It Took a Village

Discover this timely new book by Dell Hood

“I want to live here.”—an 8-year-old child checking out an armful of books

Mimi Cavender

In summer of 2024, Wimberley [Texas] Village Library opened its 8,000-square-foot addition to the original ranch-style building you see on the book cover shown above. For the library’s 50th anniversary, Library Trustee and Master Naturalist Dell Hood has brought a rare blend of life experience to his history of a Hill Country town’s showcase place. Yes, its extraordinary library.

In 1975, little Wimberley, southwest of Austin in Hays County, Texas, still thought of itself as a village. Its residents had relied on a Texas State Library bookmobile out of Lockhart to rattle their reading every three weeks up two-lane Rural Route 12. A small volunteer library had briefly lent books out of a space borrowed from a local church.

Two years of energetic organizing later, those determined volunteers had by 1977 designed and built the Texas Hill Country ranch-style public library building we know. It opened its fifth and largest expansion this summer of 2024. Read about its ambitious water-wise landscaping design in this September 2024 issue of The Hays Humm.

Part-time volunteers and visionary Board members, a community of Wimberley folks, some with old roots in the surrounding ranchland, have shepherded the little public library ‘way beyond the “village.” Early integration of a digitized collection and Interlibrary Loan Service brought region-wide library service to us all with a few keystrokes.

The library serves as an essential meeting point, learning center, a cool place to do homework or hang out in the summer—and yes, a ranch-homey place to relax with a good read. Dell Hood recounts that “a child, perhaps seven or eight years old, was heard to say as his mother completed her checkout of an armful of books for him and started to leave, ‘I want to live here.’”

The stunning success of the little library that could is a story Dell Hood is perfectly positioned to tell.

He began volunteering as a cataloger at the library in 1995 after a 30-year career in public diplomacy with the U.S. Information Agency, work that took him and his wife Gerin to eight posts across the world. Even earlier, as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Ethiopia, he’d been impressed how a U.S. Information Service library could be “much more than a book collection.”

So Dell and Gerin teamed easily with Wimberley library’s fiercely motivated volunteers.

“Gerin’s mother, Alice (known as Dexie) Hackley, was one of the first group of circulation desk volunteers when the original building opened. …Gerin started volunteering there soon after our retirement to Wimberley in 1994…[she] ignited my interest in the library…and has been the constant strong supporter of this project [this book, Wimberley Village Library—The First Fifty Years].”

Gerin Hood was the original director of the library’s Interlibrary Loan Service, and Dell has been a Trustee of the Wimberley Library District since 2005.

With perfect pitch, Dell plays the whole song, verse by verse. He shows us the decades of good will and focused energy, the family generations of love of this place—and some good political connections beyond it—that have seen the Wimberley Village Library through to its phenomenal regional success.

As currently the longest-active members of the Hays County Chapter of Texas Master Naturalist™, Dell and Gerin have their region’s ecological concerns front of mind. Their knowledge of our region’s landforms and native plants has informed the ambitious landscaping of the library’s new expansion. It can serve as a model for a responsible Hill Country sensibility to water conservation and land management in this time of warming climate.

Dell reminds us in his Postscript, “It is characteristic of communities across Texas that people who have lived in them the longest…see their community as unique and special, the inheritor of hard-to-define qualities that inspire strong bonds grown from a shared history and shared traditions.”

As earliest memories of this Hill Country community pass away with its oldest residents, and with “…almost no first-hand participants available to give their perspectives,” Dell decided “it was my responsibility to identify and collect all the resources I could find for a concise and, I hope, respectable history of such a valued and well-used institution.” Dell Hood has done just that.

Wimberley Village Library—The First Fifty Years, 121 pages, is available at the Library.

Sales benefit the Friends of the Wimberley Village Library.

Slideshow: courtesy Mimi Cavender