Recovery of significant achievements by exemplary individuals and institutions in public education and librarianship informs our present understanding and motivates future efforts. This narrative history recounts some of the struggles and successes of a great city library when the very conception of a free, public library was still being defined. In an era of rapid social and technological change, the Los Angeles Public Library (LAPL) designed a system of branch libraries to reach patrons where they lived, worked, played and attended school. LAPL's support of public schools provided the original model on which it developed its branches. These extensions of the main library overcame obstacles of poverty, distance, age and health while also relieving congestion at the central facility. At the turn of the twentieth century when political support was unreliable and financial support was weak, LAPL creatively required community participation, local financial support, and sustained usage as sufficient justifications to establish a branch library. This story of the origins of LAPL's branch libraries provides a historical background against which teachers and librarians can appreciate their shared value of public access to knowledge and jointly promote and preserve open access for students and patrons to information in the age of the Internet. (Text contains 258 notes, historical images, appendices include a chronology and a description of primary and chief secondary sources.)