Director's Note
I'm going to make this one short and sweet before introducing our archivist, Rebecca Lavallee.
On October 9 at high noon, the bidding period will begin for the Friends of the Library Fall Online Auction. You can read more about it here, or go straight to the online catalog and register to bid here.
The Library will be closed for Indigenous Peoples' Day on October 10. The online catalog will also be down for some of the holiday weekend as CWMARS migrates their servers to the cloud. Libby and Kanopy should work as usual.
We now have 7 new mobile hotspots to replace the 5 old ones. You can find out more about them here, or just come and borrow one! We are also now offering a free admission pass to Samuel Slater Experience in Webster. Learn more here.
A big thank you to everyone who visited the Library during Oktoberfest. The Friends raised $411 at their book sale.
Thanks for reading,
Justin Snook
Bits & Pieces with Rebecca Lavallee: Population
In 2021, Douglas celebrated its 275th Anniversary. During this anniversary, the idea of providing a supplemental update to the Time and Town: Douglas at 250 came to fruition. While we were unable to provide this supplement during the 275th, it has been decided that we will provide these updates in “Bits Pieces” through the library’s newsletters and website.
To understand where we were and where we are going, the first bit and piece of Douglas history to understand is our population.
Douglas could easily be described as a very large town that houses more trees than people. In 2020, Douglas’s 37.7 square miles ranked 53 out of 352 Massachusetts Municipalities in total square miles. That same year, our population of 8,983* ranked 194th. While some of this can be attributed to the fact that 8.63 square miles is State Forest, it cannot be argued that by today’s standards, Douglas is a sleepy little town.
The first official population statistic for Douglas of 1,878 inhabitants was reported in 1850. By 1970, 120 years later, the population of Douglas had increased by 1,069 inhabitants, an increase of 56.9%. By 2020, just 50 years later, Douglas’s population had increased over 200% since 1970 to 8,892 inhabitants. The majority of this population boom can be attributed to the 1990s, with a population increase of 49.5%. After the 1990s, the population has leveled off.
As we move forward in our exploration of Douglas, it will be interesting to see the impacts that our changes in population have had on our little town. For more data (and bigger images), see the archive post here.
