Seeds of knowledge seek new homes as library closes

PORTSMOUTH

For half a century, the William Collins Hill Memorial Horticultural Library was tucked in the corner of a building at 364 Peninsula Ave. like a secret garden.

Come Thursday, its doors will open to the public to sell its inventory of about 2,000 books. Then the one-room library that served as a haven for gardeners and garden club members will close for good.

And the legacy of the Hill family will start a new chapter under the umbrella of the Portsmouth Community Foundation.

The six siblings that made up the last generation of the prominent Olde Towne family were known as avid gardeners in a time when clubs were forming all over the country to promote horticultural knowledge and community beautification.

In 1954, the Hill sisters established the library with about 240 books. They named it to honor their only brother, a Spanish-American War veteran who died in 1934.

Although they lived in Olde Towne, Evelyn and Elizabeth Hill were honorary members of the West Park View Garden Club, founded by their friend Lelia Triplett.

In 1945, Triplett, known locally as the "mother of garden clubs," began a fund raising campaign for a War Memorial Building to honor the local men and women who had served during World War II. The women decided that the horticultural library would go there.

The building was finally completed after several years. It has since been sold to the Ambassador Club. The library has remained there all these years, although it closed for several years in the 1960s.

Evelyn Hill, the last of the six siblings, died in 1965, but not before she and her sisters had decided to sow some seeds that would survive them.

Their four-story English basement-style home on North Street, built in the early 1800s, was left to the Portsmouth Historical Association and has long been open for tours.

And an $80,000 endowment was left for the support and improvement of the horticultural library.

Blanche Taylor was the librarian there for years and oversaw a library that was a meeting place and resource for garden clubs.

As Taylor got older and started to cut her hours, her daughter-in-law, Linda, stepped in. Linda Taylor remembers she would see an average of 10 people or so a day. Then they became fewer.

It was a quiet place to work, Taylor said. At one time a quilting club would meet there. Some of its members moved on and the quilting club became a book club, she said.

As more and more women joined the work world, the rosters of garden clubs declined.

The decision to close may have been inevitable, but it did not come easy, according to Betty Jean McMurran, the library's trustee president.

She said there are not as many garden clubs today and the Internet has taken over as a source of horticultural information. A bank that served as one of the three trustees felt it was best to dissolve the library, she said.

So the trustees decided to use the endowment to set up a William Collins Hill Memorial Fund through the Portsmouth Community Foundation.

Last week, McMurran and trustee Ellen Upton were at the library preparing for the sale.

They had already offered the city library and a few community groups a chance to go through the inventory.

Sue Burton, city library director, said she looked for books that had local interest. They will go in the downtown library's local history room along with a portrait of Hill. Its American flag will be displayed in the entrance of the new Churchland Library, Burton said.

Proceeds from the sale will be added to the endowment fund that will now be administered by the community foundation.

McMurran said their hope is that it will grow again and can be used for projects that carry on the spirit of the Hills. Maybe park beautification or horticultural scholarships, she said.

"We really have wrestled with this thing for a lot of months," McMurran said. "And this is what we've come up with that we think is the best way to honor this family."

Janie Bryant, (757) 446-2453, janie.bryant@pilotonline.com