Cynthia Morgan manned the table directly behind where more than 100 families registered for the 2024 Back to School Bash in the George County Middle School gymnasium last August. Her table—one that earlier in the day had been stocked with library cards, backpacks, shoes, and other donations necessary to students in financial need—was the first stop for families as they made their way around the procession of volunteers who handed out items, painted children’s faces and served hotdogs to hungry families.

After a morning of distributing school supplies to families in need, Morgan packed up the remainder of her things, which by this point did not include much. As she did so, the gym’s double doors swung open, and Morgan watched as another family walked toward the registration table well after the event had formally ended.

Though the bouncy house was quickly deflating, when Morgan and the other volunteers noticed the late-arriving family, everyone stopped what they were doing and waited attentively as the family signed in and made their way around to each volunteer’s table.

“They got that family food; they got that family supplies. I still was able to talk to them and interact with them,” Morgan told the Mississippi Free Press. “They didn’t stop when (the event) ended. If anybody came in, they still helped them. And I thought that was pretty good—because most people, when they are done, they are done. But those volunteers were truly there to help these people.”

Originally, the George County Public Library was holed away in the Lucedale Courthouse until the City of Lucedale paid for the development of a new library building, which opened in 1976. Photo by Gaven Wallace

As the branch manager of the Lucedale-George County Public Library for nine years, Morgan is used to this level of active community outreach. The self-proclaimed “Delta-Dome girl” from Pascagoula, Miss., has worked in the Jackson-George Regional Library System in some capacity for 22 years.

While working as a ship-fitter in 2002, Morgan began to long for a change of career. At the time, the Moss Point, Miss., resident frequented East Central Public Library and applied for an opening as a page (a librarian’s assistant who mostly helps with organization and customer relations) and quickly advanced to the position of clerk. One week, Morgan covered for another clerk at Lucedale-George. The branch manager at the time, Janet Smith, immediately noticed Morgan’s work ethic.

“That week was the only week I ever worked with her. She was just a hard worker, you know, just didn’t stop. She was always looking for something else to do,” Smith said of Morgan. “I told her ‘Cynthia, why don’t you go back and get your degree? You seem like you got what it takes.’ She said later I was the only person who ever told her that.”

Lucedale residents visit the library in September 2024 to socialize during a sewing circle. Photo by Gaven Wallace

Now, Morgan regularly hosts and attends community-outreach events as a representative of Lucedale-George. To fulfill the Jackson-George Regional Library System’s mission of inspiring ideas, enriching lives and building communities, Morgan regularly partners with organizations to create events that engage George County residents.

On Sept. 14, 2024, the library worked with the Lucedale Kiwanis Club at the organization’s fourth annual Character Pancake Breakfast. For a $10 admission fee, families sat down for a pancake breakfast as volunteers dressed as characters such as Captain America, Minnie Mouse and Spider-Man posed with children for photos. At the event, Morgan provided children and their families with coloring sheets and information about the local library.

The Lucedale-George Public Library targets more than just children with its community-service endeavors, however. It also regularly partners with the Hospice of Light, one of Lucedale’s several respite-care providers. Each year, the hospice hosts its Senior Citizen Prom, a catered dance with live music that often welcomes more than 100 elderly guests.

“The actual George County School District comes and—they pay them so much a plate—and they serve them,” Morgan said (emphasis added). “They bring them an entree, they bring them their main dish, and they wear these really nice outfits. So they feel like they’re really being honored.”

‘Not Enough Words’

Over the course of September, a month during which many libraries celebrated National Library Card Month, Lucedale-George organized a number of free, family-friendly events intended to both bring joy to the Lucedale community. Among these were a Make ’N’ Take children’s craft day, a LEGO Club meeting and even an adult “Bad Art Night.” These activities serve the dual purpose of exposing families to the array of resources the library has to offer and to show residents that the library is, as Morgan said, “not just about books and reading.”

The Jack Mims Computer Lab is one of many amenities available at the Lucedale-George County Public Library. Photo by Gaven Wallace

Morgan and her coworkers credit Jackson-George for fostering their passion for service. Letha Boulton, the assistant director of branch services for the JGRLS of three-and-a-half years, spoke to the personal satisfaction she gains from working in the library system.

“It has just been the most fulfilling thing that I could possibly do. I’m ex-military, too, and I’ve worked in Fortune 500 companies,” Boulton said. “I’ve been in supervisory positions, management positions, but what we do—there’s no match for being of service to people in the communities that we live in, we work in or we shop in. It is so fulfilling; there’s not enough words.”

Librarians like Boulton and Morgan serve their communities by connecting them with countless resources. While many patrons visit libraries like Lucedale-George to peruse shelves or to simply mingle with one another in its common areas or computer labs, many others come seeking specific government documents or to engage in highly specialized research. No matter the customer’s need, Boulton and Morgan hope to help their patrons in any way they can.

“We’re here to serve, and it’s just very important to us, and every year it becomes just that much more important,” Boulton said. ”And sometimes it’s just that one—if we can serve that one and they feel like they have really, truly been helped, that is a big thumbs-up for us.”

The Lucedale-George County Public Library offers a number of resources both physically and digitally. Here, George County locals chitchat inside the library in September 2024. Photo by Gaven Wallace

Besides the books and documents that the library stores in-house, Lucedale-George card-holders can remotely access a number of E-Resources through the library’s virtual portal. These electronic resources include language services, study prep for both students and adults looking to take tests like the ASVAB or ACT, various courses for professional certification, and even a digital classroom to assist in obtaining U.S. citizenship.

The JGRLS—which comprises Lucedale-George as well as libraries in Van Cleve, St. Martin, Ocean Springs, Gaucher, Pascagoula, and Moss Point—regularly engages in interlibrary loan, a practice where libraries share books and other documents between one another. Card-holders at any of these institutions can request items from other branches that are then delivered to the patron’s local library. Couriers for Jackson-George travel between each branch by van every day, delivering books across the system’s libraries as guests order them.

‘The Emmy of the Library World’

Janet Smith is the current treasurer for the Friends of the Lucedale-George County Public Library and was the library’s branch manager for more than 33 years. Smith, who joined the library staff in 1971 when its existence was limited to a small room in the Lucedale Courthouse, was the first librarian to hold a degree to gain employment at what was then called the George County Public Library.

Library officials added “Lucedale” to its title after the city constructed the library’s current building in 1976. Lucedale-George largely remained the same until 2003, when Smith worked with the city and George County officials to expand the library even further, adding on the two wings that now house the library’s computer lab, conference room and other amenities.

“We had to come up with 50% local (funding), and the other came from a Mississippi Library Commission Grant,” Smith said. “And so we went to the city and asked them for 50%, and Doug Lee told us that the city would do half of it if they could get the county to do half, so we split the 50% in half, and it was funded by the county and the City of Lucedale.”

For its community-outreach efforts, the Lucedale-George County Public Library earned a John Cotton Dana Award, an endowment recognizing libraries across the U.S. with “outstanding public relations.” Photo by Gaven Wallace

In total, these grants funded the more than $900,000 needed to expand Lucedale-George’s facilities. Workers broke ground for construction on Groundhog Day of 2002. On Feb. 2 2003—exactly one year later—Lucedale-George unveiled these new wings to the public.

“We had a lot of support. The stained glass window was done by somebody, and they did murals and everything else. I mean, it was just a lot of support,” Smith said.

On top of developing the library’s infrastructure, Smith is responsible for the nationwide recognition that Lucedale-George received when the National Library Association awarded it the John Cotton Dana Award: an endowment that annually recognizes 15 libraries across the U.S. with “outstanding public relations.” It is, as Smith called it, “the Emmy or Grammy of the library world.”

“I came up with the slogan about (Lucedale-George being) ‘The Little Library that Could’ as a fundraiser and even dressed in a conductor cap and all that,” Smith said. “Our PR person entered into the contest, and we won.”

The slogan, which calls upon the Watty Piper’s children’s literary classic “The Little Engine that Could,” was more than simply a marketing ploy. Shortly before Smith thought of the library’s title, an electrical fire started in Lucedale’s first computer lab and forced the library to shut down for three months. While the building itself remained intact after the fire, library staff had to clean residual soot from the books, walls, and they had to replace several sections of flooring before the library could resume regular operations.

“That was a horrible, horrible experience, and that year it looked like we were gonna hit the 100,000 mark for the number of books we circulated that year,” Smith said.

Though the library was unable to reach this mark in 2003, Smith and their library staff recovered after this fire, and Lucedale-George later hit the 100,000 mark under branch manager Rebecca Wheeler.

Today, the library averages around 4,500 books circulated physically each month with patrons checking out 47,693 books from October 2023 to August 2024. This number does not account for the patrons who borrow from the 9,000 titles that Lucedale-George makes available through the online library, Libby.

Lucedale local Jim Corley’s grandmother retired from her 30-plus-year career at the library in the 2000s, and he served as a member of the Friends of the Lucedale-George County Library nonprofit as a result of that connection for a long time before passing away from kidney failure in 2017. His obituary memorialized him as a “man of many talents,” a mechanical engineer who designed components for the Saturn family of rockets and the pumping system for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

Jim Corley sculpted the “Storytime” statue that rests outside the Lucedale-George County Public Library in honor of his grandmother, who worked for the library for more than 30 years before passing away in the early 2000s. Photo by Gaven Wallace

Because of his dedicated support to the library and the George County community, the City of Lucedale designated Aug. 4 as “James E. Corley Day” in 2017. In addition to his career in mechanical engineering, Corley was also an artisan and a sculptor. After his grandmother died, Corley carved a stone sculpture in her memory that he finished in 2003 and titled “Storytime.” The sculpture, whittled from a block of pearl-white stone, depicts a grandmother reading to a child sitting on her lap, a design for which Corley drew heavily from his memories of his grandmother reading to him in his youth.

Corley’s “Storytime” is still a prominent feature at the library today, one that Morgan believes represents the values her library holds. Set in the brick walkway that leads patrons from Oak Street to the double doors of Lucedale-George’s front entrance, the statue has greeted many of the library’s visitors over the years. Many of these patrons may have noticed a peculiar plaque across the sculpture’s base: a black sign with the words “Please Touch” inscribed in bold white letters.

“It says that because he wanted kids to realize, you know: This is a family,” Morgan said. “Grandmas with grandchildren, grandpas with grandchildren, or families with children. He wanted them to know that family is what the library represents.”

Read original article by clicking here.

‘The Little Library That Could’: Lucedale-George County Public Library Organizes More Than Books

‘Not Enough Words’

‘The Emmy of the Library World’

Local Dining Stream

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