At first the small library occupied a corner of the main room in the Cherrydale Fire Hall. By 1923 there were 1,000 volumes, and library cards cost five cents. The collection soon outgrew the small corner of the Fire Hall and relocated to temporary quarters in the old Cherrydale School (built in 1907), located on the south side of Lee Highway at its intersection with Quincy Street. On Monday, June 23, 1924, the Cherrydale Library Association (an offshoot of the Cherrydale Citizens Association and the League of Women Voters) offered an evening of free entertainment to anyone who donated a book. The entertainment, according to a contemporary account, featured "first class attractions and local speakers." About 75 books were added that day.
In 1936 a "professional librarian" was hired by Arlington County and given control over all the small community libraries. For its part, Cherrydale Library continued to expand. In February 1938, just 16 years after it was first opened, the Library moved to larger quarters in the old Cherrydale Clinic building on Lee Highway, located on the southeast corner of the Lee Highway-Quincy Street intersection. Mrs. Walton (the head of the Cherrydale Library League) was concerned about the move and about the longer hours that the Library would be open to the public -- she asked the Cherrydale Volunteer Fire Department to help "keep order on the nights the Library was open." The old Clinic building was torn down for the construction of the Lee Highway/Quincy Street intersection in 1959. For the next few months, the library was housed in still more temporary quarters in another building on Lee Highway. In 1961, the new Cherrydale Library -- praised by a professional organization as "a splendid example of architecture for modern Library science" -- was opened at its present location on Military Road.
The County Government contemplated closing Cherrydale Library in 1978, 1992, and 1998, but each time the Board reconsidered after citizens registered their opposition.
The County's Department of Libraries proposed closing Cherrydale Library among its Green Rods.
Both the Arlington County Republican Party and the Arlington County Taxpayers Association (ACTA) published separate alternative budgets, each of which also called for closing Cherrydale Library.
The argument in favor of closing Cherrydale Library appeared in detail in a report by the Arlington County Fiscal Affairs Advisory Commission (FAAC), March 2, 1998.
ACTA, on page 7 of its newsletter published on April 2, 1998, praised the work of the FAAC, citing the Commission's report on the Department of Libraries as the most thoughtful "without a doubt" of all of FAAC's budget studies. ACTA concluded its evaluation of FAAC's report on the Libraries Department with: "We accept the FAAC's recommendation (saving $549,000) with enthusiasm."
The County Board received thousands of cards and letters during February-April 1998 urging that the library be kept open. Two such letters--one from Greg Embree on March 16, 1998 and a second from Marvin Cohen on April 5, 1998--addressed the arguments for closing Cherrydale Library contained in the FAAC report.
During the election campaign for the County Board in the fall of 1998, the citizen volunteers who organized the defense of the library formed themselves into Citizens for Cherrydale Library (CCL) and asked each candidate for his or her views about library funding, neighborhood libraries, and Cherrydale Library in particular. CCL conducted identical pre-election queries in later years. Click on the year to read each candidate's answers in 1998, 2000, 2001, 2002, February 2003, October 2003, 2004, 2005, and 2006.