About Us

In 1936, in the midst of the Great Depression, the Sayre Public Library was established with 1,600 donated books and $300 provided by the Sayre Monday Club. The long-time, constant dream of the Monday Club was for a public library. Their first meetings in Coleman Memorial Parish House included an agreement to help support the Mary Packer Cummings Library already underway there. Club memberships were sold, and the resulting finances raised allowed for a public library to be opened in February 1937. The original space for this establishment was a storefront location on Lockhart St. in downtown Sayre. In 1938, a tax was established to support the young library, which was soon moved into the local American Legion building on South Elmer Avenue in downtown Sayre. This site would serve as the home for the Sayre Public Library for roughly 50 years. The support and advocacy of the Monday Club continued until the late 1980’s, when the Glaser Library Facility was built and opened on 122. South Elmer Avenue in the center of Sayre. Built with the generous and selfless financial assistance of Sidney Glaser, the facility was completed in 1988. It is the present and proud home of the library today.

The Sayre Public Library remains forever grateful to these community champions of the library.

Land Acknowledgement
Sayre Public Library respectfully acknowledges that we exist upon the ancestral and traditional land of the Onondowa’ga (Seneca), Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, Leni Lenape (Delaware), Haudenosaunee Confederacy (Iroquois), Susquehannock (Conestoga), and all of the ancestors whose names we no longer remember. We also recognize that the names given to the Native people who inhabited and continue to inhabit this region are not the names these people called and continue to call themselves. It is with humble gratitude that we give thanks to the Indigenous people who came before us and those with us today, for their reverence of our Mother Earth, which gives us life.