The little library that could: the story behind the Little Falls Carnegie Library

INTERVIEWER: You may know by now we love history here on Minnesota Now. So much so that we started this series called Minnesota Now and Then. Well, today, we're headed to Little Falls, Minnesota, to talk about a historic library there. It's a library built in 1905 by Andrew Carnegie.

At the time, he was one of the richest men in the world. He was based in Pennsylvania, and he made his money in rail cars, oil, and steel. So why did he build a library in Little Falls, Minnesota, and what makes it historic? To answer those questions and more, Mike Worcester is here. He's executive director of the Morrison County Historical Society. Welcome to Minnesota Now.

MIKE WORCESTER: Thank you. Good morning.

INTERVIEWER: Good morning.

MIKE WORCESTER: Good afternoon, sorry.

[LAUGHTER]

INTERVIEWER: I was right there with you.

MIKE WORCESTER: Thank you.

INTERVIEWER: The Little Falls Carnegie Library is one of about 1,700 public libraries funded by Andrew Carnegie. Why did he build libraries? Do you know?

MIKE WORCESTER: Like lot of communities in Minnesota-- let's do some context here. I'm going to pull the history nerd card here, and I'll play the context. There was 66 Carnegie libraries built in Minnesota. 65 of them were public, and one was a college that was on Hamline University.

And these libraries ended up in these communities basically because they asked. They wrote to the Carnegie Foundation, and they asked for funding. And that started in Minnesota as early as 18-- I think the number I saw was 1899 that communities started asking for money from the Foundation.

INTERVIEWER: So he put word out there that, "Hey, we'll build a library if you want one," and then communities started saying, "Yes, us?"

MIKE WORCESTER: You think about this as obviously way pre-internet days, but word got around that the Foundation was putting funding out there for libraries because there was about a 30 year period where the Carnegie Foundation was helping to build libraries. And so the people involved here in Little Falls wanted to be able to utilize that.

And let's take a couple steps back here then, too. Like a lot of communities in rural Minnesota-- and we have to think now. In 1890-- let's start in 1890-- this part and most of Minnesota was still pretty rough and open. And the further away you got from the Minneapolis, Saint Paul area, the rougher and more open it got.

And so we're sitting up here in a city that had only been incorporated in 1889. But it was a community that had a very positive view of its future. It was an agricultural community. It was manufacturing, and it was really built on lumber.

The museum I'm sitting in is named after a member of the Weyerhaeuser family, which is a big, big name in Minnesota lumbering. So you had a community that was very much forward thinking. And one of the ways forward thinking communities looked to add to that aura was to build a library.

And like many communities, it started out here very simple. It was a room in City Hall, and it was a space where the public could utilize, could come in and get books, staffed by volunteer members of the community. But as that time progressed, somebody said, "hey--" and this is where it comes into play-- "let's approach the Carnegie Foundation and ask for a grant."

And the Carnegie Foundation said, "Sure." And the way these grant works was very simple. They gave you money, but you had to promise to spend a certain amount in perpetuity to help maintain that library. So in our case, it was a $10,000 grant, and then the agreement was you to put $1,000 a year towards the maintenance of that library.

INTERVIEWER: And did $10,000 cover the full construction of the library?

MIKE WORCESTER: Yes, it did.

INTERVIEWER: Wow.

MIKE WORCESTER: Amazingly, it did.

INTERVIEWER: Exactly.

MIKE WORCESTER: I pulled up the inflation calculator really quick, and $10,000 from about that time frame-- it doesn't quite go back to 1902-- would come in at just over $300,000 today. Now, that seems like a lot, but I can tell you that there was an addition built onto our library here in 1988 and '99 that cost $1.4 million.

INTERVIEWER: Wow.

MIKE WORCESTER: Yeah, I know. That's another-- we'll maybe get to that story here in a second if we have time. But when you take a look, again, this was how communities tried to make sure that they were part of that moving forward as a community was by adding a library, and that was very important to them.

INTERVIEWER: And what did the building look like at the time when it was first built?

MIKE WORCESTER: When you go around to many of these communities, you can really spot those original libraries. They're not identical, but they all have a very similar look. I struggle to try to find a word to describe them, but the word I came up with was stately. They had a very stately look to them.

Many of them, like the Carnegie Library in my hometown, had the tall steps with the pillars that you walked up. There was this aura of grandeur to it that tried to make sure that people understood this was an important place in the community. And when you take a look around at many of the existing Carnegie libraries that still stand in Minnesota, you can really see that.

I did some quick math on this. There was 66 of them built all together. 50 of those buildings are still standing. And of those 50, 21 of them are still being used as a library, which was an even higher number than I thought. And they're kind of, again, scattered all over the state.

Now, what's interesting, too, though, is of those 29 that aren't being used as a library, they're still being utilized for a public purpose. For example, if you go to Spring Valley, they're city offices. If you go to Thief River Falls, they're being used as county offices. If you go to Brainerd, it's an office building. If you go to Litchfield, it's commercial space.

And I'm going to give a shout out to one of my colleagues. If you go to Morris, Minnesota, in Stevens County, it is now the home of the Stevens County Historical Society, and they also did an expansion a few years ago. So even if these buildings aren't being used as libraries, they're still being used for a notable public purpose in some way or another.

So that legacy of Carnegie, even if it isn't the renting of books or the loaning of books or videos or ebooks or whatever, it's still benefiting the community in some way even after all of these decades.

INTERVIEWER: Speaking of the longevity of these buildings-- I have just a couple of minutes left. But as time moves on, there's accessibility issues. You can't get an elevator in there. How did Little Falls manage to keep its library?

MIKE WORCESTER: There are quite a few of these buildings that are on the National Register, too. And if you've ever dealt with National Register properties, you know that there are some very, very stringent guidelines about how you have to do anything to them, especially exterior physical alterations.

But it doesn't mean they can't be added on to. And in our case, because our library has been on the National Register since-- I got to look this up here-- since 1980, so it's been quite a while. And when you do these plans to add on, they have to be as close to that style as possible.

Now, I'm going to play historic preservationist here just a little bit. It doesn't have to be identical, but it needs to fit that style. And so what they essentially did was they built around the original library. So when you go into the library entrance now, what you are essentially doing is walking around the exterior of the original library.

And then they put an elevator into that original library so you can [AUDIO OUT] three of the floors. And that's how they did it, and that's how other communities have done this, too. And they did it very carefully, and they did it with great planning. That's why it took a couple of years.

But they did it in a way that maintains the spirit of the original library while still making that space usable by the public, as you noted, through accessibility issues, because many of those Carnegie libraries that were demoed were demoed because they just could not. They weren't able to keep them up. And as you noted, they were really a challenge for accessibility, and trying to adapt them for accessibility was cost prohibitive in some cases.

INTERVIEWER: Mike, this is great information. We need to run. We're out of time. But thank you so much for joining us.

MIKE WORCESTER: Well, thank you for having me. I appreciate it.

INTERVIEWER: You bet. Mike Worcester is executive director of the Morrison County Historical Society you can visit the County's little vaults Carnegie Library every day. But Sunday.