On the evening of October 6, 2026, the Lincoln Branch of the Peoria Public Library will hand out lengths of soft cotton cord and teach whoever walks in how to tie them into small, friendly ghosts. The workshop runs from 6 to 7 p.m. at 1312 West Lincoln Avenue. It is free, it is aimed at adults, and the library promises that no prior experience with a knot is required. All the materials are provided. The only thing a participant needs to bring is a phone call: registration is handled by dialing 309-497-2600.
It is a modest-sounding hour of Halloween crafting, the kind of program that fills a community-room table on a Tuesday night and rarely makes news. But the room it happens in has been part of Peoria's South Side for more than a century, and the story of how it got there is a story about a neighborhood deciding it wanted a library of its own.
The South Side's first library wasn't a library building at all. It opened in 1903 inside a settlement-style structure called the Neighborhood House, a multipurpose space that served the surrounding community. By 1909, the branch had outgrown its quarters. The city petitioned the Carnegie Foundation and received a $20,000 grant to put up a dedicated building. To cover the library's ongoing maintenance, the city passed an annual tax of $2,000, a detail that says something about how seriously Peorians took the project: they weren't just accepting a gift, they were agreeing to keep it alive.
The Peoria architecture firm Hotchkiss & Harris designed the building in the Classical Revival style, and construction began in 1910 under builder John J. McDonald. It was finished the following year and dedicated on June 16, 1911, becoming the first dedicated library building on Peoria's South Side. More than a century later, on May 28, 2014, the structure was added to the National Register of Historic Places, recognized both for its architecture and for its role in the life of the neighborhood.
For most of its first hundred years, the Lincoln Branch was small — just over 4,500 square feet, according to a profile in Peoria Magazine. That constrained footprint didn't stop it from becoming a hub. Cynthia Smith, who began her career with Peoria Public Library as a children's librarian, recalled that kids at the Lincoln Branch gravitated to her desk almost immediately. "Young girls were gathering around my desk," she told the magazine. "They wanted to know about my nail polish, my hair, and where I bought my clothes. And I thought, how can I reverse this? Because I don't want it to be about me. I want it to be about them."
Smith is now the branch manager, and roughly a decade ago an expansion tripled the library's space. Peoria Public Library executive director Randall Yelverton has called her "a superstar to every family who visits the Lincoln Branch," noting that when people walk through the door and see her, "their eyes light up. Not just the children, the adults too." Smith's own philosophy is simple and explains a lot about why a macrame ghost workshop would end up on the calendar at all: "I knew for this particular site that we had to have original programs," she said. "Programs are what brought the community in." She has described wanting to recreate the sense of safety and belonging she felt at the Catholic church activities of her South Side childhood — a place where her parents felt comfortable letting her go, and where the community gathered.
So the October craft night is not an anomaly. It is the latest in a long line of programming decisions made by people who believe a library's job is to be a gathering place first and a book warehouse second. The ghost itself is a small object, but the craft behind it carries its own long history. Macrame is a textile technique built on knotting rather than weaving or knitting, and its primary building blocks are the square knot and various forms of hitching, especially the half hitch. The technique's decorative use is ancient — fringe-like plaiting and braiding appear in Babylonian and Assyrian carvings, captured in stone statuary — and it was long practiced by sailors, who knotted elaborate ornamental work to cover everything from knife handles to bottles to parts of their ships. Arab weavers are credited with spreading the craft, and its name is generally traced to an Arabic word for fringe or ornamental edging. In the 1970s it became a fixture of American home decor, and in recent years it has enjoyed a quiet revival as a meditative, low-cost craft that requires little more than cord and patience.
That last quality is probably why it suits a library so well. Macrame is forgiving. The knots are simple enough to learn in an evening, and a ghost — soft, white, a little lopsided — is an unusually tolerant subject. There is no wrong way to make one look spooky.
The Lincoln Branch sits at 1312 West Lincoln Avenue, in the 61605 ZIP code, on a stretch of Peoria's South Side that has seen its share of change over the past century. The building has outlasted the Neighborhood House, the Carnegie Foundation that paid for it, and the original 1903 branch that preceded it. What has persisted is the idea behind it: that a neighborhood deserves a place to gather, and that a free hour of making something with your hands is a reasonable thing for a city to fund.
The workshop is scheduled for October 6, 2026, from 6 to 7 p.m. It is free and open to adults, materials included, no experience necessary. To register, call 309-497-2600. Bring nothing but the willingness to tie a few knots — and, perhaps, a tolerance for ghosts that turn out a little more charming than frightening.