Pittsfield — A local 12-year-old just learned a hard lesson. BB’s Book Nook founder Brielle Blessing discovered during the afternoon of August 21 that the bench adjacent to her Pittsfield Little Free Library—part of a national project that creates free lending libraries to communities—went missing, action that she and her stepfather Scott Williams feels was nefarious in intent. The bench was spotted in place at noon, but by 1:30 p.m., it was gone, said Williams who delivered the bad news to Blessing when he saw her a couple of hours later.
As The Berkshire Edge reported in June, Blessing used her Christmas gift money to develop the library, including buying the bench online, a feature she thought would distinguish her structure, offering a place for neighbors to relax while reading a story.
“It was just very disheartening,” Blessing said of the incident. “I was trying to provide for the community. I think the bench was definitely one of the main points about the Little [Free] Library because it offered a place to sit and read.”
Blessing said that the few other Little Free Libraries in the area don’t possess that feature. “I was very distraught that someone would come and take that,” she said. “You can obviously see it provides the community with books and knowledge and reading. And someone just comes and rips that away.”
Within only an hour of posting on social media what transpired at BB’s, however, Blessing found a silver lining to the story when a local builder’s wife reached out, offering for her husband to rebuild the bench. Blessing said the couple swung by her family’s home on the evening of the disappearance to take measurements and design suggestions.
“So, there are amazing people out there,” Williams said. “A good lesson it’s also teaching her now [that] even though there are not so good people out there, that part of the community is there’s also really lots of good people out there.”
And the action restored Blessing’s faith in humanity, thankful for the donation so the library wouldn’t lack a comfortable spot for a respite and reaffirming that “good people” do exist in the community.
“Every day I would see at least one interested person sitting on the bench reading a book for probably 45 minutes at a time,” she said. “There was definitely a lot of people using the bench.”
Although the original bench wasn’t chained down, Blessing and Williams plan to secure the new bench when it arrives.
Williams noted one comment made by Tammi Haines to the young entrepreneur on the project’s social media site. “Brielle, don’t give up,” Haines stated, according to Williams. “The world has lots of rotten people, but there’s even more incredible people like you out there.”
