Carnegie’s First American Library Still Stands | Post 15 | Pennsylvania

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Across the USA

5 min readSep 22, 2016

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From 1886 through 1919 steel magnate Andrew Carnegie funded the construction of nearly 1,700 libraries in the United States. This is the first.

I’m in Braddock, Pennsylvania, at the eastern edge of Pittsburgh, the center of America’s nineteenth-century steel boom. Today, Braddock is a bit rough. Though Carnegie’s Edgar Thomson Steel Works still operates — built in 1872, it was one of the first Bessemer-process mills that made mass steel production possible — Braddock suffered greatly in the 1980s from the general collapse of the steel industry and the decade’s cocaine epidemic. By 1988 it was a “financially distressed municipality” and its population is now a 10-percent shadow of its 1920s self. Current mayor John Fetterman, a former Pittsburgh AmeriCorps volunteer with a Harvard master’s degree, has made national headlines for his revitalization efforts, pillars of which include art programs and renovation of vacant buildings.

The Carnegie Free Library of Braddock itself has community efforts to thank for its survival. Structural disrepair put the building in peril of demolition in the late 1970s, but the librarian and Braddock residents rallied to purchase the library and begin renovations. Reopened in 1983 as a single-room children’s library, the library has since progressively added functionality — an adult library; a wood-paneled gym; a music hall; a ceramics studio; an art lending collection.

Gyms, studios, and music halls might seem un-library-like, perhaps modern day schemes designed to compete for the fickle, social-media-distracted attention of (young) residents. But Carnegie libraries historically often served purposes beyond book lending. They provided overflow classrooms for expanding school districts, meeting space for community groups, and stations for the Red Cross. The original Braddock library had a billiards table on the first floor, a basement bathhouse for steel workers to shower, a swimming pool under the music hall, and duckpin bowling lanes.

Books, of course, were (are) primary to Carnegie libraries. Andrew Carnegie, a keen reader and avid book borrower from childhood, believed free lending libraries were a vital avenue to self improvement, enabling those who worked hard to acquire knowledge and succeed in meritocracies — as he, a Scottish immigrant, had done in America. His libraries pioneered the “open stack” design, whereby patrons could browse through and access a library’s entire collection, in contrast to the prevailing request-and-deliver model where librarians found desired books in closed stacks and brought them to borrowers at a delivery desk. With this innovation, delivery desks became circulation desks — the great big, spanning bars positioned at library entrances to deter book theft.

By the time Carnegie died in 1919, his grants had built almost half of the United States’ libraries.

My 200-mile route to southwest Pennsylvania was quite Rust Belt. I traveled a good part of the Buffalo-Pittsburg Highway, a.k.a U.S. Route 119, and I passed through tiny towns like Force, Home, Indiana, and Black Lick.

I saw my first snow of the trip.

For stretches, a sense of isolation pervaded Street View. I felt removed. From what? The action of America? I don’t blame the rural landscape, which could be all-American scenic.

Rather, it was the outright lack of people, the boarded-up buildings, and the dying property. At one point I jumped briefly onto I-80 — and connectedness returned. The many large cars and the chain restaurants assured me that I was somewhere that other people were, not alone in what might be a ghost landscape.

Case in ghost-town point was Austin, population ~550, but soulless as far as I could tell.

Yet even Austin had a story. Upon approach, zoned out by miles of low-resolution state park, I was startled to see what at first glance appeared to be a Roman aqueduct. Was I in the European countryside?

No, it was the ruins of a dam that failed in 1911 and, after reconstruction, again in 1942. The 1911 failure made world news, claiming 78 lives and destroying the Bayless Pulp & Paper Mill, which had built the dam in 1909 after several dry seasons proved the Freeman Run Valley less reliably wet than thought. No one died in the 1942 failure, but the 1911 disaster was featured in a 1999 documentary narrated by country legend Willie Nelson, and the Austin Dam ruins are now on the National Register of Historic Places.

Ground covered since last post:

Start:Wellsboro, Pa.
Coudersport, Pa.
Austin, Pa.
Driftwood, Pa.
Benezette, Pa.
Force, Pa.
DuBois. Pa.
Punxsutawney, Pa.
Home, Pa.
Indiana, Pa.
Black Lick, Pa.
End: Braddock, Pa.

Carnegie’s First American Library Still Stands | Post 15 | Pennsylvania

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Written by Matthew Muspratt