In Union there is strength: the Farmers' Institute and the Western Literary Union library.(Western Literary Union)

Housed in what is now a Quaker meetinghouse in southern Tippecanoe County, Indiana, is the remnant collection of a mid-nineteenth-century library from an early academy. Unlike many of its type, it was never disbursed or absorbed into another library collection. The collection itself is an example of educational and literary society libraries that existed before the development of public libraries or libraries in public schools. The library also supported a literary and debating society that was the center of the intellectual life of the surrounding community. This article places the library in the context of Quaker educational philosophy, popular ideas of education of the day, and its relationship with educational reformist movements both within Indiana and at a national level.

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Prior to the influences of Melvil Dewey and Andrew Carnegie, Indiana libraries made slow and steady progress, much of it intimately tied to America's movement toward popular education. Three statewide library programs predominated in Indiana in the mid-nineteenth century as outgrowths of three reformist movements. All three share credit for the eventual popular support of Indiana's public libraries, and, in two of the programs, the remaining books became the foundations for a number of public libraries. The ubiquitous American Sunday School Union was one program. The other two programs were the state-supported Indiana Township Library Program (ITLP) and the Maclure Workingmen's Institute libraries. (1) The latter libraries were funded through a bequest of a social and educational reformer whose money provided the foundation for 160 libraries throughout Indiana and extending into Illinois. All three of these efforts were based on the idea of uplifting the poor and working classes through reading and self-education.

This article is primarily an examination of one of the workingmen's institute libraries, the Western Literary Union (WLU), housed within the Farmers' Institute, and its extant collection. The Farmers' Institute is unusual in the story of workingmen's institute libraries in that it was also a private church-funded academy. The founders of both the Farmers' Institute and the WLU library were members of a Society of Friends Meeting in a rural location, not the more typical society of mechanics and laborers in an urban setting. Most likely because of its rural setting, the Farmers' Institute library was never absorbed into a public, school, or township library as others were. It is also unusual in that it survived for several decades, unlike the vast majority of these libraries. Most of the records of the Farmers' Institute, its associated literary society, and many of its books are lost to history. Yet pieces of the collection remain today as evidence of the early commitment to libraries and popular education in Indiana.

The Farmers' Institute

Along a narrow road in rural Tippecanoe County, Indiana, sits a large wood-frame Federal-style two-story building. Behind it are the remains of what were once dormitories. Today these buildings still serve the needs of a Society of Friends congregation, although its population is much reduced in size from earlier days.

At one time these buildings served not only as a meetinghouse for the faithful but as Tippecanoe County's first seat of higher learning, the Farmers' Institute, and its associated literary society, the WLU. In the front hall of this institution, in cabinets that separate the sanctuary and the narthex, the congregation, teachers, students, and WLU members placed their books, beginning in 1851. Today these books remain cherished by the congregation, but many have been damaged by use, humidity, insects, and generally inhospitable conditions over the last 150 years.

The Farmers' Institute was established within the framework of the oldest Euro-American faith community in Tippecanoe County. This Quaker community began in 1828 with the name Flint Creek Preparative Meeting, though the name was eventually changed to the Greenfield Monthly Meeting. The founding families arrived to a relatively new county, Tippecanoe County, established in 1826. The town of Lafayette, which became the county seat, had been founded a year earlier, in 1825. The original one-story Quaker meetinghouse was built a mile from the current site. (2) As the community grew, the Greenfield Monthly Meeting developed plans for a formal institution to educate Indiana Quaker children and young adults. From the beginning the planned institution was intended as a boarding school. On 4 November 1851 the Lafayette Daily Courier carried an announcement of its opening. The institute attracted students from throughout Indiana and several other states.

Midcentury Indiana Libraries and Literary Societies

The Farmers' Institute and the WLU were created at the beginnings of popular education and the interest in creating public libraries. During the time the Farmers' Institute and the WLU thrived, Indiana's common schools, higher education, and public libraries were developing. To place the school and the literary society in context, a discussion of other libraries and library programs existing at the same time in Tippecanoe County is warranted.

During the period of the early to mid-nineteenth century, numerous subscription and society libraries came and went throughout the state, such as the Library Club of Lafayette in 1840. Early attempts at a public library occurred in Lafayette in the 1860s, according to reports of meetings in local papers. However, nothing came of these efforts until 1882, when the Lafayette Public Library opened. (3) Literary societies also flourished throughout the state during this period; the three earliest in Tippecanoe County in the third and fourth decades of the nineteenth century included the Tippecanoe County Lyceum, the Hard Knot Literary Society, and the Franklin Club. (4)

As previously noted, three reformist educational movements in the nineteenth century had a direct impact on Indiana, spawning three separate library development programs in the state. First was the American Sunday School Union (ASSU), founded in 1824 in Philadelphia. Based on British models beginning in the 1790s, Sunday schools in America were created to give the poor working children of the expanding industrial revolution opportunities for basic education and religious training on the one day of the week they had free. By the third decade of the nineteenth century these schools had largely evolved into centers for religious training for mainline evangelical Protestant denominations. Yet they remained a source for literacy training, and, in some communities, these schools were the only avenue for education for young girls and free blacks. (5) In fact, the twenty-third annual report of the ASSU lamented that Tippecanoe County, along with a few other counties in Indiana, had rates of illiteracy ranging from a fifth to a third of the population over the age of twenty. (6) The growth of the ASSU schools was remarkable. In Indiana alone there were 276 schools in 1832, and by 1875 there were 3,161. (7) Many of the schools had libraries, although they varied in size. Growing over time and aimed at different audiences, by 1850 the organization had different cabinet libraries of various sizes and contents. (8)

Another religious organization, the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA), also maintained libraries in various Indiana communities, although it had little influence in the development of public libraries in the state. The YMCA, founded in London in 1844, quickly spread to the United States. The organization was established by reformers who viewed as a social problem the hordes of young men coming into the city from rural areas looking for work. In their view the conditions in which these men were forced to live and work were both physically and morally dangerous. The facilities established in the various cities could consist of lecture halls, meeting rooms, libraries, chapels, and lodgings that served as an alternative to taverns and other "vices" the reformers found damaging. According to William J. Rhees, the YMCA in Lafayette, founded in 1855, had a 250-volume library. (9) The Lafayette YMCA was dissolved at the beginning of the Civil War, when it appears the entire membership went to war. However, it was reestablished in 1866 and by 1867 had restored its library. (10)

The second reformist movement to influence the development of public libraries…