Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, September 7, 1994 TAG: 9409070138
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press NOTE: below
DATELINE: BACK VALLEY, TENN. LENGTH: Medium
What's known as America's Smallest Library sits among the flowers in Dot Byrd's front yard. An American flag waves in a gentle breeze.
The 5-by-6-by-6-foot white clapboard structure is hardly big enough to turn around in and has a slightly musty smell. Yet it houses a floor-to-ceiling collection of 2,000 volumes, mostly paperback mysteries, histories, love stories and encyclopedias.
For 38 years, it has been a beacon of literacy among the farms, coal mines and modest homes along winding, barely two-lane Back Valley Road in this stretch of Appalachia.
It's soon to be replaced.
``I don't know what we would have done without it,'' said May McGlothin, the 86-year-old former Tennessee Teacher of the Year who paid $250 out of her own pocket for the lumber to build the library.
Visitors from all over stop by to see the tiny library. Byrd, who retires next month when a much larger, community-built and computer-equipped library opens in nearby Coalfield, is at a loss to explain the interest.
``I have no idea,'' said Byrd, 69. ``Like I told Johnny Carson. I thought he wasted his time having me come to California to tell him about the little library.''
Yes, the celebrity of America's Smallest Library carried Byrd to Hollywood for a 1989 appearance on ``The Tonight Show,'' prompted by a story in the National Enquirer.
The $200 she earned talking to Carson began a building fund for the new library. Donations, free prison labor and community auctions have raised all but about $10,000 of the $55,000 needed for the new building.
Four decades ago, the community's small reading allotment arrived by bookmobile from the Clinch-Powell Regional Library about 20 miles away. The box of books was rotated among people's houses.
Byrd, a nurse, began collecting the books in 1955. She wrapped them in oilskin to protect them from the rain, since she and her husband, Perry, and their three children were living in a leaky one-room house.
The library opened Aug.1, 1956. Morgan County at first refused to pay to operate it ``because we didn't go through the proper channels to get it approved.''
``We just built it and told them it was here,'' she said.
County officials soon relented and put Byrd on salary at $5 a month. Officially, her hours are 1-5 p.m. every Tuesday. However, the door, like everywhere else in Back Valley, is never locked.
by CNB