Newburyport Public Library

A tremendous resource and an outstanding venue for study, historic research. Best small-​city library I’ve been fortunate to visit.

George
Washington
slept
here
The very first Newburyport Library was founded in 1855 and the books were housed in the building that is now the town hall. It was soon obvious that this was a pretty bad location so a new building was soon found.
This new location for the library was the lovely federalist mansion built for Nataniel Tracy in 1777. Tracy was a very rich merchant that fought for the country as a privateer during the revolution.
Tracy had lots of cool friends and guys like George Washington, John Adams, Aaron Burr, Thomas Jefferson and General Lafayette all were entertained and slept over in this house.
Tracy made some foolish business decisions and lost all his money and his wonderful mansion ended up as the town’s library. Over the years additions were added and the great old building changed in appearance to more Victorian and then modern.
The last major addition was in 2001 and added a whole lot of new space. Still a very cool building, if you look you can see the incongruity of the structure and the roof lines inside and where many of the additions and changes took place.
It is now a wonderful library just dripping with history. Lots of great old pictures of great old guys and grand staircases and antiques everywhere. A truly stunning building worth taking the time to visit and explore. I think there might even be some books inside.

What a great little library, and with an auxilliary location on the corner of Purchase and Marlboro, too (The Emma Andrews Branch, open on Wed and Sat). I think this library has the amenities of that of a much bigger city, with on line requests and renewals, public-​use computers, an excellent selection in every department — especially that gorgeous kid’s area. They are really a very active part of the Newburyport community and literary atmosphere. The only negatives I have had in this library are the few times that I returned things only to be snagged as overdue, and I had to go and actually find them on the shelf myself to prove I had returned them (of course, with no overdue fees, who can complain about this?). Also, the no cell phone rule is only arbitrarily enforced. and with an active teen population, this needs work!

We make weekly trips to the library to get books, magazines, CD’s and DVD’s. This is a great library in a wonderful location. The only issue I have is the hours. I’d like to see more weekend hours.