Stearns, Lutie Eugenia (13 September 1866–25 December 1943), librarian and lecturer, was born in Stoughton, Massachusetts, the daughter of Isaac Holden Stearns, a doctor, and Catherine Guild. She was the youngest of eleven children. The family moved to Wisconsin in 1871, when her father became the superintendent of the Soldiers’ Home in Wauwatosa, near Milwaukee, where he worked for five years, leaving to take up general practice in 1876 in Milwaukee. He later abandoned the family, divorced his wife, and returned to Massachusetts. Stearns attended Milwaukee State Normal School for two years, completed her training in 1886 (records of University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee suggest 1887), and taught fourth grade for two years in the Milwaukee public schools, working with the children of German immigrants. Dismayed by her students’ lack of exposure to American culture and appalled by the lack of reading material available in her school, she remedied the situation by borrowing books from the Milwaukee Public Library. In 1888, during an era when librarians often perceived themselves as social reformers, she became head of the Circulation Department at the library and worked vigorously to increase circulation by outreach to schools, gradually boosting school circulation to 98,000 per year in 1894....
