ARLEE — Once upon a time, Arlee was part of Missoula County. And Missoula County had a branch library in Arlee, but it was pulled when the community was placed into the newly established Lake County. That was 1923. For the next 50 years, Arlee residents had no local library of their own.
In 1974, a group of citizens couldn’t take it any longer, and established the Jocko Valley Library as a community-run non-profit organization. The group had been collecting books, housing them in church basements until the collection grew too large. Through the graces of cheap rent, the library moved to a former liquor store, whose back door had beaten in, according to a Missoulian article from thirty years ago.
The library opened as such for the first time on April 21, 1974, then moved to the basement of the community center Brown Building in
1977. At the time, it was a great location.
Still, it had its drawbacks. The basement had a dirt floor, albeit covered over with particleboard. It had no bookshelves. It had no entrance, other than through the community center. But it was a space with free rent, and that made all the difference.
The library didn’t get a concrete floor until the mid 1980’s, when Lake County received a grant from Burlington Northern earmarked for four county libraries. Arlee received $2,593 of the total $9,130 grant. It was used to replace the floor of “rapidly rotting particle board” over dirt, said another old clipping, stored in binders in the Brown Building’s basement. The library got its separate entry staircase as well at that time.
By then, there were beautiful old bookshelves in place along the walls. The cases of solid wood came from the Jesuit Fathers in the Old Agency in the Jocko Valley, Kim Folden said.
Folden, who is the current director of the library, is interested in the library’s past as well as its hopefully brighter future.
The bookshelves “are hand crafted with square nails,” according to the library records, and, Folden said, they’re extremely heavy.
They were apparently donated by the Catholic Church, and were once used in the Old Agency rectory.
No one bothered to record how the cases were carted to the basement, but it is known that when the concrete floor was poured, cranes were used to lift the huge bookcases off the ground, and the concrete was poured underneath them.
“They hung there until the floor was dry,” Folden said. The eyehooks placed into the tops of the cases to hang them are still there, she noted. “It’s a nice reminder,” she said.
But now the bookshelves may need to move again.
“The Brown Building is rapidly decaying,” Folden said.
“When people walk upstairs, dust falls from the ceiling. The moisture issues are a problem. We have mold problems. It can be a dank and dark area,” she said of the basement library.
Folden would like to see the library into a new home.
“Basements aren’t god places for books, no matter how hard you try,” Folden said. “They’re just not.”
Plus, she said, the stairway, once an inspired entrance for the library alone, is a hardship to some patrons.
“We lose a lot of our elderly and handicapped patrons because they can’t make the stairs,” Folden said.
Her vision is for the entire community.
“I want a store front with the door facing out and a sign saying Jocko Valley Library, highly visible” Folden said of her dream building. But as they say, it all takes money.
“I think the books damage themselves just sitting in this dark basement,” Folden said.
“It’s getting to a desperate mode for the life of the books and the life of the library,” she added.
Right now, it’s a catch-22, getting users into the library, which would in turn increase interest and support. With renewed interest should come renewed funding opportunities.
Folden is hopeful that will occur, though. “We need to be able to do that,” she said, so the library can again take wing.
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