Monterey County’s first librarian traveled dangerous terrain, defying stereotypes about women.

Monterey County was a vast region with many remote, inhospitable areas when Anne Hadden became the first librarian for Monterey County Free Libraries in 1913. During her 16 years on the job, Hadden established 126 branches of the libraries – which included collections of books located in schools, homes, businesses or restaurants – and doing so required rugged travel. It was not a stereotypical bookish librarian’s job.

Hadden’s first-hand accounts of her adventures establishing branches of Monterey County Free Libraries are collected in a 2012 book, Books for All: Monterey County’s First Librarian, co-authored by her great-niece. Hadden’s career in Monterey County began after she completed her studies at Stanford University in 1901 and then became the first head librarian for the Palo Alto Library, where she worked for 10 years. After the establishment of California’s County Library Act of 1911, which aimed to get books in the hands of the state’s rural residents, Monterey County joined the program in 1912. A year later, Hadden was hired and moved to Salinas, frequently referred to as “Saloonas” in those days for its high number of drinking establishments.

Upon moving to Monterey County, Hadden quickly set out to learn the skills that were necessary for her new occupation. “What does horseback riding have to do with books?” she wrote. “No horseback riding, no books in branches to be established where only horses and mules could travel the steep mountainous trails through the wilderness.”

The first branch of the library she established outside of Salinas was in Greenfield in 1914. The trip to Greenfield took her a full 24 hours, and involved a train from Salinas to Soledad followed by a nine-mile horse and buggy ride with the mailman.

Early on, one of Hadden’s passions became getting books to the South Coast of Big Sur. On her first trip there in 1916, she took the train from Salinas to King City, auto stage to Jolon, then rode on horseback over the mountains to the coast. There, she established library branches in the rugged, nearly deserted Los Burros mining district area and for the Harlan family in Lucia. She opted to hike back to civilization along the coast, and enjoyed a day soaking at Murphy’s Hot Springs, now the site of the Esalen Institute, where Hadden learned that “people, who like us preferred to go on foot, are considered by some of these horsemen ‘loco in the head.’”

She described hiking another 20 miles up the Big Sur coast the next day: “We met deer and heard rattlesnakes and saw great stalks of yucca whipplei, three quarters of the time out on steep hot hillsides above the ocean, one quarter in shady redwood canyons where cool streams tumbled,” she wrote. “At one place, we saw a creek flow over a cliff directly into the ocean [McWay Falls], one of the rare instances where a waterfall does this.”

One of her later trips down the coast in 1922 was captured on film by her brother, David Hadden, who made early silent movies. Titled The Horseback Trip to the Coast, the 11-minute film is a blurred but fascinating glimpse of rugged settler life in Big Sur. It was shown around the state to promote the County Free Library system, including a screening at the 1925 California State Fair in Sacramento.

In 1929, when she was 54, Hadden left Monterey County to return to her former position as head librarian of the city of Palo Alto. After she retired at age 70, she moved to Pacific Grove, and throughout the 1950s worked on a manuscript about her adventures as Monterey County’s first librarian.

She died in 1963 before publishing her writings, but Hadden’s story doesn’t end there. Her writings were used as the inspiration for Patricia Beatty’s 1993 children’s novel, Eight Mules from Monterey. Later, in 2005, Hadden’s grand-niece Barbara Ann Warren, who lives in Thousand Oaks, started researching her fascinating relative’s life. “I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if I could publish her manuscripts for her?’” Warren says.

The result is Books for All, a cross-generational collaboration that tells Hadden’s story in her own words, with introductions to each chapter by Barbara plus archival photos. Though Warren is a retired CPA who had never written a book before, she says her great-aunt’s fearless spirit inspired her: “Seeing her firsthand account is what egged me on.”

Jayanti Addleman, who currently holds Hadden’s former position as county librarian, believes that Hadden was an inspiring and modern figure.

“She had very strong philosophies on how libraries should run,” Addleman says. “She saw them as a great equalizer.”

BOOKS FOR ALL is available in Monterey Public Library’s California History Room, or for $20 on amazon.com