Stephen King book collection on library bookshelf – Courtesy: Shutterstock – Image by Ned Snowman
With its expansive oak canopy and the enigmatic DeFuniak Lake, which appears as a nearly perfect circle on a map, the town of DeFuniak Springs is the type of Old Florida village you might anticipate in a Southern Gothic tale. A clapboard structure that looks like a tiny chapel or schoolhouse with a red door is located right along the lake’s edge. The Walton-DeFuniak Library, the state’s oldest continually operating library, opened its doors in 1887, and it’s clear that it’s full with stories.
The small whistlestop hamlet, which is in the panhandle of Florida approximately an hour northeast of Destin, grew created after the Pensacola and Atlantic Railroad arrived. In 1885, the Chautauqua Institution, an arts and education organization based in New York, opened a resort campus in the town after considering it as a location for meetings due to the warmer climate. The next year, a local women’s organization called the Ladies Library Association donated $580 to establish the Walton County library’s DeFuniak Springs branch for locals and tourists.
The interior, which looks to extend like the inside of Mary Poppins’ bag, can now be checked out without a library card. It was only 387 square feet when it was first constructed, but it has subsequently been enlarged to a neat 3,000 square feet.
A signed first edition of To Kill a Mockingbird, which remained in print until 2001, is among the exceptional book copies in a few cabinets within. “Ms. Harper Lee donated it to us in the 1980s,” recalls Barb Hughes, branch manager at DeFuniak. Due to schedule issues, Ms. Lee and Ms. Marilyn Coe, the librarian, kept missing each other when she wanted to visit the library. When Ms. Coe arrived one day, she discovered an envelope with the words, “Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, Harper Lee,” tucked beneath the door.
Titles that are prohibited by Florida school districts are available for checkout from a table. (To Kill a Mockingbird, which remains one of the country’s “most challenged” books, is positioned next to works by Sherman Alexie and Margaret Atwood.) Also available to anyone with a local library card are puzzles, DVDs, sewing machines, microscopes, and telescopes.
The Wallace Bruce Collection of antique armor and weapons, named for a local who was president of the Chautauqua Institution and then an ambassador to Scotland in the late nineteenth century, is another treasure, as is a rare Regina Model 27 music box. In the 1930s, Bruce’s collection found a home at the library after being donated to a now-defunct college. His bits of antique armor rise above the crammed shelves now.
Beyond these gems, the Walton-DeFuniak Library is a regular community center, bustling with copiers, computers, and kids using the kids’ section to play board games and solve puzzles. Outside, a 134-year-old live oak that has seen generations pass beneath its branches provides shaded reading areas in a ferny greenspace created by the neighborhood garden club.
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Chris began his writing as a hobby while attending Florida Southern College in Lakeland, Florida. Today he and his wife live in the Orlando area with their three children and dog.
