Sarah Annable

Library Director
In Office	1876 - 1880

Sarah Annable, called Miss Sarah Annable in the records, was for many years the keeper of Billerica's only public collection of books, and she is counted as the town's first librarian (see Library Director). Billerica had been early in the field: the historian John Farmer recorded a first "Social Library" instituted in 1772, one of the earliest in Massachusetts, and a Second Social Library incorporated in 1807. By the later nineteenth century one of these collections had become the property of the First Parish and the other of a Ladies' Sewing Society. Henry A. Hazen wrote in 1883 that "for many years they have been kept, practically united, in a room of the First Church, in the care of Miss Sarah Annable as librarian, who, in 1876, reported seven hundred volumes."

In 1880 Eleanor Bennett, the widow of Joshua Bennett, built at her own expense the brick library building just north of the First Church and deeded it to the Bennett Public Library Association, and her daughters gave $2,000 for furnishings and books. The old parish and sewing society books, which Miss Annable had looked after in the church, "passed to the custody of the new library." The association charged five dollars for membership and one dollar a year for the use of the books, and its new building had room for ten or twelve thousand volumes, many times the collection she had kept.

Miss Annable carried her work into the new building. In April 1912, in a paper on "What Billerica Women Have Done" written for the Nineteen Hundred Club and printed in the town magazine Billerica, Mary R. Eames listed her among the Billerica women who had held positions of importance, noting that she was "the first librarian at the Bennett Library." Among her successors in that post were Mary A. B. Snell and Alice May Harriman. No record of her birth, death or burial has been found in the town reports or vital records consulted.

Sarah Annable

Sarah Annable

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