Edith Guerrier was a pioneer in the field of library science.
23 Facts About Edith Guerrier
1.
2.
Edith Guerrier's father, George Guerrier, was an English immigrant who served in the American Civil War as a Second Lieutenant of Colored Infantry.
3.
Edith's mother, Emma Guerrier died when Guerrier was a young child.
4.
Edith Guerrier spent a great deal of her childhood separated from her father and his side of the family due to his difficulty finding steady work.
5.
Edith Guerrier lived at times with her late mother's siblings, Anna and Walton Ricketson and her elderly Uncle Fox on her father's side.
6.
In 1887, Edith Guerrier's father sent Edith Guerrier to school at the Vermont Methodist Seminary and Female College in Montpelier, Vermont.
7.
Edith Guerrier graduated on June 25,1881, after four years.
8.
Edith Guerrier originally moved to Boston hoping to become an artist.
9.
Edith Guerrier met Edith Brown there, a fellow student, and the two formed a fast friendship.
10.
Brown and Edith Guerrier's friendship turned into a lifelong personal and professional partnership.
11.
The funds Edith Guerrier's father provided for her to attend school full-time were not enough, so Edith Guerrier got a job at the nursery of the North Bennett Street Industrial School.
12.
Edith Guerrier became the custodian for the North Bennett Street delivery station of the Boston Public Library and became the coordinator of its reading room.
13.
The reading groups Edith Guerrier developed became very popular with girls in the community, especially a group of older girls who called themselves the Saturday Evening Girls.
14.
Edith Guerrier had a love for storytelling, plays, and folktales, which the Saturday Evening Girls soon incorporated into their meetings.
15.
Edith Brown and Guerrier helped oversee the creation of pottery pieces by the girls.
16.
In 1917, Edith Guerrier took a six-month paid leave from her position at the library to volunteer her time in Washington DC for Herbert Hoover's National Food Administration.
17.
Edith Guerrier initiated a bulletin named the Food News Notes for Librarians, which lasted for thirteen issues during 1917.
18.
Edith Guerrier believed the library could play a larger role in American society than most thought possible:.
19.
Edith Guerrier believed the libraries of the time did a great deal of work that was underappreciated, and she thought they lacked sufficient government funding.
20.
Edith Guerrier soon began to work on a new set of bulletins, named the National Library Service.
21.
Edith Guerrier wanted to send out these bulletins to all of the libraries to which the bulletins for the Food Administration had been sent, which totaled to more than eight thousand libraries.
22.
Eight years later, in 1940, Edith Guerrier was reluctantly forced into retirement.
23.
In 1958, Edith Guerrier died at the age of eighty-eight.