Gratia Alta Countryman (pronounced gray-sha) (November 29, 1866 – July 26, 1953) was a nationally-known librarian who led the Minneapolis Public Library from 1904 to 1936.

Countryman graduated from Hastings High School in 1882, and her father moved the family to Minneapolis so that both she and her sister could attend college.

She was recommended by university president Cyrus Northrop to Herbert Putnam for a job at the Minneapolis Public Library, where she started in 1889 under James Kendall Hosmer.

[7] Countryman was a capable leader who, over her 32 years as head librarian, helped increase the library’s scope and reach exponentially.

Gratia Countryman's eulogy summed up her life perfectly: "In her youth a library was a sacred precinct for guarding the treasures of thought, to be entered only by the scholar and the student...

Her crusading zeal carried the book to every part of her city and county, to the little child, the factory worker, the farmer, the businessman, the hospital patient, the blind and the old.