Hundreds, maybe thousands, of postcards. Hundreds of pins. Paintings — all originals because prints simply weren’t allowed in her home. All of which are items that belonged to Elsie Haskell, a life-long Dartmouth resident, who, according to her son Barry Haskell, “bled Dartmouth green.”

On Saturday, Sept. 14, the Dartmouth Cultural Center, located in what used to be the old Southworth Library at 404 Elm Street, dedicated its new garden to Elsie Haskell, who worked at the library for 35 years.

“When she retired at age 70, she said the biggest mistake of her life was retiring because it wasn’t her job, it was her love,” said Mary Lou Frias, Elsie Haskell’s daughter.

When she worked at the library she “did most everything,” Barry Haskell said.

This included bookkeeping, and, when construction started on the new south library in 1969, she was “instrumental” in building it up, he added.

The Dartmouth Cultural Center had been talking about dedicating the garden to Elsie Haskell for “forever,” said Pauline Santos, the president of the center’s board of directors.

“She would have been 100 in March,” Frias said. “This is what we had planned for her birthday.”

The dedication, she said, was going to be a surprise.

“I thought it was such an honor that they’d think of this,” Barry Haskell said. “She’d been retired for almost 30 years.”

His mother, he added, would often wonder why anyone would want to talk with her.

“She always seemed to have this ability to have people gravitate toward her,” he said.

Not that she minded.

“Everybody she talked with was special in her eyes,” Barry Haskell said. “She made you feel that way, that you were important and what you had to say had value.”

So much so that while she worked at the library, people would wait in line to check out a book with her just so they could “‘have a chance to talk with her.’”

But Elsie Haskell’s life extended far past the library shelves.

“She had an eye for beauty,” Frias said. “The most important one was in people.”

The hundreds and thousands of postcards she collected — never once did she throw any out, Frias said — were written by people across the South Coast.

“I went through them all, and what amazed me was how many people were writing thank you notes to her,” she said. “People I grew up with, friends from my childhood, had regularly written to her.”

There are 12 binders full of Elsie Haskell’s postcards: three full of cards from Dartmouth, six or seven from New Bedford, two from Fairhaven and two from Westport.

“We spent the past three years putting them in notebooks and making sure they were all together,” Frias said. “Just like a librarian would do.”

Where the hundreds of pins came from was no different.

“She [would] send notes and flowers to people to celebrate other people’s occasions,” Frias said. “People gave her these [pins] for the same reason.

Including one that a guest at the dedication on Saturday recognized.

“‘That was my mother’s pin,’” Frias said, repeating what the guest told her, “‘I gave it to Elsie, she was so touched that I gave her something that was my mother’s.’”

At the dedication were people from “so many different aspects of the community,” Barry Haskell said. “Long time friends who knew of it came and people who took the time because she was important to them came to participate.”

It was particularly notable, he added, because so many people present weren’t family.

“It would have given her great joy to know that she left enough of an impression on a community that they would honor her,”  Barry Haskell said. “She would have been humbled because she would not have thought that anything she did was very special.”

Even though Elsie Haskell died last December, Frias said her mom was at the dedication.

Pointing to a white flower pin on her chest, Frias said, “She’s on my shoulder.”