The Peterborough Mechanics’ Institute: Part 1

(Image Source)

Peterborough’s bibliothecal (it’s a word!) history is not, of course, as long as that of our subject of the other day, Baghdad.  However, it does go back tolerably far into the city’s early history: to 1843, and the foundation of the Peterborough Mechanics’ Institute.  Read on, and don’t be fooled by the word “Mechanics'”…

Mechanics’ Institutes were a phenomenon that cropped up across the British Empire and the United States in the early- to mid-nineteenth century (the first in Canada was the Montreal Mechanics’ Institute, founded in 1828).  “Mechanics'” in this context does not just denote someone who repairs machinery, but has the broader meaning of workman, skilled artisan, manufacturer, and the like.  The Mechanics’ Institutes functioned something like modern adult education centres and were often set up by major business-owners to improve the educational state of their employees.  Peterborough’s Institute came along in November of 1843, and its first constitution stated its goals quite clearly. Under the heading “Object of the Institute” (all emphasis in the original):

1. This Association shall be called “Peterboro Mechanics’ Institute.”
2. Its object shall be to instruct its members in the principles of the Arts and in the various branches of Science and useful knowledge.
3. The establishment of a Library consisting of Works on the Arts and Sciences and general Literature, a Museum of Natural History, Mineralogy, &c., &c. and Lectures from time to time on various subjects as the Institute may direct.

The museum never quite happened for the Mechanics’ Institute (Peterborough’s first museum was founded by the local Historical Society in 1897), but the library certainly did, as well as the lectures and even night classes on subjects such as book-keeping, geography, and a wide variety of others.  Membership in the Institute was available to anyone for whom two current Members could vouch, and who could pony up the entrance fee of two shillings sixpence plus the annual membership charge of five shillings.  Lifetime membership was available to those who paid two pounds ten pence, or donated books “or Philosophical Apparatus” worth five pounds (“philosophical apparatus” refers to such things as scientific equipment, museum samples, and the like).

A very brief history of the Peterborough Mechanics’ Institute: after its 1843 founding, it spent the next 25 years building up its library collection in fits and starts, until the Institute was chartered by the provincial government in 1868, after which it operated first under the aegis of, and with funding from, the Dept. of Agriculture and later Dept. of Education.  Over the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Ontario’s Mechanics’ Institutes increasingly turned into, merged with, or were subsumed by the new institution of the free public library — and indeed, in 1895 the Peterborough Mechanics’ Institute took that step as well and became the Peterborough Public Library.  There is, incidentally, one Mechanics’ Institute in Canada still operating in the old way, and it is the original one: the Montreal Mechanics’ Institute, now known as the Atwater Library and Computer Centre (there are a handful of surviving Mechanics’ Institutes still going in the UK and USA, and quite a large number in Australia).

There were some famous local names associated with the Peterborough Mechanics’ Institute.  In the mid-1850s, its President was James Hall, and I am sure that is the same James Hall who was Mayor in 1852 and 1855 later Sheriff of Peterborough County (and the father-in-law of Sir Sandford Fleming, incidentally).  Hall’s predecessor as Sheriff and successor as Mayor, W.S. Conger, was a Director of the Institute, as was John Langton, who was Peterborough’s representative in the Provincial Legislature as well as the husband of the artist Anne Langton.  Later “big names” involved include one of Peterborough’s first major canoe-makers, William English.  Through most of this period, the Institute’s librarian was Robert Romaine (after whom Romaine Street is named).  Not to cast any aspersions on him, but this may have been something of a good deal for Mr. Romaine.  He owned the Peterborough Review newspaper, and an associated book bindery and printing press; an 1870 invoice shows the Mechanics’ Institute paying him $14.90 for the binding of some of the library’s periodicals.

375-379 Water Street, the final home of the Peterborough Mechanics’ Institute.  (Image Source — PDF)

As for the library itself, it included both the book collection and a reading room for magazines.  In the early days, members of the Institute were allowed to borrow one book at a time (for varying periods depending on the book and with a fine of a penny a day for overdue material), although that number soon increased to two.  At first, borrowing and returning of books took place on Monday evenings only; within a decade of the foundation of the Institute regular library hours (9-7, and later 9-10, on Monday to Saturday) had been instituted.  I do not know, unfortunately, where the first Peterborough Mechanics’ Institute library was located, but by the time it became the Public Library, it was located at the corner of Hunter and Water Streets.

We do get some occasional glimpses of the numbers associated with the library.  The Report on the Annual Meeting of Mechanics’ Institute in 1875 mentions 270 members (up from 190 in 1872), to whom 4323 book loans had been made the previous year (simple math suggests that each member therefore borrowed about 16 books, on average).  The library’s holdings at that time comprised 1610 total volumes, plus periodicals.  And over the previous year, the Institute had purchased 240 new books, “selected with particular attention to the requirements of the reading public,” for which it paid a total of $380.63.

But what were those volumes, so carefully selected?  What was the library-going Peterborian of the mid- to late-19th century interested in reading?  And who was that library-going Peterborian?  Those questions we will delve into in Part 2 of this post, later on this weekend.  I will close by noting my profound gratitude to the staff at the Peterborough Mechanics’s Institute’s direct descendant, the Peterborough Public Library, for helping me get access to the necessary historical documentation for this post (and the next one).