When did Carnegie start building libraries?
A Carnegie Library, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 1902-1903. Courtesy of The New York Public Library. The first Carnegie library was built in Andrew Carnegie’s hometown of Dunfermline, Scotland. It opened to the public in 1883 with Carnegie’s “Let there be light” motto carved into the building’s sandstone entrance.
When was the last Carnegie library built?
His first library in the United States was built in 1889 in Braddock, Pennsylvania, home to one of the Carnegie Steel Company’s mills. The last public library funded through Carnegie’s generosity was the Wyoming Branch, completed in 1930 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Did Carnegie create libraries?
When a new public library building opened in Washington in 1903, acclaim for its controversial benefactor piled higher than a stack of overdue books. …
When was library built?
The first free modern public library was opened in 1833. The Peterborough (N.H.) Town Libraries was the first institution funded by a municipality with the explicit purpose of establishing a free library open to all classes of the community.
How many Carnegie libraries are still standing?
Close to 800 of Carnegie’s library buildings are still in use as public libraries, according to Carnegie Libraries Across America, while another 350 have been given new purposes as office buildings and cultural centers.
How much money did Carnegie donate to libraries?
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.
How much did Carnegie donate to libraries?
One of 19th-century industrialist Andrew Carnegie’s many philanthropies, these libraries entertained and educated millions. Between 1886 and 1919, Carnegie’s donations of more than $40 million paid for 1,679 new library buildings in communities large and small across America.
Why did Carnegie build so many libraries?
“It went from being for just the wealthy elite landowners and planters to actually being a service for the entire county that everybody has access to,” he says. It was pioneering — public and free. Those were the visionary keystones of Carnegie’s library mission.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cg1Bdrc1YII