Boulder City Magazine is a monthly publication full of information about Boulder City and Southern Nevada. Boulder City Magazine features the Boulder City Home Guide, a real estate guide to Boulder City and Southern Nevada.




Boulder City History
by Dennis McBride, Boulder City Museum & Historical Association

Boulder City Libraries
Boulder City has always taken pride in its public library, which this year celebrates its 73rd anniversary. But the Boulder City Public Library wasn’t our first library, nor was it the only library in town for many years.

Boulder City’s first library was established by the American Legion in the Six Companies hospital in January 1932. Dr. Wales Haas, hospital administrator, oversaw the collection of books and a hand-made case to store them.

On April 11, 1932 Virginia McCormick opened a circulating library in the Nava-Hopi Trading Post in the Terminal Building—where the Chamber of Commerce building stands now. For a small daily fee Boulder citizens could rent such best-sellers as God’s Little Acre; and Goodbye, Mr. Chips.

In July that year, the Legion Auxiliary established the town’s first public library, oriented toward the city’s children. The Marbus Browder Memorial Library, named for the son of businesswoman Ida Browder who died of meningitis on June 25, 1932, was housed in the American Legion building on the corner of Wyoming Street and Nevada Way.

In January 1933, the Bureau of Reclamation established a bonafide public library in Boulder City with an initial 3,000 volumes from the Library of Congress. The Legion Auxiliary donated the Marbus Browder Memorial Library to the city’s seventh grade, where it became the seed for the Boulder City school library. The city’s new public library was housed in a cramped basement room of the Municipal Building [today’s police station] and staffed with volunteers.

There were a number of other libraries in Boulder City in the 1930s and ‘40s. When the Civilian Conservation Corps was established in Boulder City in 1935, camp commanders opened a library for the CCC boys. Camp Williston, the military police training camp which stood just south of town, had a large, well-stocked library for the men stationed there. The Bureau of Reclamation, the Bureau of Mines, and Hoover Dam all had extensive technical libraries.

It wasn’t until 1958 that the Boulder City Public Library got to expand and move upstairs in the Municipal Building where the post office once was; the post office itself moved next door to what is now the new credit union parking lot. The library didn’t get its own facility until 1982 when a new building was constructed in the park in Coronado Plaza across from the Boulder Dam Credit Union—which is where the Senior Center of Boulder City is now housed.

Finally, in 1999 the city passed a bond issue which raised money to build a new library on the grounds of the former Southern Nevada Children’s Home at Adams Boulevard and Avenue G. The new library, whose 48,500 square feet of floor space was a long way from the tiny basement room where it all began, opened on March 18, 2002.

Sponsored by the Boulder City/Hoover Dam Museum.



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