History of Snow Library

David Snow, founder of Snow Library

The history of Snow Library is unique in its ties to the fishing and shipbuilding trades of the 19th century. You could say the library was founded on the wealth of the sea.

In 1876 David Snow, a Boston merchant who had grown rich in the maritime industry, died, leaving a portion of his estate to the town of Orleans. The $5,000 he bequeathed to his hometown was given with the condition that the money be used to “provide a suitable and permanent building" for a public library.

In his will Snow wrote, “The legacy of the means of supplying a public library to Orleans will be productive of great good, if the people of that town will also learn every day wisdom and practical prudence from the voice of their departed towns boy, who being dead yet speaketh.”

An illustration in “From poverty to Plenty: the life of David Snow” Portrays Snow in his clam-digging days.

Who was David Snow?

Snow’s life had begun in poverty 77 years before, on a barren stretch of land on the outskirts of town. Born in Orleans in 1799, the son of a seaman who died that same year, Snow was raised by his widowed mother in a humble home where “the only book seen…was the old family Bible and the spelling book.”*

At the age of 15 Snow began digging clams in the winter to earn money, shucking them in a shack he built out of rails and seaweed at the head of Town Cove. Over the next decade he tried his hand at various professions — from ship’s cook to carpenter to seaweed farmer — and finally settled on the baking business, setting up shop in Barnstable and then Wellfleet.

On an errand to Boston in the early 1830s, he leased a store space on City Wharf on a whim. There he established “David Snow & Co.,” trading in flour, grain and fish. A few years later he partnered with Isaac Rich, a Wellfleet fishmonger who dealt in mackerel and alewives. Their new company, “Snow & Rich,” would become “the centre and circumference of the fish trade.”

A Self-Made Man

In his 1875 memoir “From Poverty to Plenty,” Snow writes that he “never really felt the need of culture until I was nearly twenty years of age. Up to that time I worked hard to earn a scanty supply of bread. When I began to realize the necessity of improving my mind, I gave what spare time I could to reading such books as came in my way; but I had to grope along in the dark with no kind hand to help me; and only an inward impulse which said, ‘I can and will be something more than a mere ‘hewer of wood and drawer of water.’”

During the 11 years that Snow and Rich stayed in business together, they built ships, bought wharves and ran a line of packets up and down the eastern seaboard and all the way to New Orleans. Their partnership dissolved in 1852, but Snow continued working in the wholesale fish and navigation trades. He also became a successful banker and financier. On his death, he had amassed a quantity of real estate in Boston.

On Jan. 18, 1876 the Barnstable Patriot ran Snow’s obituary, citing his “genuine Cape Cod traits: perseverance, industry, grit, shrewdness, courage and tenacity of purpose.” The Boston Journal published Snow’s will in its entirety, noting that “the lessons which [Snow] here teaches . . . may be read with profit by every Cape Cod man.”

A year later, in 1877, Orleans Town Meeting voted to build Snow Library.

*[Source: Poverty to Plenty: The Life of David Snow,1875]

The Historic Snow Library

The original, Victorian-Style Library building in 1897, with the Methodist Church behind it. [Photograph by H.K Cummings]

The original Snow Library was located on the former site of the Orleans Academy, on what is now the southeast corner of Route 28 and Main Street. The library’s architecture was Victorian, the exterior built of stone and brick. It stood for 75 years. Ruth Barnard, town librarian in the 1940s and 50s, described the building with affection in her journal. “The sun always seemed to shine” in the little gingerbread library, Barnard wrote. She noted the rose-colored plaster on the walls and the light that flooded the rooms from the high, west-facing windows.

In 1952 the historic library burned to the ground in an electrical fire that broke out during a blizzard. The library’s trustees immediately launched a campaign to rebuild, and less than two years later construction began on a 3,000-sq. ft. one-story brick building on the corner opposite the former library site.

That brick building, expanded in 1977 and renovated again in 1992, is the one you see today at the corner of Main Street and Route 28.

—Kaimi Lum, Assistant Director

Fomer Snow Library directors with their years of service: Ada B. Smith (1877-1891); Hiram Myers (1891-1912); Mary S. Cummings (1912-1945); Ruth L. Barnard (1945-1962); Doris Trout Eldredge (1962-1963); Sylvia Jacobs (1963-1965); Doris Eldridge Nickerson (1965-1969); Kathleen D. Bader (1969-1995); Anne M. O’Brien (1995-1999); Mary S. Reuland (1999-2013).