Riding Through the Great Depression: The Impact of Pack Horse Librarians

Supported by Eleanor Roosevelt and the Roosevelt Administration during the Great Depression, the Works Progress Administration (WPA) was part of Roosevelt’s “alphabet soup” agencies. It didn’t take long for the WPA, which sought to provide work, education, and culture to Americans who were struggling economically, to introduce the Pack Horse Library Project to rural Eastern Kentucky. The Pack Horse Librarians were local women hired by the federal government to bring reading material to isolated, unemployed people and children of all ages. Both secondary scholarship, focused on the role Pack Horse Librarians played in the development of community, as well as interviews, newspaper articles and scrapbooks made by the Pack Horse Librarians collectively offer insight into the Pack Horse Librarians inadvertent impact on the health and well being of the people they served. While the program’s duration was limited to under a decade, the Pack Horse Librarians demonstrated innovation in an effort to address unprecedented despair specific to the communities hit hardest by the Great Depression. Part of the panel: From Hoover to Horse Trails: Literacy in early Twentieth-Century AmericaModerator: Professor David Horowitz