In culture the county is recovering the position it proudly held one hundred years ago before ground down by war and poverty. Its public schools, then nonexistent, now under the supervision of Superintendent O. L. Emerick, grow and improve and are supplemented by several excellent private institutions of which Foxcroft, near Middleburg, has been described and the very successful Llangollan School for younger children, opened in 1937 near Leesburg by Mrs. Frances L. Patton (Miss Louise D. Harrison) also may be mentioned. Loudoun has produced a naval architect of international reputation in Lewis Nixon (1861- ), two well known artists in Hugh A. Breckenridge (1870-1937) and the late Lucian Powell and a number of writers upon her history whose works have been referred to frequently in the foregoing pages. Supplementing her schools and extending their educational work the county has two large libraries, the older founded in Leesburg in 1907 as the Leesburg Library largely through the efforts of the late Mrs. Levi P. Morton and her daughter, Loudoun's benefactress, Mrs. William C. Eustis of Oatlands. In the year 1918 the Thomas Balch Library was incorporated and at once, on land bought for that purpose through public subscription, the late Edwin Swift Balch and Thomas Willing Balch of Philadelphia, sons of Thomas Balch of international arbitration fame (who was born in Leesburg in 1821) began the construction for it of the beautiful library building on West Market Street, Leesburg, which so enhances the charm of the town. Mr. Waddy B. Wood, a Washington architect of recognized authority on the early Federal period of American architecture, drew the plans and in 1922 the building was completed and dedicated and the collection of books of the old Leesburg Library was presented and moved to the new institution. That collection, since then much enlarged, now numbers well over 10,000 volumes and is of a very definite value to town and county.[188] [188] For a history of the Library see article in _The Northern Virginian_, Vol. 4, No. 1, p. 22, by the present author who is deeply interested in the institution of which he has been President and a Director since 1925. Of its fine collection of historical material on Loudoun free use has been made in the present work.