On a hot September afternoon, 16-year-old Jackson Biffar drove west to the town of Pottsboro, a rural community of 2,500 people north of Dallas. He started his journey from Ivanhoe, another tiny town an hour away, just south of where the Red River defines the Texas-Oklahoma border. Along the highway, occasional pump jacks and farmhouses are swallowed up by rippling fields, green even in the last days of summer. It’s a 44-mile drive Biffar knows well: He made it every Saturday in August.
His destination is the Pottsboro Area Library. Just off Pottsboro’s Main Street, a sparse strip of buildings occupied only by the fire department, police station, and town hall, the library might not look like much. Its one-story, red-brick exterior is about the size of a single-family home. But inside, the Pottsboro Area Library is bustling with visitors from North Texas and Oklahoma. They come because there’s so much here: video games, a community garden, access to remote doctor visits, and books, of course.
