As I pulled into the parking lot of the Haskell Free Library & Opera House — a building famous for straddling the U.S. border with Canada — my phone vibrated with a text from Verizon: “Welcome to Canada,” it read. “Enjoy your trip.”
Am I in Canada? I wondered. My car was the only one in the lot. I hadn’t gone through customs or noticed any checkpoints, but I knew I was in border territory. I shrugged it off and got out.
The Haskell, which opened in 1904, was built as a symbol of friendship and unity between the Québec town of Stanstead and its American next-door neighbor, Derby Line. The library is truly international: It is co-owned by the two towns, has two addresses — one in each country — and is run by a board of four Americans and three Canadians.
Though the towns are divided by an international border, that line has historically been quite porous. Rather than walls or fences, the border is marked with handmade signs and sparse rows of boulders. Locals remember the days when they’d drive across with a friendly wave from border patrol. For more than 120 years, Canadians were allowed to walk along a sidewalk to cross the border to the library’s front door on the American side.
“You crossed illegally into Canada, and you are being detained.” Canadian border official
But recently, the Haskell has been caught up in the escalating political tensions between the U.S. and Canada. American border officials are barring Canadians from using the front door without going through an official border checkpoint, citing security concerns. In response, library staff are allowing Canadians to enter using an emergency exit door on the Canadian side of the building. These changes have attracted media attention from all over the world, helping the library raise nearly $150,000 that will be used to build the Canadian entrance into something more dignified and accessible.
As Seven Days‘ new immigration and border reporter, I had come to attend a film screening in the Haskell Opera House, a roughly 400-seat theater above the library. Doors were to open at 6:30 p.m., but I arrived early. It was a quiet evening; the area felt almost deserted. I wandered around outside the building, taking photos. Then, as I walked up a nearby driveway to get a better view of the library from above, I heard a siren. A uniformed Canadian border official drove up to my car and ordered me to come to him.
Me?
“Yes, you,” he said. “You crossed illegally into Canada, and you are being detained.”
Within minutes, two U.S. Border Patrol vehicles also pulled up. “Look at all the commotion you’ve caused,” one of the agents joked. They questioned me: Where had I come from? Why was I there? At that point, I was in the U.S., meaning I had crossed back over the border illegally as well, they told me. They took my ID to check for criminal history and then, once I was cleared, handed my passport to the Canadian officer.
He snapped a photo and then told me he would make a note in my file. Now, whenever I visit Canada, he said, I will be stopped and searched. When I told him I was attending an event that evening in the library, where I would be crossing the border within the building, he said he would talk to library staff to make sure I stayed on the American side.
“Sorry,” he said. “This is how it is now.”
In the moment, this felt personal. In reality, though, the encounter seemed to reflect the toll that mounting political slights, heightened border enforcement and aggressive tariff policy have taken on the long-standing goodwill between Canada and the U.S. The border is newly charged in a way that is palpable.
But step inside the Haskell, and those tensions melt away.
Based on the dozens of visitors I saw at the Haskell, people from far and wide are still eager to connect across the border, perhaps now more than ever.
The border is still evident — in fact, a line of black tape runs across the library floor, marking where it bisects the building. But it has no effect here: People are free to wander across it, stepping from one country to the other. This line, though not originally part of the building (it was added much later, in service of the Canadian and American insurance companies that split coverage of the building), has become one of the library’s main attractions. Visitors hop over it, straddle it, photograph it. It’s there to delight rather than divide.
These days, when anxiety over crossing the border is keeping many people from traveling internationally and some Canadians are boycotting travel to the U.S., the library offers a safe, neutral ground for intermingling. Based on the dozens of visitors I saw at the Haskell, people from far and wide are still eager to connect across the border, perhaps now more than ever.
The next morning, I returned to the library, where story time was under way in the children’s reading room — a bright, colorful space with stained-glass windows, elaborate pressed-steel ceilings and a strip of black tape across the hardwood floors.
Lynn Prindes, 55, and her two daughters, Emily, 9, and Molly, 4, had driven 15 hours from Chicago to be there because Emily had learned about the Haskell as part of a school project. They stopped along the way at other attractions, including the Ben & Jerry’s factory and the Vermont Teddy Bear factory — but the Haskell was the main event.
“Our whole trip was based around Wednesday story time,” Prindes told me.
The librarian picked out a few books, and the small group of kids voted on which ones they wanted to hear. For an hour, she read aloud to them in both English and French. Then they had some time for arts and crafts.
Angela Bailey of Groton, who happened to be in the area that day, brought her 6-year-old son, Logan, to story time.”He doesn’t have a passport, and mine is expired, so it’s fun to still say we came to Canada,” Bailey said.
Throughout the day, the place bustled with tourists from both sides of the border who came to buy merch, take guided tours and pose for photos, as well as locals who came to check out a summer read from the library’s collection of more than 20,000 books in French and English.
Standing under a 120-year-old moose head mounted on the wall, Claudette Anders inquired at the librarian’s desk about where to find a particular book. Anders, 70, told me she has been coming to the Haskell from her home in Ogden, Québec, for 40 years.
Tensions around the library have never been as high as they are now, she said, shaking her head: “This is the big one.”
But she makes a point to come anyway. The opera house has the best cultural programming in the area that doesn’t involve making the trip to Montréal, she said.
“I don’t let politics affect my quality of life,” she told me. “I can still come in through the other door. So what?”
Nearby, a Canadian visitor was stepping back and forth over the border tape. To a friend, he recounted in French the visit of U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to the library earlier this year. The story has become local lore. Standing on the American side, Noem reportedly said, “USA, No. 1.” Then she crossed the line into Canada and said, “The 51st state.”
The man acted this out for his friend and then switched to English to deliver his thoughts about Noem: “Fuck you, eh? Fuck you.”
Outside, under the warm sunshine, visitors approached the line of concrete blocks topped with flower pots that mark the border on one side of the building. Many posed for photos, getting as close to the border as possible, sitting or standing on the blocks. Some ventured through briefly to the other side.
In the afternoon, a U.S. Customs and Border Protection agent pulled up outside the library. A Canadian officer on the other side of the border told him that there had been a call about an “explorer” on the American side. A group of Canadian visitors had taken a few steps on American soil before turning around, he said. They were back in Canada now, walking to their car.
The officials agreed to let it slide. The library is surrounded by cameras, the American agent told me. (He spoke on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak to the media.) The Haskell gets a lot of attention, but as a border official, “This is the least of my stress,” he said, before driving off.
The previous night, after my own brush with border officers, I had entered the Haskell on the American side and climbed to the opera house on the third floor, where the movie Sorry, Baby was screening at 7 p.m.
From what I could tell, the Canadian officer hadn’t contacted anyone about restricting my movement inside the building. I bought a $5 movie ticket and a $1 bag of popcorn and picked out a place to sit.
About a dozen other people filed into the theater, chatting quietly as the lights lowered. As the movie began, I looked down and realized the border tape crossed right in front of me. I was sitting in the U.S., with my feet in Canada.
When the film ended and the credits rolled, we gathered our things and slowly wandered out of the theater into the calm night — the Canadians through their door and the Americans through ours.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Crossing the Line | Haskell Free Library was built on the U.S.-Canadian line to showcase goodwill. As relations sour, tensions are evident.”
This article appears in Aug 13-19, 2025.
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