Saratoga News

Saratoga Stereopticon

Willys Peck

Foothill Club played key role in first library

As was mentioned in a previous Stereopticon article, libraries don't just happen, especially in unincorporated communities such as the Saratoga of the 1920s. Somebody has to have the vision and be willing to do a lot of work. Fortunately, this town has been endowed with such citizens practically from its beginnings in the mid-19th century.

Local library history goes back to the early 1900s, when supplies of books furnished by the state were circulated from the drugstore, which also served the purpose after the county library system was established in 1914. In 1921, the library was moved to the former Christian church on the present site of the Echo Shop. By the mid-1920s, however, enough people were interested in having a permanent library building for a campaign to be launched.

There were many moving parts, and they all seemed to mesh. Prime mover was the Saratoga Foothill Club, which, since its inception in 1907 as the Foothill Study Club, had concerned itself with broadening cultural and educational opportunities in the town. As described in Florence Cunningham's Saratoga's First Hundred Years, the club president, Mrs. H.P. Dyer, appointed her vice president, Mrs. James T. Richards, to head a communitywide committee for the building of a library. Mrs. Richards, it should be noted, was a UC-Berkeley sorority sister of famed California architect Julia Morgan's and it was through this connection that Miss Morgan's services were obtained for designing the Foothill Clubhouse and the original structure of the Federated Church.

Another major player was Sheldon P. Patterson, a retired Chicago newspaper editor who was active here in the community. It was he who convinced the wealthy widow who owned the lot at the corner of Oak Street and Saratoga-Los Gatos Road that she should donate the site for a library. Such were his persuasive powers that he later married her. Patterson also got Sen. James D. Phelan to kick in $1,000 toward the purchase of the adjacent lot for possible future expansion. Because there was no municipal entity to hold title, ownership of the property was vested in the Saratoga School District.

The original building-fund goal was $6,000, later doubled to $12,000, a sum eventually raised by the committee. Saratogans wanted their library.

Designed by Eldridge T. Spencer, the building is an early example of concrete-block construction and was regarded as a model for small-city libraries.

At the dedication on Nov. 7, 1927, one of the features of the ceremony was the reading of a verse by poet and author Ruth Comfort Mitchell, which she wrote for the occasion. "This is a magic house that you have built," her lines began, "enchanted in an endless fairy tale, where you may flee the commonplace and hide when all your other sanctuaries fail."

In a sense, even this sanctuary failed in December 1981, when, as the branch Village Library, it was shut down because of the financial constraints of operating two libraries, the much larger Saratoga Community Library at the corner of Fruitvale and Saratoga avenues having been dedicated in February 1978. A Quito branch already had been closed. However, shutting down the Village Library had some traumatic overtones. It had, after all, been a focal point of the community for 54 years. In appearance and atmosphere it was the quintessential small-town library, and many people regretted its passing.

There were some plus factors, however. The new library was designed by the same Spencer firm responsible for the Village Library. And the Village building itself did not become just another real estate office or nail parlor. It was given over to the Friends of the Saratoga Libraries, a volunteer organization dedicated to providing materials and services in support of the operation here, mainly through its Book-Go-Round, a used-book outlet. For some eight years, the building also was the headquarters for the Valley Institute of Theater Arts, or VITA, which enriched the community through its Shakespearean productions and associated dramatic academy.

The volunteer spirit that gave Saratoga its library lives on in the Friends.

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