The renovations to the Windham Center Library are close to completion. The building will be open on Saturday, Sept. 28 for tours.
Haley Pal / For Lakes Region Weekly For the first time in many years, the Windham Center Library will open its doors to the public on Saturday, Sept. 28, at the Windham Historical Society’s Fall Harvest Festival. Over the course of the summer, Karen Lougee, secretary of the society and the building’s steward, has been busy working with contractors to get the building into shape in time for the upcoming event, the society’s biggest fundraiser of the year.
“It required some structural renovations and a new roof,” Lougee explained. “We also needed to have some tree branches trimmed, but now we have our occupancy approval and we can open the doors.” The little white library has a long history in the Windham Center area of town.
It began in the 1850s when a group of women in the local sewing circle started what they called the Windham Circulating Library. They named it this because at first, the library’s volumes were moved annually from house to house among the women in the sewing circle. In 1870, the members of the Circulating Library created the Windham Center Library Association.
Then in 1890, a room in the small building next to Alley Hawke’s Grocery on Windham Center Road became available and the reading club used this as their operating center. Haley Pal, a Windham resident and active member of the Windham Historical Society, ca.