Overview
The Westerly Library rose in 1894 as the Memorial and Library Association's monument to the town's Civil War generation — a Richardsonian pile of local granite whose halls have grown with the town — above Wilcox Park, the eighteen-acre green designed by the Olmsted firm's Warren Manning, a strolling landscape of specimen trees, pond and monuments that makes the ensemble southern Rhode Island's civic heart. Its telling is soft-spoken: library staff and patrons describe footsteps in the stacks after closing, books found displaced, a lady in long dress on the mezzanine and stair, lights misbehaving in the older halls, and — from the park — figures in old-fashioned dress at dusk along the paths and near the monuments, accounts local ghost walks collect without documentation. The building is a working library and the park a town commons: visits mean opening hours and ordinary courtesy. Present the ensemble as Gilded Age civic heritage first — memorial, granite and Olmsted green — with its telling the lightest of seasonings.