Annie Brincks welcomes all to browse the Adair Room.
Unique items from more than 150 years
By Rich Wicks | Guthrie Center Times, June 2026
A newspaper report on the state runner-up boys basketball team in 1979.
Small-town pride runs deep in this part of the country. Annie Brincks of Adair oversees a collection of items that reflects that pride in the town where she lives and works. But it is not just her collection. It belongs to the entire community and is housed in a separate room at the Adair Public Library.
As library director, Brincks said the Adair Room has existed longer than she has worked in the building. During her tenure, however, she has seen scores of residents visit to enjoy the history, education and nostalgia the room offers.
“I’ve worked here since 2015. I left in 2021 to take a different job, then came back in 2023,” Brincks said.
Some of the materials are what one might expect to find in a library, including local history books, church cookbooks, high school yearbooks and scrapbooks documenting Adair through the years.
Other items, however, may come as a surprise. The collection includes high school letter jackets and sweaters, vintage photographs of Adair pioneers, novelty items distributed by local businesses over the decades, videos of notable Adair events and many other memorabilia items.
An Adair letter jacket and sweatshirts from Adair events.
“People can check out the yearbooks. There are some old VHS tapes of different events. Local author books are back there, too,” Brincks said. “The thing people are most interested in is the class pictures.”
Most anyone from the area could certainly find photos and information about parents, grandparents or even great-grandparents in the room. For example, two large portraits donated by Nadine Arnold Petersen depict her great-uncle and great-aunt, Franklin D. Arnold and Laura Arnold. The couple were among the first settlers in Adair in 1869. Their son, Charles, was the first baby born in Adair.
The high school yearbooks chronicle the early years of education in the area, from Adair High School to Adair-Casey and later ACGC. Yearbooks in the collection date back at least to 1925 and continue through the present day.
VHS tapes from various events in Adair’s history.
One shelf includes numerous church cookbooks and other items from local churches, both past and present.
“There’s a church that closed a few years ago, and one of the members brought in some things from there to donate,” Brincks said.
Not all of the town’s history reflects positive events. The Adair Room also includes information about many of the more difficult moments in Adair’s past, including news reports and photographs documenting tornado damage and other severe storms in the area.
One of Adair’s most notable historical events was the first train robbery in the West, carried out by the Jesse James-Younger gang in 1873. The Adair Room includes books, photographs and information about the event and the aftermath.
Brincks said the Adair Room is available whenever the library is open and is entering its busiest season.
“In the summers, especially, we’ll get road trip people that stop in and spend quite a bit of time just looking through, because they’re interested in history,” she said.