Homegrown library serves Amish in southern Tuscarawas County
PEOLI — Renee Brown Parker has been a voracious reader since she was a child.
She would read whatever she could get her hands on — books, cereal boxes, newspapers, anything. Now, as an adult, she has channeled her love of reading into a new direction — establishing a lending library on the family farm near Peoli to serve the Amish residents of southern Tuscarawas County.
One room in the farmhouse is filled with books on every subject imaginable — history, travel, biographies, medicine, horses, gardening, guns, beekeeping, Western novels and whodunits. There are also board games and jigsaw puzzles.
One section is devoted to children's books. Amish kids have a particular fondness for the old-time Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys mysteries, she said.
The nearest public library is 8.5 miles away in Freeport — a long distance to travel in a buggy.
Parker's library is named for Maryann Blackwell, a woman at Parker's church who nurtured her love of reading when she was young. When Parker brought her future husband, Steve, with her to church, she was surprised to find out that Maryann was Steve's aunt and had grown up on the Parker farm.
All of the books in the library are stamped "Maryann's Little Library, read it, love it, return it."
"I try to stamp that in all the books so that they know where they came from," said Parker, a former staff writer for The T-R. "I don't care if they bring the books back or not."
The library has been in existence for about a year. Parker knew there were Amish families in the Peoli area that loved to read, so she would buy books for them.
"Every time I would come down, I would just be hauling box after box of books down here. I was storing them in my basement," said Parker, who lives in York Township near New Philadelphia.
Finally, there were too many books in their basement. So she told Steve that it would make more sense to take the books to Peoli and build a library so that everyone could come and get what they wanted. It took some convincing, but Steve finally agreed to the idea.
The books are stored on shelves built by an Amish man who lives in the neighborhood. Parker doesn't know how many books are there, but there is likely more than 2,000 volumes.
Ten Amish families in the neighborhood patronize the library, coming every so often to cart home a box or bag of books.
"One of these kids' books gets taken home and it gets read by seven or eight kids before it ever comes back," she said.
Parker recalled an incident where she was talking about libraries and a young Amish boy said he had never been in one before.
"I wanted to cry, because I thought, to never have the experience of getting to walk into a building and know you can have anything that you want," she said. "Most of them, they really love to read."
One little boy in the vicinity loves trains.
"How he ever got exposed to trains, I have no idea," Parker said. "He was 2 years old, loves trains. So he would come here and find all the train books. Then when it was time to bring the family's box of books back, he wouldn't let them go.
"His mom kept apologizing, and I'm like, if he finds a book he loves that much, I want him to keep it. That's the point, to find something that you want to read about. He took it to the supper table. He slept with it. There was just something about that book that he loved. That's what I want. I want the kids to find things that they really, really love."
Parker finds books for the library everywhere — garage sales, from people's basements and on eBay. She went on Facebook asking for people's old books and got a big response.
However, the library does not have any books on religion, romance novels or anything about wizards or warlocks.
"I've tried to be really careful about what I bring in here," she said.
Parker said many people have books they no longer read but they don't want to get rid of. For the Amish, though, books are all they have.
"So it works out really good that something that other people would be throwing away, I can bring down here and they get new life," she said.
This article originally appeared on The Times-Reporter: Tiny library serves Amish in southern Tuscarawas County
