When Liberty Hill was incorporated in 1999, the City could not fund a municipal library, so two separate volunteer groups were organized, both working on ways to bring library services to their community. As the two groups had a common goal, they merged and formed the first Volunteer Board of Directors for the Liberty Hill Public Library: Linda Cannon, Linda Heimann, Joyce Hobby, Kaye Jackson, Marcia Lyon, Jean Prestridge, Sandi Revelle, and Cynthia Welty. These industrious citizens soon undertook the daunting task of raising money by holding numerous fundraisers such as book sales, auctions, a city-wide garage sale, a dinner theater performance, pictures with Santa and a softball game feature members of the City Council and the LHISD School Board. During this time, the group was also collecting thousands of books that were being donated by Liberty Hill residents. Soon, they had over 10,000 volumes stored all over town in spare rooms and garages.
The Volunteer Board of Directors were looking for a building in town that they could renovate to create a library building. However, after two years of searching, the few existing spaces available were not suitable for a library or they were far too expensive to renovate. The Board then decided on a new plan and switched their focus and fundraising efforts to constructing a new library building, but they would also need land to build it on. The Lions Foundation Park Board of Directors agreed to lease two acres of land in Lions Foundation Park to the Library Board of Directors and we are still leasing this same land.
Thanks to donations of time, materials, and labor from local businesses and community volunteers, construction began on the library building in September 2001 when the concrete slab was poured. In January 2002, LCRA and PEC granted the nascent library and its Board of Directors $24,000 to complete the building and twenty-three years later, we are still using the same 2,400 square foot library. Our library was built through the generosity of the community, the dedication of the Volunteer Board of Directors, the hard work of all the volunteers, and the investment made by a variety of local businesses, including LCRA and PEC, in our Liberty Hill community.
In October 2002, the Liberty Hill Public Library opened to the public for the very first time with just over 10,000 items on the shelves. A volunteer library director and a group of fellow volunteers ran the library for the first two years of its existence. Even before the new library opened, the Volunteer Board of Directors realized that running the library as an all-volunteer enterprise was not sustainable. The library needed a regular source of funding so that materials and supplies could be purchased, bills could be paid, provide services, and to hire paid staff to best serve the community. Texas passed a law in 1997 that allowed communities to vote to form public library districts in geographically defined areas that did not offer library services to community members. This bill also established a new source of direct funding for Texas public libraries, as it allowed these districts to collect a specified percentage of sales tax generated in their boundaries. The Volunteer Board decided that the best path forward to sustaining and providing library services for the community was to use the provisions of this law to establish a public library district in Liberty Hill.
Community members and the Volunteer Board of Directors worked to get a referendum on the ballot that would establish the Liberty Hill Public Library District. On November 5, 2002, 65% of the residents (1,248 voting yes and 660 voting against) voted to create Liberty Hill Public Library District. The vote also gave the library the right to collect .25 percent of the available local sales and use tax collected in our district’s geographic service area. The election also saw the first five trustees elected to the Library Board of Trustees: Hollis Baker, Bryan Butler, Gary Henley, Bill Seward, and LaVeta Toliver.
In the history of the library, there have been four library directors. The first director of Liberty Hill Public Library District was volunteer Jean Prestridge. Lynda McClain was hired as the second library director in March 2006 and Sandy Schultz succeed her to become the third library director in July 2009. Angela Palmer, the fourth and current director, has been the library director since November 2013.
Like our community, the library has grown tremendously during the past 23 years even though we are still in the same library building that was completed in 2002. The number of people in the service area assigned to our library district by Texas State Libraries and Archives Commission has gone from 6,777 in 2002 to 29,001 in 2023 (a 327.93% increase). The original collection of 10,000 donated volumes has now grown to over 33,020 physical items, with new materials arriving weekly, and patrons also have access to over 2,000,000 digital items. In 2006, the year that we got our current library computer software, the library circulated just 12,985 items, but in 2024, we circulated 200,050 items (170,742 physical items and 29,308 digital items), the first time we have ever reached over 200,000 items circulated in one year!
