Putnam Family Library — Belpre Farmers' Library

The Belpre Farmers' Library, established in seventeen ninety-six, holds the distinction of being one of the earliest circulating libraries in the Northwest Territory. Its founding collection is said to have grown in part from books tied to the Putnam family, including General Israel Putnam, the Revolutionary War hero, who had been a shareholder of the United Library Association in Pomfret, Connecticut. When settlers from New England pushed west into the Ohio frontier, they brought that reading culture with them.

The library was organized by the Belpre settlement as a subscription service, pooling books among farming families who had little else to read on the frontier. This marker recognizes that impulse to carry learning into the wilderness, a tradition that eventually seeded public libraries across the American Midwest.