HARDWICK — Last week the architect spent several hours inspecting the nearly completed Jeudevine addition in order to create a punch list. My understanding is that the term originated in an era when a hole would be punched through the paper next to items on a list as they were addressed. Not so today, of course, when documents traverse the ether from architect to owner to contractor to sub-contractors, none of whom wish to poke a hole in their phone or computer screens. There must be another way.
The Jeudevine list includes more than 200 items, but most are very minor observations: areas in need of painting touch-up, spots where paint inadvertently landed, door hardware placement, overlooked caulking gaps, crooked light fixtures, a missing shelf.
In the bigger picture, the passageway from the original Jeudevine into the new addition is being completed with wood paneling. Bookcases are arrayed along the walls in the old and new buildings, immediately adjacent to the walkway. The mechanical aspects of the addition, climate control, electricity, plumbing, sprinkler system and elevator are being brought on line. The original Jeudevine also has a new sprinkler system.
ReArch Company of South Burlington Site Superintendent Matt Moulton works to install the wood panels last week for the pass through from the existing Jeudevine Memorial Library in Hardwick to the new addition.
photo by Vanessa Fournier
In anticipation of the original Jeudevine floors being restored, planning has begun to move books and bookshelves back and forth. The flooring work will proceed in two stages, first the current Children’s section (to the right as one enters), then the Adult section and reception area. That effort will commence Monday, April 14. Beginning then, and continuing for two weeks, the Jeudevine will be closed. Library staff will run a satellite library across the street on the third floor of the Memorial Building. Computers and WiFi will be available, as will interlibrary loans, but the Jeudevine book collection will be inaccessible for those two weeks.
Storytime, for children under age five will continue, Thursdays, 10:30 a.m., as will rehearsals for the Jeudevine Players, Wednesdays at 3 p.m.
At town meeting, the voters elected three new Jeudevine board members. This month I am delighted to introduce you to Solomon Lew-Smith. Lew-Smith grew up in Hardwick and currently works as a teacher’s assistant at Hazen Union School. He is engaged in course work toward his MSW degree and hopes to eventually serve as a school-based social worker. He enjoys the Vermont outdoors year-round, snowboarding in winter and mountain biking during the fair weather months. His hope is that the new addition attracts more young people to the library.
Our librarian, Diane Grenkow, recently alerted me to references to the Jeudevine in The Hardwick Gazette archives. She suggested I might enjoy exploring, so I gave it a go, entering a query looking back a century. From the November 8, 1923, edition I found a news item listing “New Books Added to the Jeudevine Memorial Library.” The listing includes 27 titles, most of which did not ring any bells for me. However, former American Literature major that I am, I noticed the entry “W. Cather” under author listings. Indeed, the library had acquired a copy of Willa Cather’s new novel “A Lost Lady.” It follows the decline of socialite Marian Forrester. She and her husband live on the western frontier, near the new Transcontinental Railroad.
Much of Cather’s writing plumbed her experience in Nebraska, where she lived from ages nine through her early twenties. Some of her better-known works, such as “O Pioneers!” and “My Antonia” are similarly set along the American frontier, exploring the, mostly Scandinavian, immigrant experience and the intersection of a newly emerging way of life with Native American and old Spanish traditions.
I have not read “A Lost Lady,” but apparently F. Scott Fitzgerald, upon reading it, saw the potential in telling a similar story about the arrogance and moral shortcomings of the new American aristocracy in “The Great Gatsby.” His Daisy Buchanan bore enough similarities to Marian Forrester that he actually apologized to Cather for any appearance of plagiarism.
A search through the Jeudevine’s catalog suggests that the copy of “A Lost Lady” has disappeared, but still on hand are copies of “My Antonia” and “Death Comes to the Archbishop,” perhaps her two finest works. Although most of her work dates to the early twentieth century, Cather does fit into a movement within American writing known as local color. The term refers to many writers in the years after the Civil War who based their stories quite specifically in regions of the expanding United States: Twain along the Mississippi, Sarah Orne Jewett in Maine, Joel Chandler Harris in the south, Bret Harte in California mining towns. Setting helped define the characters and their stories. These writers brought a wildly divergent land into their readers’ homes.
