Shareholder Spotlight: Betty Shellenberger, Share No. 568

Betty Shellenberger, age 90, remembers bi-weekly trips downtown with her mother and father to visit the Library Company in our previous Frank Furness-designed home at Juniper and Locust streets. At the time the Library Company still functioned as a lending library, and this was the way Betty’s father was supplied with the detective stories he loved.  Her maternal grandfather, the Reverend George W. Lincoln, had originally purchased share 568 in 1917 when he moved to Germantown in the early part of the last century.  Her mother—also Elisabeth Shellenberger—took over ownership of the share on her father’s death in 1927, and she assumed ownership in her own right on her mother’s death in 1982.  Betty, a star athlete in her younger days, is a member of the US Lacrosse Hall of Fame, the Field Hockey Hall of Fame, the Philadelphia Sports Hall of Fame.  She is active as a guide at Cliveden and a supporter of Strawberry Mansion. For her, the Library Company is one of the most important institutions that remains in Philadelphia from colonial times.  Committed to the preservation of Philadelphia’s historic legacy, she believes “what the Library Company has to offer is wonderful!”