Monday, August 22, 2016

Adult Fiction Pop-Up Sale

Adult fiction in hardback and paperback for sale this week in the Smyrna Library atrium. Everything is just 50 cents each.

Tuesday, August 16, 2016

Thank you, Croy Engineering

Thank you, Croy Engineering, for underwriting the purchase of classroom sets of blocks needed to launch "Block Party"! 

The next party is on Tuesday, Sept 20 at 10:30am.

Monday, August 8, 2016

First Sunday Lecture: Poisonous Fruits of Political Corruption: The Infamous Yazoo Land Fraud and Its Impact on Georgia, The South, and the Nation, 1795-1848

Yesterday’s First Sunday Lecture guest speaker was Dr. George Lamplugh.   He spoke on the Yazoo Land Fraud and how it dominated the political culture of Georgia in the early 19th century.

The Yazoo Land Fraud of 1795, one of the most significant events in the post-Revolutionary history of Georgia and the United States, was overturned by Georgia’s first political “boss,” James Jackson, in 1796. Six years later, Jackson and his allies transferred the Yazoo lands (roughly, present-day Alabama and Mississippi) to the national government for $1.25 million.  To Georgians, though, the key provision of this Compact of 1802 was the national government’s promise to extinguish as quickly as possible all remaining land claims of Native American peoples (Creeks and Cherokees) within the boundaries of Georgia, when that could be done “peaceably” and “on reasonable terms.” 

Like the proverbial pebble thrown into still water, the consequences of the Great Land Fraud rippled out over more than a generation, helping to divide the nation’s dominant political party; pave the way for Indian removal in the 1820s and 1830s; create an agricultural “Black Belt” from Georgia through the new states of Alabama and Mississippi; and establish a theory of “state rights” as a supposedly “legitimate” response to the overweening power of the national government, which underlay many of the incidents on the long “road to the Civil War” between 1848 and 1861.

The First Sunday Lecture Series is sponsored by the Friends of Smyrna Library.

Wednesday, August 3, 2016

Smyrna Public Library Celebrates 25th Anniversary of New Library Building


The Smyrna Public Library celebrated the 25th anniversary of the opening of the new library located on the Village Green.  

The new library and the Community Center were dedicated before a crowd numbering in the thousands at 5 PM on August 3, 1991.The ceremony was followed by a concert of leading bands of the time and a spectacular fireworks show.