The town of DeFuniak Springs is the kind of Old Florida community you might expect in a Southern gothic novel, with its sprawling oak canopy and the mysterious DeFuniak Lake, which on a map looks like a nearly perfect circle. Just along the lake’s edge stands a clapboard building with a red door that resembles a small chapel or schoolhouse. You can immediately tell the Walton-DeFuniak Library, which opened in 1887 and is the oldest continuously operated library in the state, is full of stories.
The little whistlestop town, located an hour northeast of Destin in Florida’s panhandle, sprang up after the arrival of the Pensacola and Atlantic Railroad. Members of New York’s Chautauqua Institution, an arts and education organization, eyed the town as a spot to hold meetings in the warmer climate and established a resort campus there in 1885. By the next year, a local group of women, the Ladies Library Association, raised $580 and founded the Walton County library’s DeFuniak Springs branch for both its residents and seasonal visitors.
DeFuniak Lake.
These days you don’t need a library card to check out the inside, which seems to stretch like the inside of Mary Poppins’s bag. Originally built at just 387 square feet, it has since been expanded and sits at a tidy 3,000 square feet.
Inside you’ll find a few cabinets with special copies of books, including a signed first edition of To Kill a Mockingbird that was in circulation until 2001. “It was donated to us in the 1980s by Ms. Harper Lee,” says Barb Hughes, DeFuniak branch manager. “Ms. Lee wanted to see the library, but she and the librarian, Ms. Marilyn Coe, kept missing each other due to scheduling conflicts. One day Ms. Coe came in, and there was a note slipped under the door, written on an envelope: ‘Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, Harper Lee.’”
A signed first edition of To Kill a Mockingbird.
A table holds a selection of the titles banned by Florida school systems, which are offered for checkout. (To Kill a Mockingbird, still one of the nation’s “most challenged” books, sits alongside titles by Margaret Atwood and Sherman Alexie.) Those who have a local library card can also check out DVDs, puzzles, and even microscopes, telescopes, and sewing machines.
Other gems include a rare Regina Model 27 music box and the Wallace Bruce Collection of antique armor and weaponry, named for a local who served as an ambassador to Scotland in the late nineteenth century and then later as president of the Chautauqua Institution. Bruce’s collection was donated to a since-shuttered college before finding a home at the library in the 1930s. Today, his pieces of medieval armor peer out from above the packed shelves.
Beyond these treasures, the Walton-DeFuniak Library is still a traditional community hub buzzing with computers, copiers, and children playing with puzzles and board games in the kids’ area. Outside, a ferny greenspace installed by the local garden club offers shady reading spots beneath a 134-year-old live oak that’s watched generations come and go beneath its branches.
