Paulding County Carnegie Library

About this property

The Paulding County Carnegie Library is a historic Carnegie library in the village of Paulding, Ohio, United States. Constructed in the early twentieth century, it is a simple building that has served as the core of Paulding County's library system since its construction, and it has been designated a historic site. As late as the 1890s, Paulding lacked a library of any sort. Finding this situation undesirable, members of a local women's club subscribed money to establish a small collection in 1893. Ten years later, multiple groups of local citizens met to organize a public library, which began with a collection of six hundred books. In its earliest years, the library had no fixed home: it itinerated among downtown storefronts and different homes, including the house of the librarian herself. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the construction of public libraries was proceeding rapidly, due in part to the generosity of steel tycoon Andrew Carnegie. Many large and small cities, such as the Ohio communities of Columbus and East Liverpool, constructed libraries with money donated by Carnegie, but none had been built in small villages such as Paulding. Nevertheless, local residents worked to secure money from Carnegie, and their efforts succeeded where all before them had failed: his grant provided for the establishment of a library to serve the entirety of Paulding County. Built with this donation, the Paulding County Carnegie Library was the first Carnegie library to serve an entire county instead of a single city. The process of obtaining the money for the library and constructing the building with the resulting funds occupied approximately three years, beginning in 1912 and concluding in 1914. Since its completion, the library has never been significantly modified, and it remains a significant part of the community. Located on South Main Street near downtown, the library remains one of Paulding's most important community buildings and a center of local pride. In 1911, Andrew Carnegie's private secretary, James Bertram, published a set of guidelines that he saw as ideal for library architecture. Since three years previously, he had required libraries to submit plans for his approval before releasing money, due to what he saw as overly ornate designs being built with his employer's money. The Paulding County Carnegie Library is one of the best examples of Bertram's guidelines: instead of ornate entryways and runaway detailing, its design maximizes the amount of space devoted to the interior, and the floor plan is designed for maximum efficiency. The library board chose a design submitted by a Columbus company, Howard and Merriam, which had already produced the design for the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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