How Andrew Carnegie Turned His Fortune Into A Library Legacy

          

 

by Susan Stamberg - NPR - August 01, 2013       

     

Patrons in the reading room of the Carnegie Library of Homestead in Munhall, Pa., circa 1900. The Carnegie Steel Co.fought back against striking steel workers in Homestead in 1892.

      

Library of Congress

 

Andrew Carnegie was once the richest man in the world. Coming as a dirt poor kid from Scotland to the U.S., by the 1880s he'd built an empire in steel — and then gave it all away: $60 million to fund a system of 1,689 public libraries across the country.

     

   

Carnegie donated $300,000 to build Washington, D.C.'s oldest library — a beautiful beaux arts building that dates back to 1903. Inscribed above the doorway are the words: Science, Poetry, History. The building was "dedicated to the diffusion of knowledge.

It opened in 1903 to women, children, all races — African-Americans remember when it was the only place downtown where they could use the bathrooms. During the Depression, D.C.'s Carnegie Library was called "the intellectual breadline." No one had any money, so you went there to feed your brain. Washington writer Paul Dickson, author of The Library in America, says the marble palace was an early and imposing Capitol institution.

"This went in well before the monumental limestone and marble buildings of Pennsylvania Avenue, Constitution Avenue. This was one of the first really beautiful public buildings," he says.
Carnegie libraries are still the best buildings in many towns. Over the years some have been expanded or torn down. And, in addition to books and computers, Carnegie libraries find new ways to serve the community.

      

As a teen, Andrew Carnegie worked as a bobbin boy in a textile mill and was determined to improve his lot in life. Above, Carnegie as a young man in 1868.

Hulton Archive/Getty Images             

 

Andrew Carnegie gave $7,500 to Woodbine. That paid for the 1908 building itself. The towns had to raise money for books, salaries and maintenance. Before Carnegie, Bantam says, the library was located in an unusual section of Woodbine's town hall: "It was over the jail," she explains, "they had to close the library when the jail was occupied."
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