FORT BRAGG, CA., 10/16/26 — An arson fire destroyed Fort Bragg’s library in September 1987. The Friends of the Fort Bragg Library turned an old funeral home on Laurel Street into a library, according to the group’s own history. The branch reopened in July 1988.
Now the Friends are building again, right next door.
Work on their $1.5 million annex started Oct. 7, Friends President Janice Marcell said in an email. The money comes from donors: a potter’s estate, a house sale, book sales, restaurant nights, a basket-making class and coin jars on store counters around town. No county money is going into it. The Friends hope to open in late 2027 or early 2028.
On Oct. 6, the Friends posted photos on Facebook. One shows a backhoe on the fenced lot. In another, two people stand in the library stacks holding up signed contract pages from GOC Construction, the Fort Bragg builder the group picked in April.
What’s inside
The one-story annex will be 3,348 square feet, with its address at 421 N. Whipple St. Its biggest room is a 792-square-foot media room for meetings, activities and public rentals. Fort Bragg has few meeting spaces, according to the city’s staff report on the project.
The teen room will be “a large, sunny room,” the report says. Two small quiet rooms will give people a secure place for telemedicine visits. There’s also a history room, staff offices, three bathrooms, a patio and solar panels on the roof. The Friends will sort and store the donated books for their sales there, too.
The potter’s estate
The biggest gift came from Diana Leon. For 12 years, library worker Peggy McGee knew her only through her library visits and their talks about books. Then Leon died and left the Friends her entire estate.
McGee “didn’t know Diana was an extremely talented ceramicist,” she wrote in a July 2025 post on the Friends’ website. “So talented, she once owned her own ceramics gallery, The Griffin’s Egg, in San Francisco! Who knew?”
Leon also collected antiques, old rock and roll posters, cat-themed trinkets and cookbooks, McGee wrote. The Friends sold her pottery and posters. Her cottage sat on nearly an acre, with lavender gardens, a ceramic studio and a brick kiln, according to the listing the Friends posted. It went on the market for $650,000 in October 2025 and sold in November for nearly $550,000, Marcell said.
The Friends reported $1,370,050 raised for the expansion as of October 2025.
A neighbor’s house
The annex goes on a lot the Friends bought for $185,000 in September 2016. The house there had belonged to Lillian Vierra, a neighbor and library fan who died in 2013. When the Friends explored it, they found her brothers’ art and sports memorabilia lining the ceilings.
“We were surprised and moved by the keepsakes we found in the house,” the Friends posted at the time. They saved redwood panels and beams from the house to use in the new building.
A state construction grant the group applied for in 2022 went unfunded, and the second round was canceled. The city’s Planning Commission approved the project 4-0 in October 2025. The lot fits only five or six of the 11 parking spaces city code calls for, so the Friends needed a special permit.
Bulldozers graded the lot in May. “After more than 10 years of planning and anticipation, it is finally happening,” Marcell said in a May update. Then the groundbreaking planned for late July or early August went on hold “due to the building review process.” The city approved the building permit in September, Marcell said.
The county’s part
In 2016, supervisors backed the idea of an expansion on two conditions: no county money, and a written agreement between the Friends and the county, called a memorandum of understanding.
That agreement still doesn’t exist. County Librarian Mellisa Hannum wrote the Friends in February 2025 that it “has not yet been fulfilled.” She wanted it to settle who pays for, builds, keeps up and runs the annex, and whether prevailing-wage rules apply. Those rules require contractors on public works projects to pay the wage the state sets for each trade.
The Friends wrote back that the annex isn’t public works under state law, and that a lease or operating agreement with the county was premature. Under the law they cited, a private building becomes public works if more than half of it is leased to a government agency and either the lease is signed before construction or the building follows the agency’s plans. Marcell said the Friends and the county will write an agreement on the library’s use of the annex once the building is up.
The county has its own plans for the old branch. Measure O, the library sales tax voters made permanent in 2022, sets aside money for buildings. Supervisors approved a 10-year plan for that money Oct. 6. It includes about $2.9 million to fix up the 5,500-square-foot Fort Bragg branch, with a new roof, new heating and cooling, disability-access upgrades and a remodel. A 2023 county study found the roof in poor condition, with rainy-season leaks that threaten the books. The plan doesn’t mention the annex.
The Friends gave the county the funeral-home building, the group told supervisors in its 2025 letter. Someday, the letter said, “we may be able to do the same with the Library Annex building.”