A refurbished Little Free Library was unveiled in Tattnall Square Park on Friday, Feb. 6, courtesy of Frank Broome. Schoolchildren and community leaders, including Macon-Bibb County Commissioner Stanley Stewart were in attendance and donated books.
Broome said he wanted the library to resemble a house. Local children put their handprints on the inside panels and other members donated towards the construction.
Broome’s son also cut the material for the library, which was mostly plywood with a cedar-shingled roof.
“Nobody asked Mr. Frank to do this, but he saw that there was a problem so he stepped up,” Onica Schmidt, president of the Historic In-Town Neighborhood Association and an adjunct professor at Mercer’s School of Law, said.
Before the unveiling, Mercer University English Professor Thomas Bullington said the previous library was vandalized. Now that the library in Tattnall Square Park has been fixed, the community can take a book from the library and replace it so that its shelves remain stocked.
Bullington said the idea of a library was created in Hudson, Wi. in 2009 by a man named Tod Bol in order to address what he called “literary deserts.”
Little free libraries first popped up in downtown Macon because of a biologist named Bull, who Bullington said left Mercer in 2015 after applying for a community grant in 2014. Now, Bullington said there are over 150,000 of these libraries across the country, as of 2022.
Libraries downtown have deteriorated. Bullington said there used to be a large library near College Street that had to be dismantled.
In 2020, during online learning, Bullington turned his classes into service learning courses for his students to monitor and upkeep their assigned libraries around Mercer and downtown Macon. A year later, Bullington asked for help from the community to fix little libraries that had fallen into disrepair near campus.
Students would check which books need to be replaced, and if they do, they got books from Bullington for the library’s circulation. He added that as part of his INT course, students refurbished a library that sits outside of Society Garden last semester.
Bullington wants to eventually start doing social media work and raising community outreach with the hopes of refurbishing the library in the Macon Dog Park.
Bullington read an excerpt from Bol's writing at Friday’s ceremony, which said that Bol believes “people can fix their communities, develop systems of sharing, learning from each other and see that they have a better place on this planet to live.”
