A new interactive sculpture in Hagerstown City Park turns a local library experiment into a stop on the city’s public-art trail. DC News Now reports that Train of Thought honors Mary Lemist Titcomb, the Washington County librarian associated with the book wagon that carried reading material to rural residents more than a century ago.
The sculpture’s title gives the tribute a second layer: its moving train imagery connects the circulation of books with Hagerstown’s railroad history, according to the report. Placed along the Hagerstown Cultural Trail, the work presents Titcomb’s story as part of a route where visitors encounter local history and public art rather than only inside a library or archive.
The library experiment behind the tribute
The Washington County Free Library opened on Aug. 27, 1901, as the second working county library in the United States, the Maryland State Archives says. Its early rural reach did not depend solely on a central building: within two years, the library was operating 22 deposit stations outside Hagerstown, and the system grew to 66 stations during the next five years.
That distributed network helps place Titcomb’s book wagon in context. The Maryland State Archives records that by 1904 the wagon was carrying books directly to remote homes through the Washington County Free Library. The wagon and the deposit stations were different delivery methods, but both extended library service beyond the city center.
The original account describes a horse-drawn carriage loaded with more than 2,500 books and credits Titcomb with pioneering the nation’s first bookmobile. Those details belong to the event’s reported history; the archival record more narrowly documents the wagon’s realization by 1904 and its role in carrying books to remote homes.
A model that changed form
The available records support a history of library access being extended through multiple formats, not a simple measure of continuous growth. The National Center for Education Statistics counted 1,035 bookmobiles in the United States in 1993, alongside 8,887 central public libraries and 7,017 branch libraries. That single national snapshot shows that mobile units remained part of the library landscape, but it does not establish how their number changed over time.
A later example also shows how the vehicle itself can be repurposed. On May 29, 2020, the Institute of Museum and Library Services reported that Virginia’s Williamsburg Regional Library was using bookmobiles as Wi-Fi hotspots, moving them among neighborhoods. That service addressed digital access rather than book delivery and is an example from another place and period, not evidence of a broader trend.
In Hagerstown, Train of Thought links those changing forms of outreach to a specific beginning: a county library finding ways to reach people who lived beyond its doors. The sculpture commemorates that documented experiment while leaving the broader evolution of bookmobile service to the records of libraries, communities and the people they served.
