Blue Ridge Regional Branch Library officials on Wednesday announced the Patrick County Bookmobile Fund met its more than $180,000 goal 15-months after earnestly beginning, and delivery of the new bookmobile is expected later this year.

At a press conference Wednesday Rick Ward, director of the regional library system, said “we started a concerted fundraising effort” on ‘Giving Tuesday’ in 2016. “Less than a year and a half later, we met our goal,” and exceeded it, through a number of events and donations.

The fundraising effort totaled $188,000, which is more than $182,000 needed for the new bookmobile, Ward said.

This “has truly been a community wide effort, with donors ranging from the Patrick County government to schools, churches and civic organizations, as well as hundreds of individual contributors,” Ward said.

In addition to the Patrick County Board of Supervisors, which contributed $35,000, other major contributors included a grant from the Richard S. Reynolds Foundation; the Friends of the Library, which held book sales; and the Blue Ridge Regional Library Foundation, which conducted a number of fundraising activities including the “Writing Our Region” event that featured noted Virginia authors Beth Macy and Martin Clark, Ward said.

“We have had such a generous response to our appeal, not only from folks here in Patrick County” but also those from Martinsville, Henry County and former local residents, he added.

“We ordered a new bookmobile on March 23,” at a cost of little more than $182,000, Ward said.

The new vehicle will be custom built using a freightliner chassis, Cummins diesel engine and generator and an Allison transmission.

Once built, the chassis then will be retrofitted by Moroney Bookmobiles of Worchester, Mass. In addition to being low bidder on the project, Moroney also manufactured the current 20-year-old bookmobile, Ward said.

The retro fitting process is expected to take an additional five months, he added.

The new bookmobile will be similar in size and capacity to the current 20-year-old bookmobile, Ward said.

Once in service, the “new bookmobile will provide more reliable service and more power to deal with the county’s rugged terrain, promising many more years to ‘Keep Reading Rolling’ throughout Patrick County,” he said.

The Bookmobile Fund will continue accepting donations/contributions to help pay for any needed repairs or unexpected expenses, Ward said.

“To say that I am amazed we reached our bookmobile goal in a little over a year would be a giant understatement,” said Tammy Cope, bookmobile coordinator. “The bookmobile has always been a vital asset” to local residents, she said, adding the new vehicle will allow that service to continue.

Garry Clifton, current branch manager of the library in Patrick, served as a bookmobile librarian for 20 years.

“I would like to remind everyone that we are here not just to celebrate the purchase of a new vehicle, but to affirm our commitment to the continuation of a much needed service in Patrick County; a service that has spanned 70 years and served countless people in our community,” Clifton said.

The bookmobile provided “books to a little boy on an isolated farm, igniting his curiosity to explore the wonders of the world and, in the process, led him to become governor of Virginia,” Clifton said of Gov. Gerald Baliles.

The same bookmobile service “half a century later helped a little girl find the books and information she needed to create her own comic books and a webpage as a platform for her art,” Clifton said of Rachel Nabors, an award winning cartoonist who now works for Microsoft.

“Her storytelling skills developed into an award winning web-comic and she now travels internationally as a much sought out speaker on web animation.”

Both Baliles and Nabors “credit our bookmobile service with providing the key that unlocked the world for them,” Clifton said. “Think of all the other lives, numbering the thousands, that have been positively impacted” by the bookmobile in the last 70 years of operation.

“Now think about all of the lives that will be served during the life of this new bookmobile,” Clifton said. “That is what we are celebrating.”

The new bookmobile is expected to be delivered by the end of the year or in early 2019, officials said.