Andrew Carnegie, a prominent Scottish-American businessman who made his wealth through the steel industry, believed that the wealthy should use their riches to enrich society. Though he gave to many charities, one program he is particularly well known for is his largesse towards communities that wanted to build their own public libraries.
Carnegie created a formula which he used when donating his funds. Recipients had to demonstrate a need for the library, provide the building site, provide for continuing maintenance through a regular tax, and allow anyone to use the library for free (regardless of race, class, gender, etc.). Evadene Swanson describes the process that Fort Collins went through to get a library in her book, Fort Collins Yesterdays:
Mrs. Donald McLean, president of the Columbian Club, and wife of a Fort Collins doctor, wrote a request for aid in June, 1902. She received a promise of $10,000 in July, so rapidly that the library board with Mayor Frederick R. Baker, Ansel Watrous, and Lerah McHugh instructed the secretary to write for verification. “Is this authentic and is the money available now?” wrote Mary Kilgore.
… The amount given was estimated on a ratio of $2.00 per resident. Mrs. McLean gave 6,000 for her estimate of the population, the census of 1900 had 3,000. Thus a grant of $10,000 was generous.
… Mrs. McLean’s appeal stressed nine churches, no saloons, five hundred students at the Agricultural College, and new families coming to very humble homes because of the sugar beet and brick factories.
On Monday I posted a picture of the old Carnegie Library for #MailbagMonday. In addition to a good discussion on the probable date of the photo, I received links to several photos of the library that Charles Willgren dug up from around the internet. It was such a wonderful set of photos, that I thought I’d stick them all together here for you all to peruse.
Thank you, Charles, for all the work you did in finding these!
This is the photo of the library that I posted to social media on Monday. Charles noted that the title of the eBay entry gave a 1907 date for the card. (Somehow I’d missed that when I first posted it.)
This same photo can be found in an earlier postcard from 1906.
This photo of the Carnegie Library from 1906 was found on CardCow.com.
And this one from a collection of Carnegie Libraries in the “square” states.
This postcard was postmarked in 1912.
There’s no date on these next two, but as Charles pointed out to me, you get a good view of the library with awnings both extended and retracted in these. I was also pleased to note the bicycles out front. (I also write a local bicycling blog.)
Here the awnings on the library were fully extended and the bike rack was full. This photo is from CardCow.com.
Here the awnings were pulled back and the bike rack is still there, but it’s empty. This photo is from CardCow.com as well.
This is the back side of the above postcard, which includes a nice description of the library.
There are a few photos from our local Archive as well.
This picture is from about 1904. The photo is from the Fort Collins Archive – H03577.
Though Charles found a copy of this card in another collection, it turns out that our local Archive has one as well. This was the only photo we could find of the library taken from the north. (FC Archive – H03578A.)
And this photo I found in the Denver Archive.
This photo is from the Denver Library Archive. It’s from the McClure collection. Reference #MCC-356.
Since being built, the library has had an addition built onto the back side in the same style. When the new library was built on the east side of the block, this building became the local museum. But when the Discovery Center and the History Museum were combined into the Fort Collins Museum of Discovery, this building began being used for other purposes. The Arts Incubator of the Rockies was here. But I’m not sure what the closure of Beet Street will mean in terms of tenancy.
Here are some more recent photos of this building that I’ve taken.
April 21, 2014
February 21, 2015
Wikipedia has a very interesting article on Carnegie Libraries. I got some of my information from the Wikipedia page and some from Evadene Swanson’s book, Fort Collins Yesterdays.
I grew up going to this library in the 1960s. Spent many afternoons in the children’s area and felt so excited when I was old enough to finally be able to go upstairs to the “grownups” part of the library. I was devastated when I went. back to visit one year and they had covered all the beautiful windows to turn it into some kind of “learning center”. Looks like some one came to their senses and brought it back to its original glory.
What wonderful memories, Helen! Thanks for sharing.
I also was a child in the 1960s and 1970s who visited the children’s library. When my sister and I were done finding and checking out books, we took the somewhat scary (to a kid) and confusing route up to the main library to find our dad. The Fort Collins library was also the first time I ever saw a “photocopy” being made. I think it cost 25 cents and was glossy and hard to read. But my sister needed a page out of the Encyclopedia Brittanica for a school assignment and my dad paid the quarter and my sister got her page of the Encyclopedia. Our family later got an outdated set of the Encyclopedia Brittanica from the same library at an auction. It was missing two volumes, but our family could have never have afforded a new set.
Thanks for sharing this, Michael!
I worked at the FC Public Library from 1975 to 1978. The move from the Carnegie building to the Thomas L. Hand designed new library was exciting. However, my most fond memories were at the Carnegie building: the friendly patrons, the camaraderie of the staff, and the dramatic yet quaint building itself. I now live in a large city, and my local library is a Carnegie building – one of two Carnegie library building of many branches here. Both are similar yet with their own personality, like the Fort Collins branch.
Tilting The Balance, Volume 2 of Harry Turtledove’s WorldWar alternative history series, mentions the Carnegie Library in Fort Collins. The book is set c. 1942-43.
I looked up the library on the ‘net.
My wife and I have visited Fort Collins twice – I think I recognize the library as being in the northern part of the CSU campus.
The Carnegie library is located at 200 Mathews Street – east of College Avenue and probably about a half mile from the CSU campus.