# Haskell Free Library and Opera House

The Haskell Free Library and Opera House (French: Bibliothèque et salle d'opéra Haskell) is a Victorian building that straddles the Canada–United States border, in Rock Island (now part of Stanstead), Quebec, and Derby Line, Vermont, respectively. The Opera House opened on June 7, 1904, having deliberately been built on the international border. It was declared a heritage building by both countries in the 1970s and 1980s.
The library has two different addresses: 93 Caswell Avenue, Derby Line, Vermont, and 1 rue Church (Church Street), Stanstead, Quebec.

## Overview

The building was designed by architect James Ball in the Queen Anne Revival style. The first floor houses the book collection and reading rooms and a 500-seat theater occupies the second and third floors.
The library collection and the opera stage are located in Stanstead, but the main entrance and most opera seats are located in Derby Line. Because of this, the Haskell is sometimes called "the only library in the U.S.A. with no books" and "the only opera house in the U.S.A. with no stage". There is no entrance from Canada; however, there is an emergency exit on the Canadian side of the building. All patrons and visitors must use the U.S. entrance to access the building. Patrons from Canada are permitted to enter the United States door without needing to report to customs by using a prescribed route through the sidewalk of rue Church (Church Street), provided that they return to Canada immediately upon leaving the building using the same route.
A thick black line runs beneath the seats of the opera house and diagonally across the center of the library's reading room to mark the Canada–United States border. The stage and half of the seats are in Canada; the remainder of the opera hall is in the US. The building has different postal codes (93 Caswell Avenue, 05830 and 1, rue Church (Church Street), J0B 3E2) and different telephone area codes (+1-802-873-3022 and +1-819-876-2471) in its two respective countries.

### Library

The library has a collection of more than 20,000 books in French and English and is open to the public 38 hours a week. French and English books are co-filed. Because of different language conventions in the direction of printing titles on spines—English books have titles written top-to-bottom, and French books bottom-to-top—the language of a book can be immediately determined.

### Opera house

The opera house on the second floor was rumored to be modeled after the old Boston Opera House in a somewhat scaled down fashion (it seats four hundred), but the Boston Opera house was built afterwards. A painted scene of Venice on the drop curtain and four other scenes by Erwin Lamoss (1901) and plaster scrollwork complete with plump cherubs built in Boston ornament the opera hall and balcony in this historic building, which was constructed with two-foot-thick (0.61 m) walls built of granite from Stanstead.

## History

The Haskell Free Library and Opera House was a gift from Martha Stewart Haskell and her son Horace "Stewart" Haskell. It was built in memory of her parents Catherine and Horace Stewart and her husband Carlos Freeman Haskell. The Haskells wanted Canadians and Americans to have equal access to the Library and Opera House and so they chose to build on the border. Construction began in 1901; the Opera House opened in 1904 and the Library in 1905.
The Haskell family later donated the building to the towns of Derby Line and Rock Island in Haskell's memory; it is run by a private international board of four American and three Canadian directors.
The building is recognized as a historic site in both countries. In the United States, it has been registered in the National Register of Historic Places since 1976. In Canada, it was designated a National Historic Site in 1985 and has been a provincial heritage site since 1977.
Following the Trump travel ban in January 2017, the library served as a site for international reunions, as it is partly in Canada and partly in the United States. The play A Distinct Society by Kareem Fahmy is based on the family reunions that take place at the library. Officially, however, family reunions and cross-border visits are no longer allowed.
In January 2018, a man from Montreal pleaded guilty to charges related to the smuggling of handguns from Vermont into Quebec—in 2010 and 2011, he and accomplices illegally brought handguns, which had been purchased in the United States, into Canada via a scheme that involved hiding the handguns in the bathroom of the Haskell Free Library.
The library was closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020 and did not fully reopen until spring 2022.