Every library in Black Bay Village's town began, improbably, in a living room. In 1910, Mrs. Annie Patterson took responsibility for maintaining a library in her home on the corner of First and Frederick in Post Falls. Annie belonged to a group of mothers and wives who called themselves the Progressive Study Club, and that club sponsored the collection. Her library filled just five shelves, and she kept those shelves accessible to whoever needed them whenever she was home, opening her own front room to neighbors who came looking for a book.
Post Falls quickly outgrew the living room. In 1912 the library moved into a small upstairs room in Nogle Hall, which the Community Library Network's history calls the epicenter of entertainment for the burgeoning township, and in 1913 Mrs. Cornelia Lewis took over what Mrs. Patterson had started as a volunteer effort. Mrs. Lewis was the librarian on December 7, 1915, when the village council drew up and approved the charter that officially established a tax-supported public library, turning a neighbors' project into a permanent public institution.
The librarians who followed became fixtures of the small town. Mrs. Reynolds succeeded Mrs. Lewis, then came Mrs. Florence Lucky and then Mary Shanks. Records from 1942, while Mary was librarian, show the village provided an annual budget of 250 dollars to cover books, Mary's salary, and library maintenance combined. The library was open two days a week, from 1:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m., and Mary's salary ranged from 12 dollars to 13 dollars and 50 cents a month. When the only bank in town closed in the Great Depression of 1933, the library moved into the back of the then-empty bank building. The move cost 19 dollars, and the library remained there for over three decades.
A home of its own finally arrived in 1966, when the library moved into the first building designed and built specifically to be a library, at its current location on the corner of Mullan Avenue and Spokane Street. Architect Robert Nelson and library board chairman Ted Snyder facilitated the construction through a 15,750 dollar federal grant, 10,000 dollars in city funds, and several 500 dollar gifts from board members and the Friends of the Library. That 1,500-square-foot building was, in the Network's words, the crown jewel of Post Falls through the 1970s and 1980s. Post Falls welcomed its first master's-degree librarian, Kathryn Prather, in 1978, and under her the library converted its holdings to digitized record keeping and, in 1987, became among the first libraries in the state to circulate books by computer.
Growth asked for one more community decision. In 1998 library director Joe Reiss and the board asked citizens to support a bond to expand the building, a measure that needed a two-thirds supermajority and passed with 78 percent of voters approving, with the expanded library celebrating its open house in 2000. Then, in the November 2009 election, voters approved shifting from a city library to the larger Community Library Network, and Post Falls transitioned into the district in 2010, joining Athol, Harrison, Hayden, Pinehurst, Rathdrum, Spirit Lake, and the Bookmobile. The Post Falls location now circulates over thirty thousand items each month, a long journey from five shelves that anyone could visit whenever Annie Patterson was home.
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