Anne Hadden

Hadden was born in Bandon, County Cork,[1] the daughter of David Henry Hadden and Elizabeth Vickery Hadden. Her father was a physician. She moved to the United States as a teenager in 1891,[2] emigrating with her widowed mother and her five siblings. They settled in the San Francisco Bay area, where Hadden's uncle, William Kingston Vickery, was a noted art dealer. She graduated from Oakland High School in 1894, and, like most of her siblings, attended Stanford University, though she may not have completed a degree program there. She did complete a summer certificate course at the University of California's library school.[3]

In 1899, Hadden began working at the Palo Alto Public Library.[4] As the first director of the Monterey County Free Library, hired in 1913,[5] Hadden established 126 branches of the library system, some of them housed in schools or private homes. She left that position after 16 years, in 1929, and was a librarian at the Palo Alto Public Library[6] and at Modoc County Library in her later years. She was a district president of the California Library Association.[7] She acquired and delivered books and maps,[8] sometimes hiking or riding a horse or mule to remote locations,[9][10] and encouraged local history collections at county branches, because she believed that helped integrate the library into the community. She retired from library work in 1946.[3]

Hadden made literary contacts in the arts colony at Carmel-by-the-Sea, including writers Lincoln Steffens, Robinson Jeffers, and Mary Hunter Austin.[11] She also knew John Steinbeck, who was a child in Salinas when she was based there. She was especially close to Irish writer Ella Young.[3]

Hadden died in 1963, at the age of 89, in Pacific Grove.[1][12] Her papers are at Stanford University Library. Hadden's work in Monterey County was the inspiration for a children's book, Eight Mules from Monterey (1982, 1993), by Patricia Beatty.[13] A biography based on Hadden's unpublished writings, Books for All: Monterey County’s First Librarian, was published in 2013, edited by her grand-niece, Barbara Ann Hadden.[9] In 2016, she was inducted into the California Library Hall of Fame.[7]

• "Photograph of Anne Hadden, delivering books"; from the Monterey County Free Libraries, Local History Photograph and Document Collection, on Calisphere

• "Photograph of Anne Hadden on library grounds writing a paper for American Library Association" (1925), at Online Archive of California
• Denise Sallee, "Anne Hadden: First Librarian and Big Sur Pioneer" (2005 lecture), on Calisphere