GLOUCESTER — With the clocking ticking on 2022 and on a year-end $100,000 challenge grant to help renovate and expand the Sawyer Free Library on Dale Avenue, a Gloucester native and author has stepped up.
Ipswich resident Marion O’Connell Frost donated $4,000 to the sawyerfree2025.org challenge grant campaign that ends at midnight, Dec. 31, according to a press release.
The gift, comprising the last of the proceeds from Frost’s 2011 book, “My Gloucester: Views of a Provincial” is among those to be matched by an anonymous family fund backing the challenge campaign.
Frost’s donation pushes the total funding by the general public to $88,000 since the challenge grant campaign launched Oct. 18.
“Call it a widow’s mite,” said the 93-year-old Frost, who has lived in Ipswich for the past 50 years. “It’s fun to play a small part and it’s going to make me very happy to see Sawyer Free Library enlarged. I’m thrilled that the original building will remain intact. That is part of the reason I’m supporting Sawyer Free 2025.”
Frost says her loyalty to the seaport where she grew up is about Gloucester’s unmatched natural beauty.
“I am a Gloucester girl,” she said. “It’s my hometown. As a kid, when I got old enough to go places by myself, I’d go down to the Boulevard and look out at the Atlantic Ocean and think, ‘If I keep looking, I will see Europe.’ I’ve always loved being on the edge of places.”
She continued, “I’ve been lucky enough to travel the world. I’ve hiked in South America, in the Caucasus Mountains and in Nepal, but personally, I think Gloucester is one of the most beautiful places in the whole world. and that’s what I say in my book.”
Frost, who is nearing completion of her second book, first fell in love with libraries at Sawyer Free as a child.
She later worked as a librarian at New York’s Schenectady County Public Library and the Utica Public Library in the 1950s.
She also served as a member of the board of trustees for the Pembroke Public Library, and spent 30 years in that same role for the Ipswich Public Library, where she now holds emeritus status as a board member.
Frost’s late husband, David W. Frost, worked for Blue Cross Blue Shield and was oft-transferred before eventually becoming president of that healthcare association. The couple, who share four children, met attending the same history and chemistry classes at Gloucester High.
A Sawyer Medal winner in 1943, Frost earned an undergraduate degree from Boston University, and later a master’s from BU once the family relocated to Massachusetts. She later earned a master’s in moderate special needs teaching from Lesley University. Frost went on to become a special needs teacher at Ipswich High.
“Marion’s dedication to education and to Sawyer library is an inspiration,” said Sawyer Free 2025 Campaign Manager Sarah Oaks. “Her generosity and thoughtfulness in donating the final proceeds of her beautiful book to our matching challenge grant comes at a perfect time as our deadline approaches, and has pushed us to the threshold of $90,000 with just a few days to go.”
Frost’s book retailed for $20 a copy and underwent two printings by King Printing in Lowell, but is now out of print. It ran 94 pages and featured more than two dozen photos of Gloucester locales shot by Frost.
In 2011, Frost donated $5,000 worth of book profits to the City Hall Restoration Commission. Her new book, “Mother of Mine,” will be a tribute to the life and times of her mother, Celia Elizabeth Brooks O’Connell.
Sawyer Free 2025 (visit sawyerfree2025.org to donate) is a fully philanthropic capital campaign to fund a comprehensive renovation, modernization and expansion of Cape Ann’s oldest public library.