Why Nobody Talks About the Women Who Delivered Books by Mule

In 1935, nearly a thousand women rode mules and horses into the roadless mountains of eastern Kentucky to deliver books — this is the true story of the WPA's Pack Horse Library Project. This documentary traces how one Depression-era program reached over a million people who had never held a library card, in country so isolated that no road, wagon, or truck could follow. We follow the project from its origins — a failed 1913 private effort that couldn't outlast its own funding — through the daily reality of the riders themselves: the creek crossings with no bridges, the winter trails that turned to ice, the one-room schoolhouses waiting on a weekly delivery, and the households where a single donated book might be the first piece of printed material a family had ever owned. Along the way, we look honestly at what access to books actually meant in a segregated 1930s Kentucky, and how a single wartime program helped shape the federal library policy that followed it decades later. If you're drawn to overlooked corners of American history — the New Deal programs that rarely make the textbooks, the women whose work quietly reshaped rural communities, or the specific, unglamorous effort it took to get a book into a child's hands before roads ever reached these hollows — this episode is for you. This is part of Library Route Archive's ongoing series on America's routes to reading, covering small-town libraries and traveling bookmobiles from 1850 to 1980. If this story stayed with you, more like it are on the channel — subscribe to follow the series.