Allendale Artworks And Artifacts

09/03/2026

The Name Behind Our Name

Here's a fact that surprises a lot of people: Allendale isn't named after a founder, a family, or a landmark. It's named after a railroad engineer who passed through in the 1840s while surveying the new train line — and stayed just long enough that when the depot needed a name, his got worked into it.

Can you name this person?

One person, here for a short while, and 175+ years later we're all still saying his name every time we tell someone where we're from.
Allendale is full of small, surprising facts like this — the kind that make you look at your own town a little differently.

What's your favorite "wait, really?" fact about Allendale? Share it in the comments — let's build a great trivia thread.

09/02/2026

09/02/2026

Ask Before It's Too Late

Here's a challenge for you this week: call your parents, grandparents, or that neighbor who's lived here longer than anyone — and ask them one simple question: "What was Allendale like when you were young?"

You might hear about the old train depot, a summer at Crestwood Lake, a storm nobody who lived through it ever forgot, or a shop that doesn't exist anymore. You might hear something you've never heard before, even from someone you've known your whole life.

These conversations don't happen automatically — someone has to start them. This week, let that someone be you.

Come back and tell us what you learned. We'd genuinely love to hear it.

09/01/2026

Everyone's Got One 💛

Every longtime Allendale family has *that* story — the one that gets told every Thanksgiving. Maybe it's your grandmother talking about picking strawberries by hand for a penny a basket, back when half the town was still farmland. Maybe it's your dad describing the year Crestwood Lake froze solid enough to skate for weeks. Maybe it's simpler — just remembering what used to be in that storefront downtown before it became what it is now.

These stories don't live in any history book. They live in us — and they disappear the moment we stop telling them.

So we're asking: what's your Allendale story? 👇 Drop it in the comments, and tag a friend or family member who has a good one too.

09/01/2026

I am researching the history of Allendale's public libraries. I am looking for library cards, old library books, circulation cards, anything that identifies patron use of Lee Memorial Library or the Allendale Public Library. Photos are OK. all items are welcome. Thanks. Fred

08/30/2026

Meet Mary K. Lee — Allendale's librarian for over thirty years, and the reason the Lee Memorial Library carries the name it does today. This is her story, told largely in her own words.

"Why waste words?"

That's the entire final line of Mary K. Lee's 1950 annual report to the Allendale Library's Board of Trustees. She'd been filing essentially the same report every December for over 25 years. By 1950, she was done saying it politely.

A FOUNDER, NOT JUST A VOLUNTEER

Mary Lee's name is on the very first paperwork that created the Allendale Library Association back in April 1919 — she signed it "Mary K. Lee per Kate L. Harris." Her husband, William C. Lee, was right there with her, and stayed on the Board as Treasurer, Vice-President, and finally President for the rest of his life. Together they were the Library's two constants for 33 years, through five different presidents, two building projects, a Depression, and a World War.
Mary was named Librarian in the early 1920s and, except for brief periods when illness pulled her back, held the job — unpaid — until 1952.

SHE HELPED BUILD THE BUILDING

When the Association went looking for money to build a real library (the brick building that stood at Franklin Turnpike and Allendale Avenue for 50 years), Mary was in the middle of the fundraising. In April 1924 she ran a rummage sale that cleared $75 — and made sure the trustees earmarked every dollar of it for children's books. The new building opened for public inspection on December 18, 1926.

Seventeen years later, in June 1941, she and William didn't wait for a committee — they personally financed and donated an entire 20-by-30-foot wing onto the building. Ground was broken within days.

THE SAME COMPLAINT, YEAR AFTER YEAR

Almost as soon as the new building opened, a pattern set in. Every December, tucked between circulation numbers, came the same plea:

"Our Juvenile books are an utter disgrace." — 1932

"I can only reiterate, what I have said in my former reports that our Juvenile books (what we have) are a disgrace… I cannot ex
press to you, how very serious the situation regarding the reading matter for our young people seems to me." — 1933

Every single year she had to borrow books from Trenton's state library and from the bigger libraries in Paterson and Ridgewood just to keep up with what Allendale's readers and schoolchildren needed. By 1949 that had worn into something closer to shame:

"The high cost of books has made it very hard to meet all demands and I have been, at times, ashamed when applying to Ridgewood for help."

The Great Depression hit especially hard. Fewer families could afford library dues (2 cents a week for old books, 5 cents for new), so there was even less money for books. In 1935 she admitted she wasn't even sure why circulation had dropped so much — only that "I am sorry not to be able to hand in a better report for 1935."

SHE PUT HER OWN MONEY WHERE HER WORDS WERE

This is the part that gets us: Mary Lee didn't just ask the town for help. She quietly subsidized the gap herself, for THIRTY YEARS:
— $75 from a 1924 rummage sale, steered to juvenile books
— Books donated so regularly the minutes just note "the gift of Mrs. Lee," year after year, without further comment
— $20 toward book purchases, 1931
— A $50 book donation, 1946
— A personal $35 check to the Library, 1950
— And in 1952, in her late 70s, $40 emptied out of what the secretary recorded — almost tenderly — as "her personal Library dime bank"

"THIS LIBRARY MUST BE MUNICIPALLY OWNED"

By the mid-1940s her reports stop just describing the problem and start naming the fix. November 1944, typed and underlined for emphasis in the original:

"This report I consider very encouraging, but I do not think we can expect anything much better as long as we remain a private corporation… This Library must be municipally owned, if it is to go forward."

A year later, it reads less like a librarian's summary and more like a call to arms — the most pointed thing she wrote in three decades:
"Are we to continue, in our calm complacent way, to slip a little each year as time goes by, when we had such a brilliant second start twenty years ago? As a board we must wake up, and arouse the people, to demand a municipally run organization…. Won't you think this over."

She kept making the case for another five years. By 1950 she was tired enough to

THE TOWN FINALLY SAYS YES

William Lee died July 21, 1952, at 87 — on his and Mary's wedding anniversary, after 52 years of marriage. He'd only recently retired, in 1939, as Vice President of the United States Trust Company after 45 years there.

With her closest partner gone, Mary announced her own retirement as Librarian. The Board — down its two founding pillars at once — formally asked the Borough to take the Library over. On November 4, 1952, Allendale voters agreed, 876 to 223. It was exactly what Mary had been telling them to do since at least 1944.

A month later, on December 8, 1952, the Board voted unanimously to rename the institution in William's memory: The Lee Memorial Library. Mary herself was honored separately and just as deliberately — the new borough-run Board's very first official act, at its first meeting on January 6, 1953, was to name her honorary advisor to the Board for life. On March 13, 1953, her stepson Schuyler unveiled a bronze plaque inside the building recognizing her own thirty years of service.

The Allendale Library Association held its very last meeting on January 5, 1953, and handed the keys, the building, and the books over to Mayor John L. Tucker.

HER LAST GIFT

Mary Kirkpatrick Lee — born in Tennessee, an Allendale resident for 51 years — died November 16, 1955, at age 82. She left the Library a trust fund in her will.

Decades later, after Schuyler's death in 1973, that trust became the financial backbone for the much larger Lee Memorial Library building we still use today on West Crescent Avenue, dedicated in 1979.

WHY THIS MATTERS

The library was renamed for William in 1952. But read thirty years of Mary Lee's own annual reports and it's hard to see the two of them as separable — she ran the place, filled its gaps with her own money, and told the town for a decade exactly what it needed to do. The Board that took over in 1953 seemed to understand that:
their first act was to make sure her name stayed attached to the institution too, for life.

WE WANT TO HEAR FROM YOU

Did your family know William and Mary Lee, or check out books from Mary during her thirty years behind the desk? Do you remember the old brick library at Franklin Turnpike and Allendale Avenue before it moved? Are you related to the Lees, to their family, or to any of the other names in these records — the
Buechners, Zabriskies, Critchleys, Jacksons, Sprague, Colburn, Geismar, Husing, Morrison? Share your memories, family stories, or old photos in the comments — help us fill in what the minute books can't tell us.

08/29/2026

It started with a cardboard box of borrowed books. It ended with the library on your corner.

Prepared by Fred Litt, author, Images of America: Allendale. The attached photo, circa the late 1920s, is of the original library building on the corner of Franklin Turnpike and West Allendale Avenue. If you look closely, the first displayed name was Allendale Library.

December 1900: five Allendale women — Mrs. Walter Spring, Mrs. Stephen Van Houten, Mrs. Wallace Carver, Mrs. Frank Merrill, and Mrs. Frank Drummond — decided the town needed a library. New Jersey shipped them a "traveling library": about 600 books on loan, to be swapped for a fresh case once everyone had read them.

The Ramsey Journal wrote it up that same month: "The women in charge of this new work hope to make it a good library in time."

They had no building, no budget, and no idea they were starting something that would take 26 years to finish.

A library on wheels. For the next two decades, Allendale's library didn't have a real home — it drifted from the old schoolhouse (where the police station stands today), to a store at Erie Plaza, to the upstairs of the firehouse, to a rented room in the Braun Building. Every move meant repacking the books and starting the hours over from scratch. It was open only in summer, for the seasonal boarders who filled Allendale's guest houses each year.

1919: getting serious. The volunteers finally organized themselves into the Allendale Library Association, with real trustees and real bylaws. And they did something almost accidentally wise: they set aside $104.40 in a "Building Fund" and left it untouched — a small stubborn seed of money waiting for a building that didn't exist yet.

Almost a war memorial. After WWI, there was serious talk of building the library as a memorial to Allendale's soldiers — Mayor O.O. Clark even pictured a cobblestone building with a bronze tablet. On Thanksgiving Day, 1922, town leaders sat down with brothers William and John Mallinson and struck a deal for the corner lot at Franklin Turnpike and Allendale Avenue — the same lot this same building sits on today. The memorial idea eventually fell through on a legal technicality, so Allendale built its war memorial in Memorial Park instead and built the library on its own merits.

Knocking on doors. To buy that land and legally hold it, the Association needed real members. A small committee — including a young William C. Lee, decades before the library would carry his name — went door to door across town with a simple pitch: a dollar to join, and a promise that "the new trustees will be charged with the duty of erecting and financing the new library building." 189 Allendale families signed up.

Three years of bake sales, benefit plays, and pledges. Dr. Percy Fisher of Ridgewood led the fundraising drive, carving the whole town into zones with a trustee captaining each one. Rummage sales. Card parties. Benefit performances by the Allendale Players. Slowly, stubbornly, the money came in.

Built by a local hand. The design came from Allendale's own architect, William Dewsnap — the same man who designed the firehouse and the Church of the Epiphany's parish house. Colonial-style, red brick, deliberately built so wings could be added later. The contractor's bid came in at $8,125; the town borrowed $5,000 from the First National Bank of Allendale to help close the gap.

December 18, 1926. Twenty-six years after that first box of borrowed books, Allendale's library opened its doors for a public reception — 3 to 5 in the afternoon, 8 to 10 that night. One resident, years later, put it simply: "Something about the appearance of that delightful little library building induced us to settle here."

That first library — later renamed for William Lee — stood on that corner until 1979.

Why this matters: Allendale's library didn't start with a big gift or a grand plan. It started with five women, a borrowed box of books, and a stubborn belief that a small town deserved one anyway. It took a quarter-century of door-knocking, bake sales, and one very patient $104.40 building fund — and it worked. That's not just library history. That's how this town has always gotten things built.

We want to hear from you. Did your family live in Allendale before 1926? Any of these names in your tree — Spring, Van Houten, Carver, Merrill, Drummond, Talman, Tomalin, Dewsnap, Mallinson, Lee? Do you remember a parent or grandparent talking about the original little library on Franklin Turnpike — checking out books there, attending a benefit play, maybe even signing up as one of the 189 founding members?

If you have a photo of that first building or a story passed down about it, please share it in the comments. We'd love to add your stories to the history of Allendale

08/29/2026

The Family That Kept the Library Alive

How the Lees' Generosity Led to a Borough-Wide Vote in 1952

Prepared by Fred Litt, author of Images of America: Allendale. The attached 1946 photo shows William and Mary Lee in the addition to the library they had personally funded when the library was on Franklin Turnpike.

On July 21, 1952, William C. Lee died. To most people in Allendale, he was just an older gentleman who had lived in town a long time. But to Allendale's little public library, he was something much bigger: the man who had quietly kept it alive for more than twenty-five years. His death set off a chain of events that, in just a few months, turned a struggling private library into the Lee Memorial Library we know today — and it happened only because the whole borough got to vote on it.

A Library That Ran on One Family's Generosity

Long before 1952, Allendale already had a library. It sat at the corner of Franklin Turnpike and Allendale Avenue, and it was run by a small group of volunteers called the Allendale Library Association. William Lee and his wife, Mary, were at the center of almost everything the library did. William served as the board's treasurer and later its president. Mary was the librarian — unpaid — for more than twenty years.

William Lee was not just a library man. His obituary describes him as vice president of a New York trust company for forty-five years, a serious stamp collector, and the church organist in Allendale for twenty-eight years. He and Mary also collected antiques together. But of everything he did, the newspaper said, it was the library that got his “greatest contribution in time, money and devotion.”
The Lees didn't just volunteer their time. They gave money, again and again, whenever the library came up short, which was often. One old meeting record from 1932 simply says the board gave “a vote of thanks… to Mr. & Mrs Lee for the splendid Christmas gift to the book account.” That kind of quiet giving happened over and over for twenty years.

Their biggest gift came in 1941. That June, William and Mary offered to pay for an entire new wing on the library building, adding a room about 70 feet by 30 feet. The board happily accepted, giving the Lees “a standing vote of thanks.” A newspaper article at the time explained that the new wing matched the library's original building plan — and that Mary had already been the town's librarian for twenty years by then. William's obituary later added a sweet detail: he had the new wing dedicated to Mary herself.

Mary Lee Saw the Problem Coming

Even while the Lees kept giving, Mary Lee understood that a library run on Christmas gifts and two-cent lending fees could not last forever. In her 1944 report to the board, she wrote plainly: “This Library must be municipally owned if it is to go forward.” In other words: the borough needed to take it over.

Two years later, in 1946, she said it again, even more directly: “As a board we must wake up, and arouse the people, to demand a municipally run organization.” For years, nobody acted on her warning.

Then, in June 1952, she said it a third time — not in a private board report this time, but out loud, to a newspaper reporter. In a feature story about the Lees, published seven weeks before William's death, Mary told the Sunday News plainly: “I think it's time the Lees stepped out.” She said the library needed to be open more hours than she and William could keep managing, and that Allendale was “probably the only community in this vicinity” where the library still wasn't run by the town. She had already made up her mind. It just took a crisis to finally make it happen.

The Crisis: William Lee's Death

That crisis arrived in July 1952. William Lee died at 87, following a brief illness. Just nine days later, the library's board called an emergency meeting. They had two problems at once: their longtime leader was gone, and the man who had been filling in as acting president announced he was moving out of town, too.
The board elected new officers quickly. Then they faced the real question, with Allendale's mayor sitting right there listening. The board's own notes from that meeting spell out just two choices, plain and simple: turn the library over to the town, or close it for good.

Asking the Borough for Help

The board didn't wait around. At their very next meeting, on September 2, 1952, they voted to ask the Borough of Allendale to take over the library and run it as a free public library. The next day, the board's secretary sent a letter to the Mayor and Council laying out exactly what it would cost to keep the library running — about $690 a year for heat, light, insurance, books, and a janitor — plus a debt of $1,284.59 still owed on the building.
A state library expert, Mrs. Janet McKinley, came to Allendale to meet with the board. She told them the library's problem was common across New Jersey small towns: it just wasn't open enough hours for people to use it, and it needed more books to get people interested again.

Why the Whole Borough Had to Vote

Here's the part that makes this story about more than one family's kindness: under New Jersey law at the time, a borough couldn't just decide on its own to take over a library. The law required a public vote — a referendum — asking the actual citizens of Allendale to approve it.

So the question went on the ballot for the November 4, 1952 election: “Shall a free public library be established in Allendale?” The local newspaper explained what a “yes” would actually mean: the library would come under state supervision as an official Free Public Library, and — as a former mayor pointed out — it would cost more to run with paid staff than it ever had with volunteers alone. All fall, library trustees and volunteers campaigned anyway for a “yes” vote. They put up posters at the post office and in front of the library. They handed out flyers. They had volunteers knock on doors and call voters the week before Election Day.

One flyer that survives from that campaign spelled it out for voters in blunt terms: a “no” vote would close the library for good, while a “yes” vote would give Allendale a library “of which the town may well be proud at a very small cost to the taxpayer.” It even did the math — the extra cost per person would add up to less than one mill on the dollar of a home's value.

On Election Day, Allendale voters said yes — and not by a little. The final count was 893 in favor and 223 against, more than four votes to one.

A New Name for a New Library

The library's own board didn't wait for the town's paperwork to catch up. At their meeting on December 8, 1952, they voted, unanimously, to rename the library. It would no longer be called simply “The Allendale Library.” From then on, it would be The Lee Memorial Library — named for the man whose death had finally pushed theborough to act, and whose family had kept the library going for a generation before that.

The handover took a little longer to finish. Allendale's new mayor, John Tucker, told the board he couldn't officially complete the takeover until he had appointed new trustees and filed the right paperwork — probably by February. In the meantime, he asked the old library's volunteer staff to keep the doors open.
On January 5, 1953, the Allendale Library Association's board met for the very last time. Its treasurer gave a final report on the money, and its president then simply “turned the meeting over to Mayor John Tucker.” Just like that, more than thirty years of volunteer-run library history came to a close.

The Same Faces, a New Job

The very next day, the Borough Council officially appointed the library's first municipal board of trustees. And here's a detail worth noticing: most of the new trustees weren't new at all. Mrs. David M. Colburn, Miss Ruth Morrison, Mrs. George De Block, and Martin Husing had all been trustees of the old, private Library Association. Ruth Morrison had even been the board's last secretary — the one who wrote the letter asking the town for help in the first place.
Nothing about the library's people really changed. What changed was that, for the first time, they had the whole town's support behind them — tax dollars instead of Christmas gifts.
Hilda Sprague became the library's first paid librarian, and Mary Lee, who had worked for free for more than two decades, was named the library's honorary advisor for life.

A Plaque, and a Son Standing In

The new library held its first open house on March 13, 1953. The big moment of the night was the unveiling of a bronze plaque honoring William Lee. Everyone hoped Mary Lee would be there to see it — but she could not make it. Instead, it was the Lees' son, Schuyler, who unveiled his father's plaque, standing in for his mother. Even so, Mary Lee's generosity was still on the shelves that night: a new book on display had been donated in her name.
Mary Lee died three years later, in November 1955, having lived just long enough to see the library she had begged the town to save standing firmly on its own two feet.

Why This Story Matters

The Lee Memorial Library exists today because one family gave, quietly, for a generation — and because when that family could no longer carry the whole load alone, the people of Allendale stepped up and voted to carry it together. It's a small-town story, but it's also a story about how a library, or almost any public institution, survives: not through one person's generosity forever, but through a community deciding, together, that something is worth keeping.

08/29/2026

William and Mary Lee were the most significant benefactors in the history of the original Allendale Public Library. I am looking for Allendale residents of yesteryear that knew either of them and belonged to the library before it became the Lee Memorial Library at the end of 1952.

08/28/2026

If you joined the Allendale Public Library before 1968, this is the cover of the library patron registration book where your name, address, and library card number were registered. Do you remember this book? Do you have your library card? When did you join the library? Did you ever visit the library before 1968 with your parents or grandparents?