Every morning I park in the back lot of the library and I read and reread the names of authors of classics I’ve read or read about.
I use the term “read” rather loosely. I’m not really sure how much of the Homer’s “Iliad” or “Odyssey” I actually read. I remember stumbling over Greek names such as Agamemnon and Menelaus and wondering how many more battles I could stomach. I probably armed myself with study guides and somehow kept all the relationships straight.
I certainly never took Dumas’s “Count of Monte Christo” to bed with me although I did become intimate with that story and of the antics of the “Three Musketeers.” All of this said, however, I certainly understand the reasons the benefactors and designers of the original Morrill Memorial Library carved such illustrious names upon the granite walls. Hugo, Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Cervantes earned their place on the exterior walls of the 1898 building facing Beacon Street. Plato, Keats, Dante, Horace, and Taine were added at the back of the Plimpton wing built in 1928 just years before the Great Depression. These latter five were poets and philosophers, Greek, English, Italian, Roman, and Italian.
Americans Longfellow, Poe, Franklin, and Emerson were four of the 11 names surrounding the original front door of the library; all of them were carefully re-carved when the door was reconstructed after the addition of 1965. The majority of those 11 writers wrote during the century that the library was built and many of them had died only a decade or so before.
Following the addition of 1965 a committee was formed in 1968 to add 33 additional names to the building. The newspaper article from that time states that a “special ‘Blue Ribbon’ Committee was appointed to advise the Trustees” in choosing who exactly warranted such a special place on Norwood’s architecture. The new names included Gandhi, Thoreau, Melville, and Swift. Interestingly, the committee noted that no woman had heretofore been granted such an honor on the library’s exterior walls. Five women, Louisa May Alcott, Willa Cather, Emily Dickinson, and Charlotte and Emily Bronte joined the ranks and their names were proudly inscribed along with Melville, Swift, Huxley, Kipling, and Frost and others.
The committee could not decide exactly which Bronte sister to honor; we’ll never know their preference because the last name has stood for both.
In 1986 two college students won approval from the Board of Selectmen “to have the letters ‘M.L.King’ carved into the library’s Walpole Street face, just under the names of civil rights leaders Mahatma Gandhi and Henry David Thoreau.” The name was then carved and between 1986 and 1998 there were 89 names engraved on the granite of the Morrill Memorial Library.
Near the turn of the 20th Century, and on the eve of the first Centennial of the library building, the Committee of One Hundred Names was formed in time for the celebration. The mission of this committee of seven was to find eleven more names. What a daunting task! A century of writers had been born since the building had been built. Some of the original names were hidden or lost during the ensuing years and the two additions. The committee noted that only four women’s names now graced the building and that most of the authors carved on its walls were writers for adults.
For three months the public was asked to nominate. Names came from elementary schools, from library users, and from the general public and 144 names were received. The file of nominations is several inches thick and includes testimony and heartfelt letters from an enthusiastic public.
Discussions and compromise resulted in a final list. Committee members had to “give up some favored authors” to make room for others who spoke to the need to include women, children’s writers and omissions of the past. Among the women of the eleven chosen were Jane Austen, Rachel Carson, Dame Agatha Christie, Toni Morrison, and South African Nadine Gordimer.
Among the children’s authors were Beatrix Potter and New Englanders David McCord and Theodore Geisel, or Dr. Seuss. Rounding out the 11 were scientist/author Isaac Asimov, Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, and Irish satirist Oscar Wilde. Reluctantly left off the list were several New Englanders, Eric Carle, and Edith Wharton. The committee must have mourned those losses because they did make note that some, if not all, of the authors nominated should be considered in the future.
The tradition of great minds and great authors surrounds us each day as we work in and as you visit the Morrill Memorial Library. Please visit us and stroll around the lovely exterior of our building to savor each and every one of the great names around us.
Visit our Web site, www.norwoodlibrary.org or call 781-769-0200 for any of your informational needs.
Charlotte Canelli is library director of the Morrill Memorial Library in Norwood.
Morrill Memorial Library building names
Here is the complete list of the names inscribed on the Morrill Memorial Library
New part of building facing Walpole Street
Churchill
Shaw
Kennedy
O’Neill
Hemingway
Wolfe
Stevenson
Wells
Brandeis
Swift
London
Melville
Boswell
Faulkner
Thurber
“Twain”
Alcott
Bronte
Cather
Dickinson
Hughes
Huxley
James
Newman
Eliot
Masefield
Kipling
Yeats
Frost
Sandberg
Gandhi
Thoreau
ML King, Jr.
Gordimer *
Wilde *
Carson *
Christie *
“Dr. Seuss” *
McCord *
Potter *
Austen *
Tolstoy *
Asimov *
Morrison *
* names added in 1998
Surrounding front door
Longfellow
Holmes
Lowell
Poe
Whitman
Whittier
Franklin
Emerson
Hawthorne
Prescott
Irving
Facing Beacon Street – old part of building
V. Hugo
Bacon
Goethe
Jonson
Petrarch
Addison
Shakespeare
Racine
Spenser
Marlowe
Fielding
Thackeray
Humboldt
Chaucer
Newton
Schiller
MaCauley
Mommsen
Dickens
Cervantes
Milton
Tennyson
Browning
Lessing
Carlyle
Ruskin
Bancroft
Parkman
Hallan
Motley
Gibbon
Old part of building facing Winter Street
Fox
Clay
Pitt
Plimpton Wing
Keats
Horace
Taine
Dante
Plato
Old part of building, rear
Dryden
Dumas
Homer
Caesar
Browne
Cowper
