09/10/2026
In the mountains of eastern Kentucky during the Great Depression, the library sometimes arrived on four legs. A woman would appear along a muddy trail on horseback, carrying saddlebags filled with books for families and schoolchildren who might otherwise have had almost nothing to read.
They were known as the Pack Horse Librarians, part of a New Deal program launched in 1935 to bring reading material into some of Kentucky's most isolated Appalachian communities. Roads were scarce, poverty was severe, and conventional libraries simply could not reach many mountain settlements. So the librarians went where the roads ended. Most were women, riding horses or mules across steep trails, through creeks and difficult weather, sometimes covering more than 100 miles in a week.
The work demanded more than delivering books. There was little money to purchase new material, so collections depended heavily on donations. The women repaired battered books and transformed discarded newspapers and magazines into homemade scrapbooks filled with stories, recipes, quilt patterns and practical information. They also gathered material from the people they visited, allowing local knowledge to travel from one isolated community to another.
The librarians often came from the same communities they served, which mattered. They weren't strangers arriving from some distant government office. They knew the families, understood the mountains and returned often enough to earn people's trust. For children in remote schools, the sight of a horse approaching with books could mean access to a world far beyond the hills surrounding them.
The Pack Horse Library Project continued until 1943, when the Works Progress Administration ended as wartime employment reshaped the country. By then, its riders had carried books to tens of thousands of Kentuckians who lived beyond the reach of ordinary libraries.
Photographs of these women can look almost whimsical today: a librarian, a horse, saddlebags overflowing with books. But there was nothing whimsical about the problem they were solving.
