1905 — It started in a drug store

On March 4, 1905, a collection of 225 books was deposited in Brakke's corner drug store at 1353 Caledonia Street, and the north side of La Crosse had a library. Clerks handed the books out, except on Saturday mornings, when the children's librarian came. More books went out on a Saturday morning than in the whole rest of the week put together.

In 1907 it moved next door to 1351 — one number along the street — into a rented room divided by a partition, a reading room at the front and the books behind. Circulation went from 8,400 in the first year to 13,818. Two thirds of it was children.

1351 Caledonia Street, photographed by the Tribune in July 1941 — the ground floor of half a green-fronted brick building, where the branch spent thirty-five years. The drug store it started in was next door at 1353.

The branch was established by Miss Mary Alice Smith, head librarian of the La Crosse Public Library, and she did not simply open it and move on. The library's own history records that she was a strong advocate of the branch and worked hard to obtain more funding and resources for it.

By 1914 — the last full year she was head librarian — the north branch held more than 2,500 books and was doing one quarter of the entire city library's circulation. It was still in a rented room on Caledonia Street. She had already written what the next thirty years would be about:

— Miss Mary Alice Smith, head librarian 1904–1915. She left twenty-seven years before the building opened.

Anna B. Pederson joined the La Crosse Public Library staff in 1907 and became the north branch's librarian in 1911. She spent sixty-one years as its leader — thirty-one of them in the rented room, thirty more in the building she finally got — and retired in 1972 at the age of eighty-seven.

By 1932 the branch was lending 89,600 books and magazines a year. The following year, the Depression forced its hours down.