https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/librarians-horseback-new-deal-book-delivery-wpa
The Women Who Rode Miles on Horseback to Deliver Library Books
Librarians are amazing.
BY ANIKA BURGESS AUGUST 31, 2017
They were known as the “book women.” They would saddle up, usually at dawn, to pick their way along snowy hillsides and through muddy creeks with a simple goal: to deliver reading material to Kentucky’s isolated mountain communities.
The Pack Horse Library initiative was part of President Franklin Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration (WPA), created to help lift America out of the Great Depression, during which, by 1933, unemployment had risen to 40 percent in Appalachia. Roving horseback libraries weren’t entirely new to Kentucky, but this initiative was an opportunity to boost both employment and literacy at the same time.
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Fiction
https://www.litreadernotes.com/home/2021/1/30/the-book-woman-of-troublesome-creek
The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek opens in 1936 and (with the exception of a short third-person scene with which the novel begins) is a first-person account of the life Cussy Mary. Cussy is both a pack horse librarian and the last of the blue-skinned people of Kentucky (or so she has always been told). Cussy’s narration sets the novel in Appalachia as much as any description of the landscape and people; she tells her story in a no-nonsense way with all the idiosyncrasies of Kentucky speech.
As a “blue,” Cussy experiences the same racist discrimination as her friend, Queenie Johnson, an African-American pack horse librarian. Her skin color has always separated her from the people—particularly the other young women—of Troublesome Creek. Her blue-hued skin has also always intrigued the local town doctor, who calls her “Bluet” and wishes to study her blood and attempt to cure her condition. In the role of pack horse librarian, Cussy finds a welcome and meaningful identity beyond her skin color and she revels in her role as “Book Woman.”
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(Today use drones? But mules are better company.)
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