Once upon a time, a wealthy widow who was a citizen of two neighboring countries hired craftsmen to raise a stately, turreted building of gray granite and stained glass windows. Only the finest wood adorned the reading rooms in its library. Cherubs soared over the proscenium arch in its opera house.
But the widow’s most important, and perhaps unusual, request was that the building sit exactly on the nations’ common border. Inside, black tape representing the boundary ran along the hardwood floors, a symbol not of division but of the enduring friendship between the two lands.
Then one day, the leader of the country to the south threatened to annex his neighbor to the north. One of his trusted emissaries visited the building.
“51st state,” she said, stepping north over the black tape. “U.S.,” she said, stepping back.
President Trump’s tariffs against Canada and his threats to turn it into a U.S. state have fueled a deep crisis among Canadians, forced abruptly to rethink their relations with their neighbor, the rest of the world and even among one another. But they have also upended small-town life across the borderland, where many Canadian and American communities had led intertwined and intimate lives.
Perhaps nowhere along the 5,525-mile stretch — still the world’s longest undefended border — did that idealism find more powerful expression than in a sleepy corner of southernmost Quebec and northernmost Vermont. There, the Haskell Free Library and Opera House has straddled the border since 1904, the brainchild of Martha Stewart Haskell, the wealthy widow who chose the location, not only for its symbolism, but also for its equal access to both Canadians and Americans.
For decades, Canadians left Canadian soil and walked down an open sidewalk next to the library to reach its main entrance, located on the U.S. side — no passports required.
But the United States announced in March that it would bar Canadians from directly accessing the library, saying that the library’s open border policy has led to cases of smuggling and other security concerns.
Starting in October, all Canadians wishing to use the main entrance will first have to go to a nearby U.S. border crossing, passport in hand, and officially enter the United States.
Canadians who are not Haskell library cardholders have already been banned from using the open sidewalk into the library. A new sign warns that if they do, they “will be arrested and face prosecution and/or removal from the United States.” Most Canadians are now entering through a previously unused back door.
The crackdown at the library and opera house followed a visit in January by Kristi Noem, the U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security. The U.S. authorities had been pressing to restrict access to the Haskell in recent years, even suggesting that Canadians and Americans take turns visiting it, library officials said.
Inside the library, Ms. Noem and her entourage stood on the south side of the black tape while facing the library staff on the other side. U.S. officials described illicit cross-border episodes involving the library, while library officials argued that they had beefed up security.
All of a sudden, Ms. Noem stepped over the tape and back a couple of times, saying, “51st state, U.S.,” as her entourage giggled, said library officials, who were left speechless.
“I was embarrassed because I’m American,” said Kathy Converse, a longtime volunteer at the Haskell and its unofficial historian. “The other ladies, I think, were just stunned because they’re all Canadian — and offended.”
Since then, officials at the library and in the two adjoining towns, Stanstead in Quebec and Derby Line in Vermont, have fought to keep the facility open to all. The U.S. authorities, they say, are overreacting to the potential threat posed by the porous library.
The restrictions, they say, risk destroying the special bond between the two municipalities, which share drinking water, sewage facilities and a long history. Canadian flags fly from porches on the U.S. side.
The drama that has embroiled the library is in many ways reflective of a bigger phenomenon playing out across the two towns as Mr. Trump’s campaign against Canada has upended relations between the two neighbors.
In the past, for many locals, the two communities used to be essentially one. They are at a restaurant in one, and used the swimming pool in the other.
“It was almost just like the border wasn’t there,” said Fran Gonter-Gross, an American who lives in Derby Line and was borrowing a novel from the library. Ms. Gonter-Gross was “furious,” she said, about the new restrictions against Canadians, adding, “The whole thing is insane.”
As the Haskell has found itself at the center of geopolitical tensions, journalists from all over the world have been descending on the library, about a two-hour drive from Montreal or Burlington.
“They’ve come from Germany, Switzerland, France, Japan, so many!” said Sylvie Boudreau, president of the library’s board of trustees. “Martha Stewart Haskell deliberately wanted the library on the border. But I don’t think that in 1901 she could have ever imagined where we’d be today.”
Haskell was already in her 70s, long widowed and the heir to her husband’s lumber fortune when ground was broken on her project in 1901.
“She was wealthy, politically influential, and people would come to her home for books and theater,” Ms. Converse said.
Construction was wrapped up in 1904 — complete with a library on the ground floor and a 400-person opera house on the two upper floors — a couple of years before Haskell’s death.
The family eventually donated the building to the two communities on either side of the border, and people kept visiting without any thought to the frontier.
Ms. Boudreau, president of the board of trustees, is a retired Canada Border Services Agency officer. When she joined the agency in 1998, a decade after the signing of a free-trade agreement between Canada and the United States, the talk was of opening up the border even more, she recalled.
“In three years, I didn’t think I’d have a job,” Ms. Boudreau said.
But while border security was stepped up after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the library and opera house kept operating as imagined by Haskell.
“Even though I worked at customs, I’m a person who believes there should be no borders,” Ms. Boudreau said. “It’s utopian, I know.”
“At the same time, because I worked at customs, I understand the risks,” she added. “When people come and go like this, their details are not put into the system.”
According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the library “continues to be leveraged by individuals attempting to enter the U.S. illegally and smuggle commodities.”
In 2018, a Canadian man was sentenced to 51 months in prison for smuggling more than 100 handguns from Vermont into Quebec — including several firearms hidden in backpacks that were brought into the library from the United States, left in a bathroom trash can, retrieved and then sold in Canada.
Library officials have tightened security in recent years, Ms. Boudreau said. Staff members are more vigilant. They inform border officials on both sides of any special event or group visit.
They have banned family reunions that used to take place inside the library, where foreigners living in Canada or the United States, unable to visit the other country, would meet. They point out at that the U.S. authorities have surveillance cameras trained on the building, including a new one hidden inside a birdhouse.
After the U.S. authorities restricted access to the main entrance, library officials opened a back door — situated on the Canadian side — that had not been used. So for now, Canadians can enter the library from the rear, using a makeshift walkway of large carpet mats spread out on the lawn.
Canadians will be able to continue using the back door starting in October. Both Canadians and Americans are now required to leave from the door they entered.
Library officials are planning extensive renovations on the Canadian side in response to the restrictions. So that the library remains welcoming to Canadians, officials are installing a new back door, erecting an awning and building a walkway and small parking lot.
A GoFundMe campaign has already raised nearly 200,000 Canadian dollars, double the budget for the renovations. Maybe the story of the wealthy widow’s library and opera house would end happily ever after.
“I think there’s a sentiment of this little library being bullied by this powerful administration, and that helped encourage people to contribute,” said Steve Timmins, a Canadian visiting the library. “In light of what’s going on, it’s an important symbol of the friendship that cannot be taken away.”
Norimitsu Onishi reports on life, society and culture in Canada. He is based in Montreal.
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