Haven Community Library

Haven Community Library began as Ruth McCausland’s practical act of preservation: she rescued usable books from the Methodist parsonage and made a public library in the building. Its story is inseparable from her work and from the local history the books, building, and community helped hold together. In a town named and renamed across generations, the library became one of Ruth’s most enduring forms of service to Haven.

Founding and Collection

The library’s collection came from books that had accumulated in the Methodist parsonage over many years. Some were Detective Book Club titles and Reader’s Digest Condensed Books, with a clear smell of mold when opened; others had swollen to the size of telephone books after the parsonage pipes burst in 1947. Many, however, remained in surprisingly good condition. Ruth sorted through them patiently, keeping the sound books, selling those beyond use for repulping, and discarding only volumes that could not be salvaged.

This work began without a ready-made library space or a paid staff. Ruth sat on the parsonage’s cold floor, bundled in one of Ralph McCausland’s old red-checked hunting jackets, and worked through boxes of books until her hands went numb. The details make the library’s origin more than an administrative founding: it emerged from the physical labor of judging what could be saved and giving those books another life in public use.

Opening and Public Recognition

Haven Community Library officially opened in the repainted and refurbished Methodist parsonage in December 1968. Ruth served as its volunteer librarian and remained in the post until 1973. On the day she retired, the trustees hung her photograph over the mantel in the reading room. She protested at first, then accepted the honor when she understood that the trustees meant to recognize her and that she could not dissuade them.

The recognition extended beyond the photograph. In 1972, the library Ruth had begun single-handedly was voted Maine’s Small Town Library of the Year. That distinction arrived during a period of profound personal grief: Ralph died that October, two days short of his thirty-seventh birthday, after doctors discovered a brain tumor. The public honor could not erase her loss, and she took little pleasure in much of anything in 1972 and 1973. The award nevertheless recorded, in public terms, the value of the institution she had built before her retirement.

Ruth’s Continuing Service to Haven

The library was one part of Ruth’s wide-ranging civic life. She also served the Cancer Society and the New England Conference of Small Towns, took an active role in the Methodist church, and served on the school board and textbook committee. Church suppers regularly featured one of her casseroles, while bake sales might include her pie or raisin bread. The range of these commitments helps explain why people wondered how she managed everything; Ruth answered that she believed busy hands were happy hands.

Ruth’s service to the library also stood within a longer relationship to the town. In the years after she and Ralph had discussed adopting a child, she performed a kind of adoption of her own by taking Haven into her care. The library gives this idea a concrete form: rather than simply inheriting a civic institution, she assembled one from the books already at hand, then sustained it through years of volunteer work. Her care was both local and material, expressed through the salvaged volumes and the reading room in which her photograph eventually hung.

Books, Memory, and Local History

The library’s founding parallels the way Haven’s past survives: in accumulated traces that must be sorted, interpreted, and sometimes questioned. The town itself had several earlier names. In its first municipal form, it was Montville Plantation, established in 1816 and owned by Hugh Crane, a Revolutionary War lieutenant who had purchased the land in 1813. The name mocked his father, the twelfth Earl of Montville, who disinherited Hugh after the Revolution; Hugh cheerfully styled himself the first earl of Central Maine or the Duke of Nowhere at All.

Another episode in the town’s remembered past centered on the revival preacher Colson, who arrived in Ilium in 1900 and drew much of the Christian population to his lively preaching. A year marked by abundant harvests gave particular force to the revival’s promises, but Colson eventually used its final gathering to solicit the largest offering of his stay and then sexually assaulted six young women behind the tent. He folded the tent and left town during the night of September 7. Talk of changing Ilium’s name to Haven began the following day, though the formal town-meeting vote came later. Such histories show that a community’s memory is not simply a record of civic milestones: it holds contradiction, scandal, and the stories by which residents explain the place they share.

That work of memory becomes urgent when Haven’s present turns dangerous. Ev Hillman, thinking of himself as the town’s memory, bought a Maine Atlas at a Derry bookstore and used its map of the state to circle the township of Haven—not merely Haven Village, which lay at the edge of the township. His act of marking a boundary belongs to a larger effort to understand the town and its history. The library’s salvaged books offer a quieter counterpart: both map and collection make knowledge tangible, but each requires careful attention to what is included, what is damaged, and what has been left out.