The Concord Free Public Library’s Special Collections holds a rich and extensive collection relating to Herbert Wendell Gleason (1855-1937), a prominent American landscape photographer and environmentalist. The holdings include close to 7,000 Gleason negatives on glass plates and film, Gleason’s slide lecture “Thoreau’s Country,” albums of Concord, and Thoreau-related images compiled by Gleason himself, as well as correspondence and lecture notes.
Victor Curran: On the Concord Free Public Library website, you wrote, “It is a very exciting time to get to know the staff, to serve this wonderful community and all those who support the library.”
By early next year, the renovation and expansion of the Concord Free Public Library will be complete. This transformative project, eight years in the making, broke ground during the pandemic, but remained on-time and on-budget in spite of the challenges. Showcasing the designs of architects from Johnson Roberts and Associates, the newly renovated Library has something to offer everyone in our community, and as always, it’s free and open to all.
What was your first experience at your library? Was it a story hour? Or checking out your summer reading? With access to information now so freely available, we sometimes take it for granted, but it wasn’t always that way. Free and easy access to information, whether online or in a physical library, evolved from the beginnings of
the country.
