The founding decade's firsts, and the county-name turn of 1990

1873–1994 · the system's own published history, read whole

The system was founded the way its branch map still suggests — in reading rooms and school-board resolutions, decades before it was a county's — and the name "county" arrived only in 1990, the same year it reached Lakeville. The system's own history page carries the course, and this article digs it to the depth the checklist asks. 1873: a reading room on Michigan Street, the South Bend Library and Reading Room Association. 1888: the Board of Education's resolution takes the library public. 1889: Evelyn Humphreys is appointed the first Head Librarian — she serves to 1903 — and the library opens on the fourth floor of the Oliver Opera House. 1894: the borrower's card, one book for one week, renewable once — the founding decade's whole circulation policy in a line. 1896: "the Castle," the system's first purpose-built home, rises at 304 South Main Street. The succession the banked file already carries runs on from there — Virginia M. Tutt from 1903, Ethel Baker from 1927, Roger B. Francis from 1952, Donald Napoli from 1977, Debra Futa from 2015, Stephanie Murphy from July 2022 — with its firsts spaced along it: River Park, the first branch, in 1920; the first Bookmobile in 1953 (the banked file prints a conflict with 1959 whole, and it is not re-merged here); the Castle demolished in 1958 and the Betty Ruth Spiro Memorial Library in 1960; the first computer system in 1982–83, among Indiana's first; four branch buildings in a single November, 1983. Then the turn the checklist names: in December 1990 the Lakeville Branch opens at Lakeville High School, and in 1990 the South Bend Public Library is officially renamed the St. Joseph County Public Library — a name that finally matched the district the state library's guide now prints, eight townships by tax — with the new Main Library dedicated in 1992 at 304 South Main, and the system in 1994 the first library in the nation, and second in the world, on the World Wide Web. What the system's own history does not carry, the residue states: it names no founding-decade departments — no cataloguing, circulation or children's department stands in the founding record at this strength — and the department-level firsts of the system's growth stand owed to the system annual reports at LFH, named current in this lane's accounting. The narrative founding, the heads, the buildings and the name-turn now stand dug; the departmental structure beneath them remains the LFH residue.