Tiniest American Library Goes Over Big in Appalachia : Tennessee: The 5-by-6-by-6-foot white structure houses 2,000 volumes, mostly love stories, mysteries, histories and encyclopedias.

What’s known as America’s Smallest Library sits among the flowers in Dot Byrd’s front yard. An American flag waves in a gentle breeze.

The 5-by-6-by-6-foot white clapboard structure is hardly big enough to turn around in and has a slightly musty smell. But it houses a ceiling-to-floor collection of 2,000 volumes, mostly paperback mysteries, histories, love stories and encyclopedias.

For 38 years it has been a beacon of literacy among the farms, coal mines and modest homes along winding, barely two-lane Back Valley Road in this stretch of Appalachia.

It’s soon to be replaced.

“I don’t know what we would have done without it,” said May McGlothin, the 86-year-old former Tennessee Teacher of the Year who paid $250 out of her own pocket for the lumber to build the library.

It’s not just the children, parents and grandparents of this hamlet of 1,500 people who have come here. Visitors from all over stop by.

Byrd, who retires next month when a much larger, community-built and computer-equipped library opens in nearby Coalfield, is at a loss to explain the interest.

“I have no idea,” said Byrd, 69. “Like I told Johnny Carson. I thought he wasted his time having me come to California to tell him about the little library.”

Yes, the celebrity of America’s Smallest Library carried Byrd to Hollywood for a 1989 appearance on “The Tonight Show,” prompted by a story in the National Enquirer.

The $200 she earned talking to Carson began a building fund for the new library. Donations, free prison labor and community auctions have raised all but about $10,000 of the $55,000 needed for the new building.

Four decades ago, the community’s small reading allotment arrived by bookmobile from the Clinch-Powell Regional Library about 20 miles away. The box of books was rotated among people’s houses.

Byrd, a nurse, began collecting the books in 1955. She wrapped them in oilskin to protect them from the rain since she and her husband, Perry, and their three children were living in a leaky one-room house.

McGlothin bought the lumber anonymously and had it delivered. The sawmill cut the boards too short, so Byrd found out who bought the wood. Nonetheless, the library was built.

“Perry and our kids and May and whoever else happened to come by picked up a hammer and went to workin’ on it,” Byrd said. “And we opened on Aug. 1, 1956.”

Morgan County at first refused to pay to operate it “because we didn’t go through the proper channels to get it approved.”

“We just built it and told them it was here,” she said.

County officials soon relented and put Byrd on salary--$5 a month.

Officially, Byrd’s hours are 1 to 5 p.m. every Tuesday. But the door, like every other one in Back Valley, is never locked.

“In a small community like this, a library was just unheard of,” said Jim Rivers, who grew up in Back Valley and leads the new library drive.

“It sets an ideal, you know,” said Oliver Springs Elementary School principal Richard Davis, who remembers going to the library as a boy with his family. “The fact that you supported books and a library was passing a message to the kids that those things are important.”

But time marches on. “I think the little library has kind of outlived its usefulness as far as today’s society goes, which is kind of sad,” he said.

Byrd doesn’t disagree, but she isn’t going to part with the old library entirely. The books will go to the new library, and her grandson and others will refurbish the old one to hold books filling her house that were specifically donated to Back Valley.

When the new library opens, Byrd said, she will probably feel let down.

“Perry swears I will just sit and cry. And I wouldn’t be a bit surprised,” she said. But she added that she can’t wait “to just check out books as a patron.”