Dear Editor,

I moved to Nederland in the summer of 2000. That autumn I saw a notice in The Mountain-Ear for a community meeting to promote a town library. Having some previous library experience, I joined the discussion. Almost immediately we formed committees; mine was about the collection of books and other materials, which did not yet exist. So, we put out the call to residents of Nederland and other parts of Boulder County as well as to the established libraries in the area.

I used my trusty pickup to transport all kinds of materials back to the Community Center, where Mayor Scott Bruntjen had set aside a space for the new library. Some individuals donated useless stacks of old paper records, or textbooks, or their own prized publications, all of which we carried over to a recycling center. But Boulder Municipal library was a gold mine: Sally Grahn, Hughes Mohr, Marty Dick (our first librarian) and I made several trips to load up from its overstock collection. And Hughes Moir donated dozens of new children’s books from his book reviewing career.

All of this material was stored in the east balcony of the Nederland Community Center gymnasium. A whole gang of volunteers sorted, evaluated, and catalogued books until we had a fairly respectable collection of around 2,000 items. Several volunteers took a quick tutorial in cataloguing and set to work on our three donated computers.

Unfortunately, by this time it was winter in 2003. A March blizzard dumped over eight feet of snow on the town and shut down most activities for a week. When I dug a tunnel out of my house up on Navajo Trail and snowshoed down to the Community Center below, my first view of the building revealed the gymnasium balcony, its roof collapsed inside, with all our library books exposed to the elements! 

A crew of volunteers showed up soon enough and set to work packing boxes of books and carrying them downstairs to more protected areas. Eventually the Town gave us two rooms at the far end of the west wing for a more permanent home. We filled those rooms with shelving (donated, once again, from other area libraries). Then a human assembly line carried the books once more through the Center to their new home. Until the next couple of moves!

Dale Porter
Nederland