The Kansas City Public Library Celebrates 150 Years and its First Librarian
Carrie Westlake Whitney. Photo courtesy of the Missouri Valley Special Collections.
As the Kansas City Public Library continues to celebrate its 150th year of service to the community, supporters have taken special note of its history and especially its first full-time director and so-called “Mother of the Library,” Carrie Westlake Whitney. In a remarkable career of nearly 30 years, she defied the patriarchal expectations of her time to leave an enduring mark on the library and the city.
Whitney, who became the library’s first full-time Head Librarian in 1881, built the library from a modest collection of 2,000 books into Kansas City’s most indispensable civic institution with nearly 100,000 books.
By Jason Roe, PhD
The library’s first bookcase, which is still on display at the Central Library, 14 W. 10th St. Photo courtesy of the Missouri Valley Special Collections.
Modest Origins
The library was founded on December 5, 1873, with a resolution of the Kansas City Board of Education, which would remain the library’s governing body for nearly 115 years. In these early years, Kansas City was still an untamed western town that was recovering from the social and economic strife of the Civil War. A columnist in The Kansas City Star described it “as a place without a park or a drive; as a place with miles of unpaved . . . streets; as a city without a large free public library, and, finally, as a city that, having unequaled opportunities to be beautiful, chooses rather to remain unattractive and ugly.”
In 1881, Superintendent James M. Greenwood, who had been overseeing book circulation from his own office, hired Carrie Westlake Whitney as the first full-time head librarian. When she first reported for duty, patrons still had to pay two dollars a year to borrow one book at a time. Over the ensuing years, however, Whitney’s legacy would include free book lending to the public, a deep commitment to children’s literacy, engagement with professional library organizations nationwide, and two prominent museums.
Superintendent James Greenwood. Photo courtesy of the Missouri Valley Special Collections.
Born Caroline E. Westlake in 1854, she had moved to Kansas City from rural Missouri by 1880. Census records indicate that she was boarding with Superintendent Greenwood’s family and working as a bookkeeper. Her legal name at that time was Carrie Westlake Judson, but she had separated from her husband Dr. Edward Judson sometime earlier, after the couple lost their only child. By the time that she came to Kansas City, Whitney began reporting a different birth year to effectively subtract a few years from her actual age.
Whitney took charge of the library in 1881 to oversee a collection of 2,000 books with no tax-funded budget for additional staff or any facilities beyond the bookshelves in the school district offices. In 1885, she married James Steele Whitney, a reporter for The Star. Their marriage piqued curiosity and even surprised their friends because James was only 21, whereas Carrie was likely 34. He died in 1890, and to acknowledge the loss, the library closed for a day. The twice-wed Carrie, now nearly 40 years old, retained the Whitney name and never married again.
Certificate for a lifetime paid subscription for book lending. Photo courtesy of the Missouri Valley Special Collections.
In September 1889, the library moved with the district offices to a purpose-built building at Eighth and Oak streets. The two-story brick structure cost $10,000 and dedicated the first floor to the library, which now held 15,000 books, a large reading room, and a stenographer’s room. A dedicated chess and checkers room would eliminate disruptions that had become common.
Kansas City Public Library at 8th and Oak Streets. Photo courtesy of the Missouri Valley Special Collections.
An increase in tax revenues in 1892 freed Whitney to “experiment,” as she described it, to allow high school students to check out books without paying for subscriptions. The following year, she extended the benefit to sixth and seventh graders. With circulation rising among students, the library finally eliminated paid subscriptions for all city residents in 1898.
Emergence at Locust Street
Kansas City Public Library at 9th and Locust Streets. Photo courtesy of the Missouri Valley Special Collections.
The frontier library experience improved dramatically in the fall of 1897, when patrons could finally visit a facility appropriately sized for a booming city of 150,000 people. A classical, Second Renaissance Revival building opened at Ninth and Locust streets after three years of construction, at a cost of $200,000. With subsequent renovations, it would serve as the main library until 1960.
Whitney added a dedicated children’s department catering to young readers’ unique needs, including the provision of kid-sized chairs and tables. It was, at the time, believed to be one of the first resources of its kind in any library in the United States. Likewise, it was a fitting legacy for a librarian who considered her greatest achievement to be her “influence with children.”
Children’s room at 9th and Locust Streets. Photo courtesy of the Missouri Valley Special Collections.
On a regional and even national scale, Whitney helped to redefine what the library profession could be. She organized and supported university extension classes as early as 1891. She served on the Chicago World’s Fair educational commission in 1893, she was pictured in a Bookman of New York article about prominent women working in libraries in 1897, and she secured braille books for use by blind patrons in 1898.
By the mid-1890s, Assistant Librarian Frances Bishop was following in Whitney’s professional footsteps, and the two likely became romantic partners for the remaining four decades of their lives. Newspaper announcements chronicled their frequent departures to or returns from library conferences. The two lived together and moved to new rented apartments every year or two, but they never lived more than a short walk or streetcar ride from the main library building.
The Westport (originally “Allen”) Branch. Photo courtesy of the Missouri Valley Special Collections.
Branching Out
In July 1899, the library added its first branch. The small town of Westport had just been annexed into Kansas City, and its new Allen Library joined the Kansas City system. This added more than 1,000 books and expanded the system’s geographic reach. Today, the Westport Branch—originally opened February 22, 1898—remains the oldest branch in continuous use by the Library.
Part of the Western Gallery of Art. Photo courtesy of the Missouri Valley Special Collections.
The new library at Locust street operated two museums of note. The first was officially named the Western Gallery of Art, but locals called it the “Nelson” gallery for its benefactor, William Rockhill Nelson, owner of The Kansas City Star and real estate mogul. In the late-1920s, funds from the Nelson family would be combined with resources from another local philanthropist, Mary McAfee Atkins, to build a museum complex, and in 1933 the library’s art collections were transferred to the new Nelson-Atkins gallery of art.
The second museum featured the Dyer Indian Collection, which originated with Daniel Dyer, a federal agent who worked in the Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma) in the early 1880s. Included were beaded amulets, blankets, dolls, pouches, baskets, war implements, clothing, and much rarer objects, such as a Cheyenne dress adorned with 1,500 elk teeth. Other objects were thought to be associated with famous individuals, including Geronimo and Sitting Bull, or with infamous events such as Custer’s Last Stand and the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890.
The Dyer Collection and natural sciences museum. Photo courtesy of the Missouri Valley Special Collections.
The museum’s exhibits expanded to cover natural sciences, mineralogy, and anthropology collections. In 1940, the museum’s 40,000 artifacts transferred from the library’s ownership to the Kansas City Museum of History and Science, which opened in the Robert A. Long mansion the following year, where it remains to this day.
Authorship
During its annual meeting in Kansas City in October 1901, Whitney was elected president of the Missouri Library Association. That same year, her name appeared alongside James Greenwood’s in the list of editors of the six-volume Missouri History Encyclopedia. Moreover, a monthly bulletin transformed into the more substantial Public Library Quarterly, which enjoyed wider circulation across the Missouri Valley region.
By 1908, Whitney was already a respected author, but she published a comprehensive 1,800-page history of her adopted hometown, named Kansas City, Missouri: Its History and Its People. The book spanned three volumes, with the first providing a 100-year chronicle of the area’s history and the other two profiling hundreds of Kansas City leaders.
Whitney made room for a humble entry for herself among the biographies, where she allowed that her name had become “familiar in every household.” She omitted personal details but gave readers one insight into her sense of personal identity: “Mrs. Whitney’s biography is the history of the Kansas City Public Library.”
“I Think a Man Should be Selected”
By 1910, the collection neared 100,000 books. In July of that year, however, the school board asked Whitney to resign. “The library has gotten to be a very large proposition,” board president J. V. C. Karnes advised her. “It has grown away from you, and in my opinion needs for its head a person at least under 40 years of age, a scholar of eminence and distinction, who has library training and experience, and I think a man should be selected.”
“I think, since my ability to administer the affairs of the library has been questioned, that an investigation should be made,” Whitney responded. “The only treatment I ask is justice and fairness,” she told The Star. Whitney refused to resign, and supporters circulated petitions on her behalf.
Whitney was offered a demotion to assistant librarian, for which she would receive her full salary, and in August 1910 she accepted the reassignment. Frances Bishop likewise was demoted to second assistant librarian.
Head Librarian Purd Wright. Photo courtesy of the Missouri Valley Special Collections.
Her continued presence unsettled her successor, Purd Wright, who had previously helped establish the St. Joseph Public Library in Missouri and briefly led the Los Angeles Public Library in California. In 1912, amid turmoil among the staff however, he submitted his resignation. In September of that year, however, the school board permanently removed Whitney from the library and invited Wright to return. Wright then served as Head Librarian until 1936 and oversaw an unmatched period of growth with dozens of new public branches opening in school buildings.
Final Years
As severance, the school board continued to pay Whitney through the end of November 1912. Frances Bishop remained on the library’s payroll, but she was demoted again; this time to working at one of the library substations. Whitney and Bishop settled into an apartment at 4741 Holmes Street, miles away from the main library. In April 1934, Whitney passed away from pneumonia at St. Luke’s Hospital and was buried in Forest Hill Cemetery. She was around 80 years old. Frances Bishop died nearly nine years after Whitney, in 1943, and she was buried next to Whitney in Forest Hill Cemetery.
Besides praising Whitney’s librarianship, an obituary in The Star bittersweetly memorialized her “inseparable” relationship with Frances Bishop: “For more than 40 years these two, bound by a rare and beautiful friendship, found happiness in each other and the books of current literature with which they surrounded themselves. They dropped out of the great current, but they never lost interest in its movement and ever-changing character.”
The forthcoming book, Kansas City’s Public Library: Empowering the Community for 150 Years (Andrews McMeel Publishing, October 15, 2024), explores the library’s century-and-a-half journey from a single bookcase in 1873 to a bedrock cultural institution today. Although Carrie Westlake Whitney’s time with the library ended unceremoniously, her accomplishments are among the many episodes uncovered and celebrated in the book.
Jason Roe (PhD, University of Kansas, 2012) is Digital History Specialist at the Kansas City Public Library. He is co-author of Wide-Open Town: Kansas City in the Pendergast Era (University Press of Kansas, 2018) and editor for the Library’s award-winning websites, The Pendergast Years: Kansas City in the Jazz Age and Great Depression (PendergastKC.org) and Civil War on the Western Border: The Missouri-Kansas Conflict, 1854-1865 (CivilWarOnTheWesternBorder.org). Most recently, he is co-author of Kansas City's Public Library: Empowering the Community for 150 Years (Andrews McMeel Press: October 15, 2024).