Lucy Lee Pleasants

A crowd gathers in honor of the laying of the cornerstone of the Elisha D. Smith Public Library in this 1898 photograph.

Before Elisha D. Smith’s and Miss Lucy Lee Pleasants’ vision was fulfilled, a freestanding public library for Menasha had been just a dream. The library, at the time, consisted of limited volumes in a few rooms on the second floor of the Tuchscherer and Schlegel department store.  Miss Pleasants (sister-in-law of George Banta, founder of the Banta Corporation) was the driving force in establishing the first library, and she became its first librarian.  Mr. Smith donated the library to the city.  She held this position until her retirement in 1919.  Instrumental in the encouragement of reading for younger children, the children's room at the library built in 1930-31, five years after her passing, was named in her honor.  Even today, Miss Pleasants' portrait hangs in the library's children's room, and the storytime room is named in her honor.

A poet and author in her own right, Miss Pleasants was a published poet with her long poem "Plutarch's Lives" and also wrote Old Virginia Days and Ways: Reminiscences of Sally McCarty Pleasants, reminiscences of her mother's life in antebellum Virigina, published in 1916.  She contributed to many library journals and monographs.  As one example, she is quoted below in Library Work with Children by Alice Hazeltine (1917, The H. W. Wilson Company):

"When a librarian is much 'dressed up' and can take time to play that she is an agreeable hostess, all children, whether little aristocrats or arabs, enter into the civilized spirit of the occasion and become more mannerly." --Miss Lucy Lee Pleasants, Menasha, Wis.

                     Miss Pleasants' formal portrait, as seen at the Menasha Public Library