The Bailey Library: Oilcloth Money, Granite Walls

The library standing in Winthrop is a monument to a particular kind of American philanthropy: a successful manufacturer, grateful to his town, spending money on something that would outlast him by a century.

Charles M. Bailey owned one of the largest oilcloth factories in the country. Oilcloth, a waterproofed fabric used for tablecloths, floor coverings, and protective clothing, was in strong demand in the early twentieth century, and Bailey's Winthrop operation employed roughly two hundred people at its peak. He was the kind of industrialist who viewed the success of his business as inseparable from the health of the community that made it possible.

In November of nineteen sixteen, Bailey entered into a formal agreement with the Town of Winthrop to donate a new library building for use as a public reading room and community resource. The building opened to the public on December second of the same year, just weeks after the agreement was signed. Speed was intentional.

The design came from one of Maine's most distinguished architects, John Calvin Stevens, working with his son John Howard Stevens. Stevens had built his reputation on shingle-style houses and civic buildings that balanced regional character with architectural refinement. For Winthrop he produced a structure of rough-faced and chiseled granite, solid and restrained, the kind of building that announces civic confidence without grandstanding. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen eighty-five.

Before Bailey's gift, Winthrop had a public library operating since eighteen eighty-nine out of rented commercial space, holding just over thirteen hundred volumes. The granite building changed that permanently. It gave the town a dedicated home for its reading public that has remained in continuous operation for more than a century.

The legacy of industrial wealth spent on community institutions rather than private monuments is one of the recurring stories of small-town New England, and the Bailey Library is a well-preserved example of it.