Newport News Public Library: A Shipyard City's First Books
Near Norfolk Va Beach, Virginia
The West Avenue Library in Newport News is a modest but telling building, a Colonial Revival structure completed in nineteen twenty-nine at the corner of West Avenue and Thirtieth Street. It was the first building ever constructed in Newport News for the express purpose of housing a public library, a fact that says something about how recently and how rapidly this city came into being.
Newport News as a city barely existed before the eighteen eighties. It was Collis Huntington's railroad terminus and shipyard that conjured it into being, and a working-class industrial city focused on building and launching ships had different civic priorities than a university town or a state capital. The first library association appeared in eighteen ninety-one, run by a group of young business professionals who kept books in a borrowed office. For decades, public reading depended on subscriptions and donations.
When the Newport News Shipyard agreed in nineteen fourteen to donate twenty dollars a month to the library association, it was a minor but symbolic gesture: the company that had built the city was investing in its mind as well as its docks. The library building itself arrived fifteen years later, designed by Charles Morrison Robinson in a restrained Colonial Revival style that suited a Virginia city trying to anchor itself to older traditions.
What the building's quiet exterior does not announce is its role in the city's civil rights history. In nineteen fifty-two, the Newport News Public Library became one of the first public establishments in the city to integrate, opening its doors to African American patrons. For a Virginia city in the early years of the civil rights movement, that was not a small step.
The building was listed on the Virginia Landmarks Register and the National Register of Historic Places in two thousand five, recognized as much for its social history as for its architecture.
