102 Years of the Jeffersonville Township Public Library

This is the fifth edition of JTPL Stories: a series of interviews with library patrons, staff, and partners. Continue below to meet the faces of JTPL with our Outreach Coordinator, Aliya! Click Here to read the entire series.

2025 marks the 125^th year that JTPL has been serving Jeffersonville and Clarksville!

This month, I interviewed a patron who has been with us for over 102 of those years. We talked about making friends at the library, the importance of reading, and how JTPL has changed over the time she’s spent here.

In the past, Flora used the library to check out paintings and vinyl records, to keep up with bestsellers, and to follow current events with the newspaper. She recalls reading about Hitler invading Poland in 1939 and learning about developments in the war through the newspaper and at the library.

“The way you kept up with things was through reading,” she said. “Books were how you learned about now, back then, and long ago… You had to read if you wanted to know.” The library, Flora said, was where you went if you wanted learn just about anything.

Reading has always been important to Flora’s family, especially through the newspaper. She told me that her grandfather, who learned to read while he was enslaved in the 1850s, taught her to read at a young age and continued to stress its importance throughout her life. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons Flora became a teacher.

Flora told me: “Back then, we knew the newspapers were prejudiced against us [people of color]. But, nevertheless, we were all lovers of the newspaper. We relied on it.” She still reads the News and Tribune regularly. In fact, she has been featured in it frequently and even won an essay contest during her senior year of High School back in 1940.

For Flora, the library provided another source of information and entertainment that was free whenever a newspaper couldn’t be found. “Reading is still very important,” Flora said, “and the library is such a resource for everybody and everything.”

She still checks out books from the library and conducts research with the resources that we have. Recently, Flora worked with our librarians to research the history of African American education in Indiana. She also enjoys finding books by Black authors she hasn’t heard of before. “Keeping up with the library has helped me keep up with the expansion of Black writers,” she told me. “There are so many Black authors that were writing long ago, but I had never heard of.”

But, now that information and news can all be found online, Flora uses the library for different reasons than she did in the past. “Books played a different part in our lives then than they do now,” she told me. Many of her friends read fewer books and don’t visit the library. In the modern age, we can learn about now, back then, and long ago through social media and Wikipedia. The library is no longer our only source for information.

These days, Flora’s favorite part of the library is attending our book clubs. She and her sister were two of the first members of our first book club at the library more than twenty years ago, and she has been a book club regular ever since. More than just a repository for information, the library is a social space for her.

Flora told me: “In the book clubs, I’ve met people in the community that I would never have met otherwise. Every once in a while, I’ll see somebody in the community or I’ll see a name in the paper, and I’ll remember that it is someone that I met at the library. That’s one of the really nice things about it.” She’s still friends with many of the people she has met at a program or book club or when browsing the shelves. At home, Flora still has books she exchanged with other book club members decades ago.

Flora is a steady presence at the library and loved by patrons and library staff alike. She’s a regular member of our African American Literature Book Club, which is held every third Saturday of the month. She says that’s where she discovered many Black authors and many friends she wouldn’t have otherwise. She also attends Let’s Learn @ the Library programs, which feature local authors and artists, when she can.

“The library has been a vital place in my life,” Flora ended our interview with, “and reading and learning to read are still very important today.” She encourages readers to “try the library and participate in the community,” even if we no longer offer vinyl records for check-out. We can still offer friendly staff, quality programs, and the best patrons in Indiana.

I certainly agree with her sentiment, and I hope Flora will remain a patron for years to come.

If you would like to meet Flora at one of our programs, try the African American Book Club on the third Saturday of each month, or our Let’s Learn program on the second Friday of each month. You can find all of our programs on our calendar, here.

If you’d like to learn more about Flora, you can watch her 2022 oral history interview about COVID and the protests surrounding Breonna Taylor’s shooting on Indiana Memory.