TodayCupola Crowns New Library
Country store founding family donates library
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Marion Harbaugh smiles during the installation of the cupola on the library her family donated to Biglerville.(Michael Bupp/The Sentinel)
Construction workers position the steeple on the new Harbaugh Thomas Library in Biglerville.(Michael Bupp/The Sentinel)
For almost a century, Thomas Brothers Country Store and Museum has been a landmark in the Biglerville community.
Standing at three stories, it was the first building in town to have heat and indoor plumbing. While there were multiple businesses at the store, the top floor of the building was reserved as an auditorium. It also was the proud host of the town library.
Until the library was taken away.
It was almost 40 years ago that the books were consolidated at a library in Gettysburg, but Marion Harbaugh, now 82 and the daughter of country store founders Nes and Nettie Thomas, remembers clearly the day the town lost its library.
“We weren’t happy,” she recalls.
Several years later, the Thomas family came up with the idea to build a new reading center for the community. What followed was 15 years worth of saving, resulting in the big, beautiful new reading library for Biglerville that Harbaugh hopes will be open in time for summer.
“We want everybody to enjoy it,” Harbaugh says. “It’s my family’s gift to Adams County.”
The library itself is a charming white brick building with black shutters and an old-fashioned cupola that will light up at night. Topping the building is a golden dove weathervane based on the one that crowns Mt. Vernon, the historic home of George Washington.
“It’s going to have the best of everything,” Harbaugh says. “But it isn’t modern. It has a Colonial feel. It fits in with this town.”
Although she and her sister, Jean Thomas, who passed away several years ago at the age 91, had been saving for decades for the project, Harbaugh modestly refuses to divulge just how much funding her family gave for a library.
“We don’t tell that, but we didn’t spare any expense,” she says.
The Harbaugh-Thomas Memorial Library will have elevators, computers and meeting rooms. Gracing the top of the library fireplace will be a brass mantle clock and matching candelabra given to the Thomas family by Mamie Eisenhower, wife of president Dwight D. Eisenhower and a frequent customer at the country store.
As affiliate of Adam’s County library, the Harbaugh-Thomas library has been promised 30,000 items to fill its rooms, with more to come, according to Harbaugh. Ground-breaking for the project took place last year.
Although the opening will mark a proud time for the Thomas family, it’s tempered with sadness for Harbaugh since she doesn’t have her sister there to share it with.
“It breaks my heart,” she says. “She was the reader.”
Harbaugh says she will donate her sister’s many books to the building.
Her hope is the community will enjoy the library as much as her family loved being a part of Biglerville.”
“Our goal is to make Biglerville a better place for all the wonderful people who live here,” she says.
