LAFAYETTE'S new $42 million, 30,880 square-foot, 110,000 book library with lots of computers and a beautiful home for the Lafayette Historical Society collection will open Saturday.

Its official title is the Lafayette Library and Learning Center.

As far as libraries go, Lafayette has come a long way since Jan. 21, 1860, when the Lafayette Library Association was organized to start a subscription library to "bring to the homes of the public the advantages of reading." This public service library may have been the first in Contra Costa County, but by the 1880s, it had all but disappeared.

"The life of Lafayette, like most of the other small towns in the county, has been principally composed of prosperity and adversity. Stories are told of the days when the thoroughfares were lined with teams from the redwoods, whose drivers spent their hardly earned money with reckless profusion "... blacksmith's shops were duly opened, houses of entertainment sprang up as if by magic, while a taste for culture developed itself. "... The Lafayette Library Association was organized, but we much fear that the society has long ago died a natural death," wrote J.P. Munro-Fraser in 1882 in "Slocum's History of Contra Costa County."

Lafayette women, however, weren't going to let the idea of a lending library die. They apparently did organize a second library association in the early 1900s.

After the county library was

"Mrs. Whitbeck, librarian of the Martinez County Library, came to Lafayette and went around to several places in the town to see if she could find a location for a branch library. She had a box of 25 books with her and she came to the post office and asked Mrs. (Carrie Hough) Van Meter, who was postmaster, if she could leave her box of books with her. Mrs. Van Meter said, 'Yes'. But she received no salary that first year as librarian. The next year she received $5 or $10 a month. She told us she could not remember which," said Jennie Bickerstaff Rosenberg, Lafayette's early schoolteacher, in a talk to the members of the Contra Costa County Historical Society in 1956.

Fern Powell Davis, whose 1976 oral interview can be read online at the Lafayette Historical Society Web site, said that Van Meter was giving out books on her own as early as 1904.

The books stayed in the post office, on the northwest side of Mt. Diablo Boulevard and Moraga Road, until 1927, when the Lafayette Improvement Club bought the old Lafayette School building for a combination post office, library and telephone company building. The club moved the old school from its Moraga Road location up to Mt. Diablo Boulevard.

"I can remember in the 1930s when I used to go down with my mother — in the 1940s too, as long as Carrie was in the library — and get an armful of books. My mother was quite a reader, and she'd finish those in a week and go back for another armful. She and Carrie got to be very good friends. They weren't one bit alike. Carrie was kind of frigid looking and had a long, severe face. Wasn't the slightest bit interested in chitchat or small talk. She wasn't that kind of a person at all. But she and my mother became very good friends. She got to know Mother's reading habits. And she saved all the books that she knew Mother would be interested in and set them aside for her," said Davis.

The library had another move, and for a time was located in the Town Hall building. But the women of Lafayette were not satisfied. They began raising money for a library that was not just shelves in a post office or stuck in the basement of another building. Davis said she remembered her mother knocking on doors and asking people for money to build a library at Moraga Boulevard and Moraga Road.

The women did succeed. A tiny cottage library was built on what is now the parking lot of the 1961 library that now is replaced by a magnificent structure on Mt. Diablo Boulevard.

Nilda Rego's Days Gone By appears Sunday in A&E. Reach her at nildarego@comcast.net .