In 2013, while I was still working for Charlotte Mecklenburg Library, I joined our CEO and Library Director on a benchmarking trip to Boston Public Library. We were there to learn, observe, and gather ideas from one of the country’s most iconic public library systems.
As part of the visit, we toured both the public and behind-the-scenes spaces at Boston Public Library’s Central Library in Copley Square. That included the historic McKim Building, which opened in 1895, as well as the adjoining Johnson Building, designed by Philip Johnson and opened in 1972. At the time of our visit, the Johnson Building had not yet completed the renovation that would later transform it into a more open, welcoming, light-filled public space.
It was a fascinating professional experience. But it also turned out to be unexpectedly personal. I already had a connection to Boston Public Library.
My great-great-grandfather, Isaac F. Woodbury, was co-founder of Woodbury & Leighton, the building firm that constructed the McKim Building alongside architect Charles Follen McKim of McKim, Mead & White. The building now known as the McKim Building was constructed between 1888 and 1895 and opened to the public in 1895.
So there I was, more than a century later, walking through one of the great public library buildings in the United States — only to realize that my own family story was literally built into its walls.
The “Palace for the People”
The McKim Building is often associated with the phrase “palace for the people,” and it is easy to see why. It was designed not simply as a place to store books, but as a civic landmark: grand, beautiful, public, and purposeful.
The building occupies part of a full city block on Copley Square and was designed in Renaissance Revival and Beaux-Arts styles. Its spaces include the famous Bates Hall reading room, the central courtyard, grand staircases, murals, sculpture, and major works by artists including John Singer Sargent, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Daniel Chester French, Edwin Austin Abbey, and Augustus Saint-Gaudens.
Bates Hall alone is enough to make a library person stop in their tracks. Long wooden tables. Green-shaded reading lamps. A barrel-vaulted ceiling. A hush that somehow feels both scholarly and democratic.
It is exactly the kind of room people imagine when they think of a historic public library. But the larger lesson of the McKim Building is not just its beauty. It is the way the building expresses belief in public learning, civic investment, and shared access to knowledge. Those are values I have spent my career working to support — just in a very different way.
Enter Isaac Woodbury
Isaac F. Woodbury was born in New Hampshire in 1849 and came to Boston as a young man. According to his Boston Globe obituary, he began work as an apprentice mason, later formed a partnership with George E. Leighton, and by 1903 the firm had become I. F. Woodbury & Sons Company.
The obituary describes him as the “dean of Boston builders” and notes that his firm had constructed more Boston buildings than any other single company at the time. Among the projects listed: Boston Public Library, the restoration of Faneuil Hall, New England Telephone and Telegraph headquarters, International Trust Company, Boston University buildings, Hotel Westminster, and Robert Brigham Hospital.
Also: he looked a little like the Monopoly Man. I say that with affection. The formal photos, the mustache, the top hat, the suit — he had a very strong late-19th-century-builder-who-knows-where-all-the-granite-came-from energy.
There is another fun family detail: Isaac married Emma F. Woodbury, who was also a Woodbury. They were distant cousins — not too close, I promise — but close enough to make genealogy both interesting and slightly confusing.
A Family Story Within a Family Story
The Woodbury family stories go back even farther.
Isaac’s great-great-grandfather, Captain Israel Woodbury Jr., appears in a historical account of Salem, Massachusetts, through a story retold by Isaac’s uncle, Levi Woodbury. The account reads like something between family lore, frontier adventure, and historical tall tale.
As the story goes, Israel left home as a young man to serve during the Revolutionary War. He became ill with measles in camp and, while still weak, was captured during an attack. He was taken toward Canada and held for a long time before eventually escaping, crossing the St. Lawrence River by canoe, and walking nearly all the way home to Salem. By the time he returned, his family had given him up for dead.
When he appeared at the door, barefoot, hatless, and carrying his gun, a childhood friend reportedly fled in terror, crying that he had seen “Israel’s ghost.” Israel’s reply, according to the family tale: “Amos, ghosts do not carry guns.”
It is a wild story, and like many family histories from earlier centuries, it comes to us through the language, assumptions, and storytelling habits of its time. I would not treat every detail as documented fact. But as a piece of family memory, it is unforgettable.
Why This Still Matters to Me
I often think about libraries as institutions that hold stories — not only in books and archives, but in buildings, objects, rituals, and shared memory. Boston Public Library’s McKim Building is one of those places where the physical space tells a story. The architecture communicates permanence. The murals communicate aspiration. The reading rooms communicate seriousness of purpose. Even the tables and lamps communicate a kind of reverence for study and public life.
What I did not know when I first began my library career was that my own family had once helped build one of the most significant library spaces in the country. And what I love about that connection is not that it makes the building “mine” in any way. Of course it doesn’t. Public libraries belong to the public.
But it does remind me that libraries are made by people. Architects, builders, masons, artists, librarians, donors, civic leaders, staff, patrons, and communities all leave something behind.
Some build the walls, some build the systems, some build the trust, and some build the case for why libraries still matter. I did not become a builder like Isaac Woodbury. But in a way, I like to think I am still working in the family business: helping libraries create spaces, stories, and strategies that serve their communities for generations.
