Here at 67 Haywood Street rises Pack Memorial Library, main branch of the Buncombe County Public Library System. Listen for the story in the stones: this place began with the Asheville Reading Club, where Anna C. Aston, Fannie Patton, and Annie Chunn started collecting books in 1876. That energy became the Asheville Library Association on January 25, 1879, and a subscription library followed.
In March 1894 the collection moved to Church and Aston Streets—about 2,000 books then, and a yearly subscription fee of $2.00. A turning point came in 1899, when George Willis Pack donated a building to the Asheville Library Board for the Asheville Public Library; in time the institution would bear his name as Pack Memorial Library. On January 2, 1919 the library ended subscription service and became a free public library.
The original Pack building was replaced by a new building designed by Edward Tilton, which opened on July 9, 1926, with a collection of 18,500 volumes. Picture the readers who once passed through those doors, then follow the façade toward Haywood Street, where downtown Asheville carries on its daily business.