Nell Thornton famously said, in her book, The Traditions and Records of Southwest Harbor, “The Southwest Harbor Public Library had its beginning [as the Tremont Public Library] in 1884 when Mrs. Annie Sawyer Downs gathered a number of discarded books from the hotels, mostly paper covered volumes, and placed them on a shelf in one corner of Dr. R. J. Lemont's drug store…”
The library was, as were many small libraries on the coast of Maine, started by “people from away,” in other words, summer people. This small library, however, was quickly adopted by native Southwest Harborians, and has grown, in the almost one and a half centuries since its founding, to be one of Maine’s very few five-star libraries, according to the Library Journal Index of Public Library Service.
Thornton, Nellie C., Traditions and records of Southwest Harbor and Somesville, Mount Desert Island, Maine (Merrill & Webber Company, 1938, The Southwest Harbor Public Library, 1988)
