New Paltz’s Elting Library quietly marks 100 Years at current location
If you think you remember the Elting Memorial Library celebrating its centennial back in 2009, you’re not wrong. That was indeed 100 years from the date when seven women from the New Paltz Study Club, inspired by the opening of a new Normal School building after the original one was destroyed by a 1906 fire, decided that the town needed a Free Library Association. So, they opened a reading room at 60-62 Main Street: the first iteration of what was to become the modern library the town knows today. A few months later it relocated to larger quarters in the Nathan Van Wagenen building at 68 Main Street. The Regents of the University of the State of New York granted the New Paltz Free Library a provisional charter on April 1, 1909, and an absolute charter on December 2, 1915.
