A HISTORY OF FOXCROFT LIBRARIES
By the 1960s, the School, yet again, had outgrown the designated library and plans were drawn for a large, stand-alone building that would meet the current and future needs of students and faculty. Not only would this building house books and study carrels, but it was also to become the community hub. The spacious new library provided students with a bounty of books, a typing room, seminar rooms, and an abundance of space to study and relax. The Goodyear Room, given in honor of Alison Harrison Goodyear ’29, offered the students a comfortable retreat for reading, studying, listening to music, and spending time with friends. Fifty years later, the Foxcroft community continues to connect, imagine, and learn in the Audrey Bruce Currier students here, and on occasion, she told Library. Here’s to the next 50 years! ghost stories by candlelight in the library.
Happy 50th Birthday
HAPPY 50TH BIRTHDAY AUDREY BRUCE CURRIER LIBRARY
library was moved book by book, and as written in a student’s scrapbook, at the end of the day, Miss Charlotte proudly declared that each of her students had touched every book in the library!
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The Foxcroft Library outgrew its place in Brick House and moved to the neighboring building of Wing around 1923. This was followed by a move next door to Porch House sometime later. Porch and Wing were “. . . how truly essential I feel the library, adjoining buildings any library, to be: for I look on the library that stood across of any school or college or university as from Schoolhouse and served as both the academic heart, the life-giving organ dormitories and whose injury or removal would lead to the academic buildings withering and death of the whole learning until they were razed in 1952. In the 1940s, process and of the imagination.” there was a push to From the remarks of Mr. Paul Mellon at the dedication increase the scope of the Audrey Bruce Currier Library, October 17, 1969. and size of the library collection to meet increasing academic rigor. This was ibraries are often described as the accomplished through the Wayman Fund, heart and soul of communities, named in honor of Christina Wayman, offering people a place to gather, the first Academic Head of Foxcroft. grow, connect, and learn. In the early years of the School, Miss Charlotte was As Foxcroft continued to grow, a new intent on creating a comfortable space Schoolhouse replaced Porch House and for the Foxcroft community to come Wing. Included in the beautiful, red-brick together. The first library at Foxcroft was building was a library complete with floor to built in 1916 and was located in the space ceiling shelves, large windows, and plenty we now recognize as the entrance to the of tables for students to sit and study. In dining hall. This addition to Brick House order to move the books from Porch House was designed for the girls and filled to Schoolhouse, students and teachers with books, a piano, and comfortable formed a book brigade that stretched furniture. Miss Charlotte often read to her from one building to the next. The entire
By Kerri Gonzalez, Assistant Librarian and Archivist
Miss Charlotte reads to girls in the Brick House library.
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hough the coronavirus pandemic has temporarily taken us away from these beautiful spaces in the Library, we continue to gather as a community through virtual Morning Meetings and online collaboration between faculty and students.
Spring/Summer 2020 5
