Library Blog

History on the Go!

June 13, 2025 by kmerwin

We’re putting history in your hands this summer and taking it on the road to destinations near and far.

History in Your Hands

The Wood River Museum opens virtual doors to Wood River Valley History through a free app from Bloomberg Connects.

Locals, visitors, and even people far afield can now experience the history of the Wood River Valley in a whole new way. The Community Library’s Wood River Museum of History + Culture launched a new digital guide to enrich both onsite and offsite visits. The app features highlights from the Museum’s offerings. More/download the app here.

Community Library Field Trips

The Museum is hosting three summer field trips to provide opportunities to dig deeper into the regional history in southern Idaho. Seating is limited; registration is required.

Saturday, June 28
Field Trip: Minidoka and the Herrett Center

Saturday, August 9
Field Trip: Shoshone Bannock Indian Festival at Fort Hall

Saturday, September 3
Field Trip: Teater’s Knoll and the Hagerman Museum

Sun Valley Story Tour by Bus

Catch free Valley tours every Friday starting July 11 and running through August 29.

Join Wendy and Jim Jaquet or one of our volunteer team to ride the Blue Line bus (starting at the Elephant’s Perch on Sun Valley Road at 10:15 a.m.). You’ll get the opportunity to learn from local experts about the history of the area as well as see a wide variety of historic buildings and sites along the way. After the tour, come to the Museum to learn more from our collection that includes information on mining, Hemingway, the Shoshone Bannock, and Bald Mountain. To guarantee your spot, call the Visitor Center at 208-726-3423 or email Kristine Bretall here.

Friday, July 11
Sun Valley Story Tour by Bus

Friday, July 18
Sun Valley Story Tour by Bus

Friday, July 25
Sun Valley Story Tour by Bus

Friday, August 1
Sun Valley Story Tour by Bus

Friday, August 9
Sun Valley Story Tour by Bus

More about The Community Library’s Wood River Museum of History + Culture here.

Review: “Little House on the Prairie” Series

June 12, 2025 by kmerwin

Children’s Librarian Helen Morgus recommends the “Little House on the Prairie” series by Laura Ingalls Wilder

My sweet dad read Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder to me when I could not have been more than five years old. We loved and identified with Laura—headstrong and creative—and her Pa, a paragon of manhood. Craving an escape into a story of American industriousness in the face of hardship, I returned to Laura Ingalls Wilder this past winter and was abundantly rewarded.

The pillars of Wilder’s writing are her meticulous descriptions of the technology of the 1880s, her passion for the land, her love of family, and the Wilders’ sense of duty and devotion to one another. Herein lie many lessons for young readers, and adults will pick up on the tenderness and mutual respect between Laura’s parents, Charles and Caroline.

But there is a troubling flip side.

Wilder wrote her books from the perspective of the late 19th century in which she was embedded. For example, she encounters people of other races, and with a sense of superiority, and adults discipline children with the rod and the whip. Notwithstanding spankings, a blackface minstrel show, Caroline’s visceral fear of Indians, and the unavoidable whiff of Manifest Destiny, there is more to admire about the Wilders than there is to condemn.

Wilder’s accounts (written in her 60s) deal with poverty, hunger, cold, disease, and other trials from a distance that takes the sting out of them. I had to ask myself: was all that self-reliance simply just that? What other forces could have been at work in the Wilders’ successes and failures?

Prairie Fires: the American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, by Caroline Fraser, helped answer these questions. Fraser takes us through the period covered in Wilder’s children’s books and through her adult life with her husband Almanzo and their daughter, Rose. Using letters, diaries and the public record, she puts together a more complete historical portrait. I found Fraser’s dive into the U.S. government’s policies toward Indians, and her treatment of the economy of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries especially helpful.

The “Little House on the Prairie” series withstands the test of time. Perhaps most because it reminds readers of the grit that is baked into the character of people who call themselves Americans.

Book Review: The Women of Brewster Place

June 12, 2025 by kmerwin

Executive Director Jenny Emery Davidson recommends The Women of Brewster Place by Gloria Naylor.

A young woman leaned at the windowsill of her sixth-floor apartment. She looked at the traffic and the crowds along the street just beyond the dead-end one where her apartment stood. A pigeon flew past her, and “[s]he placed her dreams on the back of the bird and fantasized that it would glide forever in transparent silver circles until it ascended to the center of the universe and was swallowed up.”

It is language like this that makes me love Gloria Naylor’s work. In the span of a single sentence, she transforms a fleeting, forgettable moment into one that is transcendent. Throughout the novel The Women of Brewster Place, Gloria Naylor uses language with breathtaking elasticity to evoke the friction between the mundane grittiness of an urban apartment building and the poignant qualities of the people who live there.

The architecture of the novel is framed by Brewster Place itself: a housing development born of messy political negotiations that resulted in a gray apartment building on a dead-end street. It is a place that the city has pushed out of sight. But Naylor begins and ends the novel with Brewster Place, and it becomes mythic in the telling.

The novel focuses on seven Black women of different ages and backgrounds who all find themselves, for different reasons and with different expectations, living at Brewster Place. Each chapter opens the door on another character’s life, and the vastness of their experiences strains the walls of their Brewster Place apartments. These women are in turn reckless and silly and stubborn and sexy and proud and brave and humble and fearful and strong. They are mothers and teachers and widows and activists and lovers and sisters.

There is a loneliness to each of the characters, even as they are crowded among so many people in tight city quarters – and there are quiet but profound moments when they see each other’s loneliness, brush against it, and recognize the dreams that lie within it.

There is so much I love about this novel: how each woman’s story unfolds; how Brewster Place frames the novel as well as their lives; how the language changes how I see the world.

In some ways, The Women of Brewster Place reminds me of one of my other favorite novels, My Antonia by Willa Cather, though it is set decades later and in a city rather than the western plains. Both novels are anchored in a strong sense of place and tell the stories of female characters who are largely overlooked by the societies around them. Both novels show communities that teeter between being made and unmade, and they invite us to think of the individuals whose dreams are embroidered on those unraveling edges.

Note: The Women of Brewster Place is the pick for the Library’s Book Club to be held at 5:30 p.m. on August 6. More/register here.

Find The Women of Brewster Place in our collection here.

The Bald Mountain Hot Springs

June 6, 2025 by Liam Guthrie

Kristine Bretall, Wood River Museum Community Engagement Manager

A person dives off a diving board into a pool surrounded by people. — The Bald Mountain Hot Springs Lodge Pool, taken by Martyn Mallory. Jeanne Rodger Lane Center for Regional History (F 08069)

School’s out for summer! For many across the country, swimming only happened in the summer time, but here in Ketchum, Bald Mountain Hot Springs was a year-round fixture on the south end of Main Street in Ketchum from 1927 until the late 1990s. Hot springs were the very first tourist attraction in the Wood River Valley and in the late 1880s in Ketchum, near the Warm Springs base of Baldy, Guyer Hot Springs was built and featured a hotel, a spring fed hot pool, tennis courts and a bandstand. But by the early 1900s, the distance from town and time had taken their toll on the place, and entrepreneur Carl Brandt bought the hotel and springs in 1927.

Deciding that the future of the hot water lay in Ketchum, Brandt piped the hot water all along Warm Springs Road in wooden pipes to the corner of South Main and 1^st Streets, to create a hot springs pool right in town (where the Limelight Hotel is now located). Hired for the project was the renowned Boise-based architecture firm, Tourtellotte and Hummel, who in Boise designed the Idaho State House, the Egyptian Theater, the Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist, and Boise Junior High.

The original design for the hot springs pool and lodge included a covered pool, rustic looking tourist cabins, and an elaborate, luxury two-story hotel with an enormous stone fireplace. However, with the Crash of 1929, instead of the full plan coming to fruition, Brandt scaled the project and built the pool without the cover, but surrounded by a full rectangular building that contained offices and changing rooms, and surrounding the pool building in a three-sided “U”, was a one-story motor lodge catering to the growing number of tourists traveling in their own cars.

In 1935, Averell Harriman’s scout Count Felix von Schaffgotsch stayed here on his final stop of his search of Western states for the perfect place on the Union Pacific’s spur train lines to build a ski area. The hot springs pool flourished for decades and was a focal point of most kids’ youth in Ketchum. Kids learned to swim there, adults had parties and even “Aqua-Cades” in the 1950s and 1960s that featured synchronized swimming and diving, and a lot of clowning around.

By the late 1990s, however, the wooden pipes and other equipment was failing and the site was sold. The motor lodge was moved to a private hunting ranch in Hagerman in the early 2000s and the sign for Bald Mountain Hot Springs now hangs in lounge at the Limelight Hotel.

Note this story was originally published in June of 2025 in the Idaho Mountain Express.

Book Review: The Paris Novel

June 5, 2025 by kmerwin

Director of Philanthropy Carter Hedberg recommends The Paris Novel by Ruth Reichl.

Ruth Reichl’s The Paris Novel is an absolute delight! I found it to be a sumptuous, transportive journey through the City of Light and France, told through the eyes of Stella, a reserved and tightly-wound young woman. Her life begins to unfold after an unexpected inheritance from her mother: a one-way plane ticket to Paris and a note that simply reads, “Go to Paris.” What follows is a tender, layered story of self-discovery, sparked by the mystery of the model in Manet’s iconic painting, Olympia, and deepened through the new friendships Stella forms.

As I read, I found myself irresistibly drawn back to my own memories of Paris, savoring a café crème under the arcades of Place des Vosges, standing before Olympia for the first time in the Jeu de Paume, and becoming gleefully lost in the stacks of Shakespeare and Company. And, of course, discovering extraordinary food at every turn. Reichl captures the city’s essence with such richness and clarity that I often felt I was walking in step with Stella, experiencing Paris as she does, tentatively at first, then with increasing energy and appetite.

Reichl’s reverence for food, art, and the intoxicating thrill of adventure is found on every page. The Paris Novel is not simply about unlocking a painting’s secret, it’s about embracing a more expansive, more flavorful life…something that seems to unfold when visiting Paris.

Ruth Reichl will appear at The Community Library on Tuesday, July 22, in conversation with Jenny Emery Davidson, as part of the Community Speaker Series, presented in partnership with the Sun Valley Writers Conference. While in-person seating is full, the program will be livestreamed. More/register for the livestream link here.

Find The Paris Novel in our collection here.

Book Review: Walking with Peety

May 27, 2025 by kmerwin

Children’s Library Assistant Polly Hopkins recommends Walking with Peety: The Dog Who Saved my Life by Eric O’Grey.

There are few things that intrigue me more than dogs. I am just indelibly fascinated with them. I’m also fortunate enough to work with them almost daily. When my colleague, Kyla, recommended the book Walking with Peety in her recent newsletter article about dogs, I checked it out. I was not disappointed.

The story is an autobiographical account of the author’s remarkable transformation from being a severely obese and despondent man to a fit and flourishing individual.

O’Grey tells the story of how Peety, a sweet middle-aged mutt he was encouraged to adopt, sets him on a new path to freedom. Peety was also in poor physical and emotional health, and together they transitioned from merely existing to thriving by walking and altering their diets. The results unfolded gradually but were totally evident and worthwhile to O’Grey and those around him. He details his experiences with career swaps, relationships, the development of his cooking skills, home renovations, drug abuse …

… and Peety stands by, supports, and inspires him through it all.

This book resonated with me in multiple profound ways. I too grapple with addictive tendencies and was enthralled with the author’s commitment to change. It is an amazing testament to the notion that we can absolutely accomplish just about anything we set our minds to. It’s a genuinely captivating and heartwarming tale, and pretty easy reading. I’m also convinced it could potentially turn a non-dog lover into someone like me. Shout out to Kyla for the awesome recommendation!

Find Walking with Peety in our collection here.