An Early Librarian's Connection to Bellefonte

One of the things I like best about collecting postal librariana is the connection it provides to the people who worked in libraries in the past. A few years ago I acquired a collection of postcards that had been mailed over a number of years in the early part of the twentieth century to a librarian named Alice M. Hughes. Miss Hughes’ library career, as documented by the postcards, included work in several libraries in multiple states. One of the libraries that she worked for was the library of Bellefonte Academy in Bellefonte, PA, the home of the APRL. The Bellefonte Academy no longer exists but there is a nice history of the Academy on the web. The two postcards mailed to Miss Hughes when she was in Bellefonte were mailed in July, 1909. The postcard shown above has a picture of the Algona (IA) Public Library on the front. The message on the postcard reads: “The Library is well supplied with up-to-date books, periodicals and Iowa history.” I have a more complete description of my Alice M. Hughes postcard collection on The Library History Buff Blog.