Libraries Before and After Carnegie
Carnegie's First Library - Dunfermline, Scotland
Public libraries as an overall institution were in poor shape as Andrew Carnegie was going up. Prior to his library-centered philanthropy, libraries in the United States were rarely established public institutions. Indeed, they often were not located in buildings of their own, and were occasionally found in what now seems to be comically unsuitable places, such as Marysville, Ohio’s public library, which had the misfortune of sharing a building with the fire department’s horses (Van Slyck, 1995). By the time Carnegie died in 1919, this was no longer the case. His library-building program never had a name or formal legal status, but ultimately Carnegie paid for the construction of 1,679 public libraries across the United States (Carnegie Corporation of New York, 2009), which served a patronage of approximately thirty-five million people (Jones, 1997). Overall, in the currency value of his day, Carnegie spent around $40 million on libraries in the United States, and $16 million more on internationally (Maurizi, 2001). In 1911, fearing that he would not be able to give his wealth away during his lifetime, Carnegie founded the Carnegie Corporation of New York to carry on his philanthropic goals after his death; the Corporation has since funded an additional 2,509 libraries in the United States and abroad (The Carnegie Corporation of New York)