Saco's first truly public library opened in 1882 after earlier libraries and reading rooms had operated by fee or membership. The library was created through the estate of Olive and Oliver Dyer, whose gift made possible a universal literary retreat for Saco residents. When Olive Dyer died in 1879, she left $36,613 in her will for a city library, fulfilling the wish of her husband Oliver, a Biddeford native who had made his fortune in Boston, retired to Saco, and served briefly as mayor. Because Olive stipulated that only $5,000 could be used to secure a building, the library began in a basement room of Saco City Hall. The Dyer Library Association was established in 1881, and when the library opened in 1882, Sarah W. Tucker became librarian. The one-room library held 6,500 volumes, including 2000 from the old Saco Athanaeum, and in its first month more than 2,300 volumes were checked out by 800 cardholders. In 1893, Saco historian and Civil War veteran John Haley became head librarian. In 1892 the library moved next door to 308 Main Street, into a building funded chiefly by Sarah Bradbury, widow of John C. Bradbury, the first president of the library trustees. Its first permanent home, which still stands, was designed by Horace Wadlin of Reading, Massachusetts, an architect who also later served as head librarian of the Boston Public Library from 1903 to 1916. The building was primarily eclectic Colonial Revival in design with Romanesque elements, and its interior was largely one open space divided by a broad wooden double arch, with a reading room in front and a book room in back. After more than half a century there, the library moved in 1955 to 371 Main Street, the Deering Mansion, a gift from Board of Trustees President Joseph G. Deering and his sister Annie Katherine Deering, who also funded remodeling for library use. The two-story brick Italianate mansion had been built in 1870 for their grandfather Joseph G. Deering, later passed through their father Frank Cutter Deering, and had undergone earlier renovations including remodelings in 1915 and 1920. The 1955 remodeling connected the main building to the carriage house for children's and meeting rooms, a new main entrance was completed in 2006, and an observatory tower added in the 1930s was relocated then to Thornton Academy.