At the turn of the twentieth century there were few libraries open to the community. In the agricultural farming town of Seaford, a group of women organized the Acorn Club as a means through which they could improve their community. Their aspiration was to set up a public library.
The meeting of the Acorn Club was in a rented room to which each member brought a chair, a book, and a cup and saucer. They voted to start a library with books from their own homes and material borrowed from the traveling library available through the State. Each member served as the librarian for a month until they hired a part-time librarian for $1 a week.
By 1909, the Seaford Library had 404 books in their collection and by 1912 they were serving the more rural areas by one the first bookmobiles in the country. Mary Hopkins purchased a touring car, stacked books on the car seats and would visit nearby farms loaning books and magazines.
The library and its services to the community continue to grow and by 1939 the library had to move to the Acorn Club House on Hall Street. Outgrowing the current location again, the library took up resident in the old Henry White brick building on Pine Street until moving to their new facility on North Porter Street in 1963. Ad addition to that building in 1987 almost doubled its size, adding more bookshelves and offering a large meeting room for the community. The library moved again in 2009 to our current location on North Market Street, again doubling its size. The new facility has a computer training room, an exhibit/conference room, and a community multi-purpose room.
Today, the library’s collection has grown to over 28,000 items and following our legacy of outreach the library provides services to local schools, day cares, nursing homes, and other organizations in the greater Seaford area. The library is the community center for wellness classes, job coaching, social services, GED classes and testing, parents as teachers, expungement services, ELL classes, high speed internet, tutoring, summer read and feed, and much more. The library continues to partner with the Seaford community by providing resources for individual and community development and success as we have for 117 years.