Kathy Hill, library specialist at Pack Memorial Library, traces the organization’s current crop of clubs to 1990, when the Friends of the South Buncombe Library established its first book club. Soon thereafter, similar groups at other branches began to spring up as well.
“Asheville has a long history of independent book clubs,” she says. In fact, “the library was basically started through a book club.”
According to Hill, in 1877, three civic-minded women, Anna C. Aston, Fanny L. Patton and Anna B. Chunn, began a private reading circle. From there, they formed the Asheville Library Association and went through the county in a horse-drawn wagon collecting donations of money and books to open a community reading room. Its success prompted George W. Pack, the lumber baron and philanthropist, to donate a building for a library that would eventually memorialize his name.
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