Innisfail Library History
| 1904 | A committee of Innisfail citizens decided to start a public library. It moved several times before being established in Miss Simpson's Drugstore. Miss Simpson volunteered as the library manager and prepared a catalogue. |
| 1959 |
First paid Library Manager was hired. Her name was Mary Morton. 
We joined Parkland Regional Library System. |
| 1969 | The first paid assistant manager was hired, Margaret Pendergast. |
| 1975 | Mary Morton retires and Margaret Pendergast took over as library manager. Library moved into the first fire hall, but it grew rapidly and soon need more space. The town purchased the newer AGT building on the southeast corner of 50 Ave for the library, and it moved there in 1981. |
| 1981 | Officially opened at its new location, 49 Street and 50 Avenue. |
| 1985 |
A new two-story addition was opened, and named the Mary Morton Center, in honor of our first paid librarian.
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| 1988 | The town established a Municipal Library and a Board of Management. |
| 2012 | At long last the new multi-million-dollar public library will official open its doors on January 23. |
| 2017 | We received a grant to put in keyhole gardens in the front of the library. Members of the Bow-Inn 4H Club and amazing staff and volunteers help out with Stage 1 of the keyhole gardens which included constructing the raised garden beds, filling them with soil and preparing them for seeding. The keyhole gardens were used for children's programming throughout the spring and summer teaching kids about gardening, growing food and harvesting what they grew. |
| 2020 | The library switched from RBdigital to Overdrive, closed for 3 months due to Covid. When we reopened we started with curbside pickup and slowly moved to patrons being allowed back into the building for short periods of time. We were not allowed to do indoor in-person programming so we did take home kits for our craft programs, zoom meetings for our book club and for our Summer Reading Club we took it to the parks with stories and take home kits. Around Halloween we did not want the pandemic to spoil the magical fun of the season of ghost and goblins, so between the Town, the Historical Village and the library we found a remedy. The Halloween Hop which in previous years was setup in the Historical Village got moved to the library parking lot. |
| 2022 | Thanks to the generous support of the Town of Innisfail and FCSS, library cards were free with us for anyone that lived in Innisfail or Red Deer County. |
| 2024 |
April we Celebrated 120 years of making connections. We had Erin Young In November we decided to do a Kids Only Secret Shopping event, it was a HUGE success! 175 kids of all ages picked out gifts for their loved ones. That's 350 items donated, all thanks to some amazing sponsors and a couple of anonymous groups. Some festive elves stopped by to help the kids pick out gifts and wrap them up. |
from Medicine River Center and Olive the owl come in for a well-received educational presentation. Our much-loved children's programmer Sherry Driezen did story time for anyone to listen, she read books about owls and seeds and a story that she wrote herself. We found an old steamer trunk that is a time capsule, we encouraged people to bring something in to leave in our time capsule and we got some old-school sign-out cards for checking out book, so if someone wanted to write their best memoirs of the library. The time capsule is being stored carefully to be opened in 30 years. We unveiled our new mascot that is an owl and got people to vote for its names, Birch was the name that got the most votes. There was cake for everyone that came and we displayed some of the history of the library, like; all the managers from past to present, what the building looked like from past to present and the different logos we have had over the years.