Hopkins Library Records

Library service to the Hopkins, Minnesota community was established over 100 years ago, when the library was housed in City Hall. The library moved to the historic Dow House in 1948 and then temporarily to a vacant restaurant in 1963. The library opened in its current location in 1968 and was renovated in 2002, then again in 2015. The library joined Hennepin County Library in 1973.

In 1931, a lively debate was sparked in Hopkins over whether the city library should merge with the Hennepin County Library system. The county system was formed just after the Hopkins Library opened, and it was the only suburban library that still was independent. Besides Minneapolis, Hopkins was the final independent library in the county. In 1973 the Hopkins Library became a member of the Hennepin County Library System. In the collection there were some 1,000 books in Czech. The community had held on to these books even though most Hopkins residents no longer could read Czech or speak the language. Finally in the 1990s, they were donated first to The Hopkins History Center and then to the University of Minnesota Immigration Research Center, where to this day they are a valuable resource in the study of Czechoslovakia.