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PRIEST RIVER – A century of books, learning, and community programs—Priest River Library turns 100 in 2026. From its humble beginnings in 1926 to its modern-day home, fully equipped with free Wi-Fi and welcoming spaces for the community, the library has grown alongside the people it serves. Come celebrate this important milestone Saturday, Oct. 3 during Priest River’s Oktoberfest. Festivities go from Noon to 5 p.m. in the library with lots of games and activities for the children, including a bookworm guessing contest (winner gets to take home a gallon of gummy worms), a ping pong toss contest (winners receive free books from Main Street Books), an art project to make a personalized bookmark (all materials provided) and, of course, birthday party hats and cupcakes.
The Friends will also be having their huge annual book sale in front of Main Street Books, next to the Library on Main Street. Thousands of books of all kinds will be available for purchase at $2 per bag. In addition to books, there are DVDs, CDs and audio books. There’s fiction, non-fiction, cookbooks, children and youth books, history, biographies, pet care, landscaping and more. Book store hours that day will be from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. All proceeds from Main Street Books sales go to the library’s needs.
As the library staff and Friends of the Library (FOL) volunteers plan the celebration, it also acknowledges the efforts of all the women who have helped through the years. Marie Duncan is one of those women. She has been involved with the library since 1965.
Duncan says that the first thing she did upon moving to Priest River in 1962 was to get a library card. She was working as the secretary to the bank manager on the corner of High Street and Main in the Beardmore Building. The Idaho First National bank required its employees to participate in one civic duty and Marie chose to help with the volunteer library. She was 25 years old.
“It was one of my best decisions,” she says, and she’s been volunteering ever since.
Duncan describes the first library, located in a small room in City Hall, as “little but efficient.” Rumor was that City Hall was built by the Work Progress Administration and was required to have a library in the building. Prior to the City Hall room, Priest River women were having the library “here and there” and wherever they could find free rent. One popular fundraiser was the annual cookbooks. Duncan still has two of these treasured cookbooks. The books contained local recipes for things like hard tack and picking a goose as well as stories of the times and local ads where the listed phone number was only four numbers.
“It was all women, and they were all volunteers,” Duncan says. She also remembers a bi-annual cleaning day where they took all the books off the library shelves and wiped down everything. Duncan shakes her head as she recalls the one room library as compared to the large facility today on Main Street. Even the name and the area served have changed: from Priest River to West Bonner County.
Duncan says that she has always loved libraries and books. She recalls crossing the border into Canada with her family right after WWII. Her mother who was born in Germany and did not drive did not have a driver’s license. They were not going to let her into Canada without an ID so she told the family to go without her and she would wait in the U.S. Then she produced her library card, and they let her through. Duncan feels that she has always had a special connection with libraries.
“As a child it was a special occasion to get to go to the library to get books,” she says. “I even remember the smell of the place.”
Duncan considers the library “a gem of the community.” The library has printers, copiers, computers, children’s programs, teen programs, cooking and sewing classes, crafts, community and cultural discussions. She also helps coordinate Book Talk, a book club free to the public that meets monthly since 2008. She says that if, “you join a book club, you end up reading things that you wouldn’t necessarily pick up.”
“It is a great way to get to know people and their backgrounds and beliefs,” Duncan says.
She is also a longstanding member of the West Bonner County Friends of the Library. The FOL is a non-profit group of dedicated volunteers that support library events and raise money through Main Street Books, the adjacent used bookstore and through the annual “Beer & Wine Tasting Auction.”
People can usually see Duncan on the first Saturday of each month at Main Street Books. In Duncan’s perspective, Main Street Books is a “labor of love for the library and the community.
“The library’s amazing administration and staff have been able to build on the backs of those early volunteers,” Duncan says. “Priest River is lucky to have such smart, dedicated women who still work, staff and volunteer at the library.”
