New Downtown Library Highlights Iva Progress in 2025
Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer
On a windy December Friday afternoon in Iva, Tim Taylor is still talking about the new library downtown. A year ago, the town manager’s ambitions for 2025 sounded almost grandiose for a place with one stoplight and a main street that could be mistaken for a movie set; now, the new branch library sits at the center of those ambitions, a brick-and-glass declaration that small towns do not have to think small.
The library, which opened early in the spring, was the town’s main goal for the year, and Taylor is quick to spread the credit.
“With the help of so many people, that happened,” he says, insisting that the building, “beautiful” as he calls it, belongs as much to the volunteers, county partners, and local donors as it does to the town that lobbied for it. The measure of its success, in his telling, is not in circulation statistics but in what you see when you drive by: people crossing the road, arms full of books.
Inside, the library operates as a kind of secular parish hall. Children’s reading programs fill the schedule, and the arrival of Santa for Christmas programming has already become a seasonal marker, a sign that the town’s calendar now runs, at least in part, on story time and craft days. Taylor expects more of it next year—more workshops, more themed events, more reasons for people who might otherwise bypass downtown to stop, park, and walk.
The building also has a quieter civic life. A meeting room has become neutral ground for groups that once scrambled for space: civic organizations, neighborhood committees, and one of the town’s own homegrown projects, Revive Iva, which meets there regularly. Taylor sees it as proof that a library in 2025 is less a repository of paper than a kind of shared living room, a place where the town can think aloud.
That civic energy is beginning to leak onto Main Street. Taylor talks about the library as a catalyst, a model of “cleanup and good design” that he hopes will shame—or inspire—other property owners into reimagining their storefronts. The old museum building, dormant long enough to feel like a rebuke, is next in line; he hints at “something kind of neat” planned there, an economic-development project on a “very small scale,” with a target opening sometime in the summer.
There is nothing flashy about this version of growth. It is incremental, almost stubbornly local: one library, one meeting room, one rehabilitated building at a time. But in a town like Iva, that is how progress announces itself—not in ribbon cuttings for multinational companies, but in the sight of people walking across the street with books, and in the knowledge that there are now more reasons to gather than to leave.
