[5] Her father was a wealthy Boston merchant who provided a comfortable home for his wife, children, and an extended family of aunts, uncles, and grandmothers.

This is where she received her brief library training, learning sound bibliographic practice while working for one year under William Frederick Poole.

[9] In 1911, Hewins was awarded an honorary master of arts degree from Hartford's Trinity College in recognition of her 51 years of service at the library.

[10] Caroline Hewins left the Boston Athenaeum to take a job as librarian at the Young Men's Institute of Hartford where she was employed from 1875 until her death in 1926.

In order to better serve the community, Hewins expanded the library's hours to include Sunday afternoons so that working people could take advantage of the institution's resources.

In 1895 she opened the first branch library in the North Street Settlement House where she lived, staffing it herself one hour each evening.

[13] Despite this, one of her most significant accomplishments was her success in adding a children's room in 1904 before the end of her career at the Hartford Public Library.

[11] Soon after accepting the librarian position at the Hartford Young Men's Institute in 1876, she began inviting children to the library.

[15] The Institute Library had not welcomed children, but Hewins quickly changed that, and gathered together books by Grimm, Andersen, Hawthorne, Thackeray and Dickens to furnish a corner for them.

Three years after arriving at the Young Men's Institute of Hartford, she began to include reading lists for children in the libraries news bulletin.

[16] Opinionated, iconoclastic and not a follower of rules established by others, she believed that children deserved better books than the formulaic and often violent Horatio Alger stories and weekly novels of the penny press.

As chief librarian at Hartford Public, Hewins refused to ban them from the newly opened children's library.

[17] By the time the library became a free service in 1892, Miss Hewins had already lowered the annual subscription fee to $1 and doubled the membership.

[6] Hewins was always thinking of ways to reach children and so when she traveled, particularly abroad, she wrote extensive letters to the library's young patrons.

[11] In 1882, through the ALA, Hewins sent a questionnaire to twenty-five libraries around the country and asked: “What are you doing to encourage a love of reading in boys and girls?”[17] Based on the discouraging answers, which revealed that little was being done to encourage early readership, she made an impassioned report to the ALA that galvanized their attention.

[9] Hewins would also drive her horse and buggy throughout the state to encourage cooperation between schools and libraries for the benefit of children.

In New England Women: Their Increasing Influence, Margaret Bush writes that Caroline traveled in Connecticut to encourage the creation of libraries and talked to people about the importance of children's services.

She made of herself a center from which radiated an immeasurable influence, especially in the great revolution in the library world which, instead of banning the children, made them the first thought of the librarian who could look at the future as well as the present.” [11] The legacy of Caroline Hewins continued through the Caroline M. Hewins Lectures, so named by Frederic G. Melcher.