For eighty years these Kentucky pack horse librarians were ignored with the exception of several amazing children’s books-the women’s historic legacy but a small footnote in history. I was surprised that I had been unable to find these women in novels. It showed fierce, courageous women in an unforgiving landscape, accomplishing what many never could, and battling everything from inclement weather, mistrust, treacherous landscapes, and extreme poverty, and doing it all in Kentucky’s most violent era-the bloody coal mine wars.Īlso, women who defy the odds, achieve great measures, both in the past and present, should be recognized as more than a blip in history, and should be lifted up and shown for the true heroes they are. The initiative alone was a fascinating, unknown part of history, but having it mostly women-driven made it more unique. Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration (WPA), as an effort to put women to work by bringing books and reading material to the poorest and most isolated areas in eastern Kentucky. It would be almost twenty years until the service was revived under President Franklin D.

But a year later the program expired when Mayo died. Mayo, to subsidize a mounted library service to reach people in poor and remote areas. Kim Michele Richardson: It was actually in 1913 when the Kentucky Federation of Women’s Clubs convinced a local coal baron, John C.

The book woman of troublesome creek