2 will take place—a collection of my favorite Star Democrat library columns published between June of 2015 and May of 2025.

Actually, now that I think about it, those two dates do bookend an interesting period in our nation’s history. Several of the columns consider what our community went through during the Covid pandemic, how we dealt with the limitations placed on our commerce and our social lives, and how, despite those limitations, we managed to reach out and help one another. And a few address the ever-widening political divide in our country at large, and how, once again, as a community, we have tried to rise above that division.

But most of the writing in the book simply celebrates our community library, its collection, and the wonderful people who use that collection every day. I hope that, reading it, you will get to share some of the joy I have found in working for the library and serving the good people of Talbot County.

So please, if you can, join us at one or all of these events in celebration of the birth of our beloved Talbot County Free Library.