Stefanie Colgrove's little idea keeps getting bigger.

Boxes filled with books keep arriving at her home, sent from all over the country by book lovers who have heard of her idea for a library in the Fundamentalist LDS communities of Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Ariz.

"There's a lady coming up from Chandler, down the Phoenix way," she told the Deseret News. "She's bringing 2,000. I would say there's close to 5,000 books we have to start going through."

Colgrove wants to open a library in the FLDS communities. Aside from the local school libraries, there hasn't been a public library there in many years.

Now, she could get government support. The Mohave County, Ariz., Board of Supervisors is scheduled to vote Monday on funding a library there. While some politicians question it, Colgrove remains undaunted.

"We are going to have a library either way," she said. "We just might have to all volunteer to run it."

Roots

It started with the idea to lend out books in her home.

Colgrove, an ex-FLDS member who moved back to the border towns to raise her family, wanted a library for everyone. The rumor was that FLDS leader Warren Jeffs ordered the old library closed and all of the books disappeared, she said.

Local community groups offered to help start a book drive and collect used bookshelves. After a story first appeared in the Deseret News in January, Colgrove was flooded with books. The huge numbers of donations led her to sign a deal for a building with the court-controlled United Effort Plan Trust (the FLDS Church's real-estate holdings arm), which controls homes, businesses and property in the FLDS communities.

Now, the future Hildale/Colorado City library is a log building on the corner of Central and Johnson streets. Colgrove and the "Friends of the Library" have been working with the Mohave County Library District to create a formal, county-run library.

Censorship

When she first visited the site of the future library, Kathy McGeehee had concerns.

"There's going to be no censorship. It'll be an actual county library and the community would not be in control of the library," the district's development director said.

McGeehee said they had problems with the first library, with books being censored by community members to make them unreadable.

"There was a Nancy Drew book in the old library. It was so censored so much there were only two or three words on the page that hadn't been blacked out," she said.

A bookmobile that would venture to the border towns never really caught on, McGeehee said, but the idea of a permanent facility is getting a lot of support.