Montgomery County Library, 1827

This ledger, stored in the CDPL archives, gives us an inside view of the Montgomery County Library – in 1827! The fee for an annual membership at that time was was 75 cents, and members included Benjamin Ristine and Isaac C. Elston,  founder of Elston Bank, who bought the site of Lafayette, Indiana, for $240 in 1825 with his business partners. The detail page shows I. C. Elston was charged a fifty-cent fine in 1827 for “an injury to book.”   Another line of the ledger (not shown) for 1828 shows a subscriber by the name of John Beard, for whom the local school was named. Sanford Cox’s diary listed the local residents circa 1825, and several of these listed library subscribers had arrived in the county before 1825: the Cox, McCullough, and Catterlin families.