Carnegie Public Libraries

Colonel Anderson’s 400 Books

Carnegie always said the idea began in Allegheny with Colonel James Anderson (1785–1861), who opened his personal library of about four hundred volumes to working boys on Saturday afternoons and acted as librarian himself. “In this way,” Carnegie wrote, “the windows were opened in the walls of my dungeon through which the light of knowledge streamed in.” In 1904 he paid for a monument to Anderson outside the Carnegie Free Library of Allegheny, by the sculptor Daniel Chester French and the architect Henry Bacon, inscribed to the “Founder of Free Libraries in Western Pennsylvania”.

The story is genuine and documented — but its primary evidence is Carnegie’s own retrospective testimony, in the autobiography published after his death in 1920 and in his 1889 essays. By this site’s standard that makes it traditional and self-reported rather than independently established. Two details also get smoothed away in the sentimental retellings. There was a real dispute over whether messenger boys like Carnegie, who were not bound apprentices, qualified to borrow at all — he wrote to the Pittsburgh Dispatch under the signature “Working Boy” to argue his case. And his biographer David Nasaw points out he was around seventeen at the time, not a small child.

The Gospel of Wealth

Carnegie set out his philosophy in two 1889 articles in the North American Review — “Wealth” in June and “The Best Fields for Philanthropy” in December — later known together as The Gospel of Wealth. Among gifts to a community, he wrote, the free public library “occupies the first place”, “provided that the community will accept and maintain it as a public institution”. That clause is the whole design. He favoured helping “those who will help themselves” and warned against giving with a “degrading, pauperizing tendency”. His dictum that the man who dies rich dies disgraced launched what is now called strategic, or “scientific”, philanthropy.

The Carnegie Formula

Carnegie paid for the building. The community had to do two things: provide the site, and pledge annual public tax support equal to ten per cent of the grant for staff, books and maintenance. In Britain that meant adopting the Public Libraries Acts and levying a half-penny rate. He refused to endow the libraries instead, on the grounds that “an endowed institution is liable to become the prey of a clique” and that his rule “requires the recipients to help themselves”.

It was a co-investment model rather than charity, and it is the part of the story most often skipped. It also had teeth. Because most grants made no provision for books, a town was signing up to a permanent obligation, and some could not meet it: Parkston and Tripp in South Dakota, among others, found ten per cent a year beyond them. The exceptions prove how deliberate the rule was — four Pennsylvania steel-town libraries, at Braddock, Homestead, Duquesne and Carnegie, he endowed in full.

The administration evolved with the scale. Early grants were personal and ad hoc, handled from 1897 by his secretary James Bertram, who sent applicants a standard “Schedule of Questions”. Later the giving passed to institutions: the Carnegie Corporation of New York in 1911, endowed with about $135 million and the largest philanthropic trust yet created, which ran the US library programme until wartime shortages ended construction grants in 1917; and the Carnegie United Kingdom Trust in 1913, founded in Dunfermline with $10 million for “the improvement of the well-being of the masses of the people of Great Britain and Ireland”. The UK Trust shifted the emphasis from single buildings to library systems: the Central Library for Students, rural and regional schemes, county libraries. It sat alongside two earlier Scottish vehicles, the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland of 1901 and the Carnegie Dunfermline Trust of 1903, and all three still share premises in Dunfermline.

The Architecture Myth

There was never a single mandatory design. Until 1908 communities built what they wished. From that year Bertram required plans to be submitted for approval, and in 1911 he issued the pamphlet Notes on the Erection of Library Buildings, which set minimum standards and offered six model floor plans, believed to be the work of the architect Edward Lippincott Tilton. Bertram discouraged fireplaces and grand entrances as space-wasters, and favoured a rectangular plan with a raised basement, a central librarian’s desk giving a clear view of the whole room, and open stacks — a real break from the older closed-stack library where a member of staff fetched your book.

Exteriors were left to the town, and ran from Beaux-Arts and Italian Renaissance to Classical Revival and, in Scotland, Scottish Baronial. So the “identical Carnegie library” is a half-truth: interiors converged on an efficient plan after 1911, exteriors varied widely. The flight of entrance steps, read as elevation through learning, and the lamppost or lantern standing for enlightenment became recurring motifs — recurring, not required.

Counting the Libraries

The standard figure is 2,509 buildings between 1883 and 1929, for almost $56.2 million, grounded in Florence Anderson’s study of the Corporation’s library programme and George Bobinski’s 1969 scholarship, and used by the Carnegie Corporation of New York itself. Within that: about 1,681 US public library buildings in 1,412 communities plus 108 academic buildings; 660 in Britain and Ireland; between 125 and 156 in Canada; and around twenty-five elsewhere, in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Serbia, Belgium, France, Barbados, Mauritius, Malaysia and Fiji.

What Scotland Actually Got

The Dunfermline Carnegie Library was the world’s first, and it was a serious building rather than a gesture. Carnegie put plans in place in 1879; his mother Margaret laid the foundation stone on 27 July 1881; the Edinburgh architect James Campbell Walker designed it in a Domestic Tudor style; Carnegie gave £8,000 to build and stock it; and Lord Rosebery, a future Prime Minister, opened it on 29 August 1883. It carried the motto “Let there be light” and was made a Category B listed building in 1971.

Beyond that, Scotland received “over 40” libraries between 1883 and 1911 — a soft figure from Dundee City Archives, and one of several country totals inside the 660 that do not reconcile cleanly. Ireland had around sixty-six built of roughly eighty promised, on Brendan Grimes’s catalogue; Wales about thirty-five on Oriel Prizeman’s 2022 count, against an older figure of seventeen; and for England the dedicated research project states plainly that no reliable single total exists. Branch libraries under one grant, and “towns funded” against “buildings built”, are counted differently in different places.

Homestead and the Refusals

The Homestead Strike at Carnegie Steel’s Homestead works, from 1 to 6 July 1892, left ten workers and three Pinkerton guards dead. Carnegie was in Scotland and let Henry Clay Frick manage the confrontation, but a surviving telegram shows he endorsed Frick’s actions. The chronology is the point: Homestead happened in the middle of the years in which Carnegie was building his reputation as the benefactor of libraries, and the criticism was contemporary. The St Louis Post-Dispatch wrote that “Ten thousand ‘Carnegie Public Libraries’ would not compensate for the direct and indirect evils resulting from the Homestead strike.”

PBS records that 225 communities turned down his money, one glassworker declaring he would “sooner enter a building built with the dirty silver Judas received for betraying Christ than enter a Carnegie library”. Labour leaders in Wheeling, West Virginia defeated the bond levy over the Homestead deaths, declaring Wheeling “one place on this great green planet where Andrew Carnegie can’t get a monument with his money”. Louisville objected to a “monument to beggary”. Richmond’s council rejected $100,000 in 1901, partly over the new taxes and partly over fears the library might have to admit Black patrons. Detroit, several Tennessee towns and five Iowa communities also declined. In Llanelli in 1914 Alderman Nathan Griffiths said: “I have not forgotten the shooting of the strikers by Pinkerton’s men… I would not touch a single penny of the money of the man who employed mercenaries to shoot down my fellow-workers.”

Accuracy cuts both ways here. Robert Sidney Martin’s Carnegie Denied documents that most refusals were financial — the ten per cent pledge, or the absence of book money — rather than moral. And Carnegie’s own answer to his critics, as Nasaw records it, remains the most revealing thing he said on the subject: higher wages, he argued, would have gone on “a better cut of meat or more drink”, whereas “what you needed, though you didn’t know it, was my libraries and concert halls”.

One further limit belongs in any honest account. In the Jim Crow South, Carnegie did not use his money as leverage for integration; he funded separate libraries for Black citizens, including a “Colored” Carnegie Library in Houston and the Savannah library for Black residents that opened in 1914.

What Survives

The structural effect was enormous: by 1919 the United States had about 3,500 public libraries, and nearly half of them were Carnegie-funded. More than half of the American buildings still serve as libraries — roughly eight hundred nationally — and Carnegie branches still form the nucleus of the New York Public Library, with 31 of the original 39 still operating from his 1901 grant of $5.2 million for Manhattan, the Bronx and Staten Island.

In Britain, of roughly 660 built, about 437 remain standing, many of them listed or otherwise protected — Grade II and II* in England and Wales, listed status in Scotland through Historic Environment Scotland, the National Register of Historic Places in the United States. Where they are no longer libraries they have generally become something else civic: the museum at Worthing, the theatre and arts centre at Workington, community buildings in dozens of towns.

The Carnegie United Kingdom Trust still operates from Dunfermline, now as a wellbeing-focused think tank, and is candid about the source of the endowment: Carnegie, it acknowledges, “built much of his wealth on practices that are not in line with our understanding of wellbeing today”. That is a fair epitaph for the whole system. The reading rooms were real, the ten per cent pledge built the habit of publicly funded libraries into thousands of town budgets, and the money came from somewhere.

Timeline

1. 25 Nov 1835

   Carnegie born in Dunfermline

   Son of William Carnegie, handloom weaver and Chartist

2. c. 1847

   Steam looms and slump destroy the family trade

   The Carnegies borrow about £20 for passage

3. 1848

   Emigration to Allegheny, Pennsylvania

   Andrew starts as a bobbin boy at $1.20 a week

4. c. 1850s

   Colonel James Anderson opens his library to working boys

   Carnegie's own account of where the idea began

5. 1879

   Carnegie puts plans in place for Dunfermline

   The gift is made to his birthplace first

6. 27 Jul 1881

   Foundation stone laid by his mother Margaret

   Designed by Edinburgh architect James Campbell Walker

7. 29 Aug 1883

   Dunfermline Carnegie Library opens

   The world's first; opened by Lord Rosebery; £8,000 to build and stock

8. 1886 / 1889 / 1890

   The American beginnings

   Allegheny commissioned 1886; Braddock first to open, 1889; Allegheny opens 1890

9. 1889

   The Gospel of Wealth

   Two North American Review essays put libraries first among gifts

10. 1–6 Jul 1892

    The Homestead Strike

    Ten workers and three Pinkerton guards die; Carnegie is in Scotland

11. 1897

    James Bertram becomes secretary

    Handles applications with a standard Schedule of Questions

12. 1901

    $5.2m for New York City branches

    Manhattan, the Bronx and Staten Island

13. 1901 / 1903

    Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland; Carnegie Dunfermline Trust

    Scottish vehicles distinct from the later UK Trust

14. 1908

    Plans must be submitted for approval

    The end of the free-for-all in design

15. 1911

    Carnegie Corporation of New York; Bertram's Notes

    About $135m endowment; six model floor plans issued

16. 1913

    Carnegie United Kingdom Trust founded in Dunfermline

    $10m, shifting from buildings to library systems

17. 1917

    US construction grants end

    Wartime material and labour shortages

18. 1929

    The last building completed

    2,509 in total across the whole programme

Did You Know?

• Carnegie's mother laid the foundation stone of the world's first Carnegie library herself, in July 1881.
• Bertram's design notes discouraged fireplaces and grand entrances — he considered them a waste of floor area.
• The central librarian's desk in the model plans existed so one person could see the whole room; open stacks were the trade-off.
• Four Pennsylvania steel-town libraries were fully endowed by Carnegie, breaking his own rule — including Homestead.
• Richmond, Virginia turned down $100,000 in 1901 partly out of fear the library would have to admit Black readers.
• Carnegie was Lord Rector of St Andrews from 1901 to 1907 and of Aberdeen from 1911 to 1914, between H.H. Asquith and Winston Churchill.
• The Dunfermline library's motto was “Let there be light”, and a lamppost or lantern became an unofficial signature of the buildings.
• Carnegie told critics that higher wages would have gone on drink, and that what workers really needed was his libraries.

Honest Caveats

The scale was American, not Scottish. Dunfermline’s first is genuine; the system was built overwhelmingly in the United States with American steel profits.

The count is variable. 2,509 buildings is best supported; 2,811 and “nearly 3,000” rest on other counting bases, and US totals run from 1,670 to 1,689.

Country breakdowns inside the UK total do not reconcile. Scotland “over 40” is soft and runs only to 1911; England has no reliable single total; the parts do not sum to 660.

The Anderson story is self-reported. If a pre-1920 source independent of Carnegie corroborates it, that judgement should be revised.

The single-template claim is a myth. Six model plans and interior minimums after 1911; exteriors chosen locally.

Homestead is not a footnote. The deaths, the endorsing telegram and the contemporary refusals belong in the same account as the libraries — while noting most refusals were about money.

The library figure is not his total giving. Almost $56.2 million went on libraries; his lifetime philanthropy was around $350 million.