Day 110, Sunday July 7, 2024: Ashtabula, Ohio to Edgewood, Pennsylvania
- Mark Carl Rom
- Oct 7
- 7 min read
Carnegie libraries visited: Kinsman, Warren, and Youngstown, Ohio; Midland, Carnegie, the Pittsburgh Carnegie libraries in West End, Mount Washington, South Side, Main, Lawrenceville, and Edgewood, Pennsylvania
Days sober: 381
Those of you who have slept overnight in the parking lot of a marina will remember that some people like to go fishing really, really, early, and that backing boat trailers into the water can be quite a noisy operation. When I went to sleep last night, the marina’s parking lot was empty. By 5 am, it was almost full – the boats started arriving around 4 – and so I was told I had to move my car because I was taking up a valuable parking slot.
Not much other than the mariana is open in Ashtabula at 5 a.m. Sheetz is, and so that is where I went to get coffee in the biggest cup they had, which I filled to the lip. I have been back on the road for only a day, but it was a Sunday, all the libraries I planned to visit would be closed, and I didn’t feel like working much, anyway, ergo I returned to the marina until the sunrise no longer glowed pink on Lake Erie, and then I took a tranquil if caffeinated backroad drive south on Highway 11, through quiet forests and farmland, with no need to speed. I waved a cheerful midwest hello to the Carnegie library in Kinsman, the public libraries in Cortland and Warren (the Trumbull County Library), and the Trumbull County Law Library, a Carnegie-funded building that remains open to the public for legal research.
I arrived in Youngstown in time for a 10.40 a.m. showing of the movie Thelma – a grandmother is the action hero, despite all her elderly conditions – at a cinema multiplex. As the single customer in the theater, I fully extended my reclining chair, jammed a vat of vastly oversalted popcorn into my corn hole, and sucked down 32 ounces of Mountain Dew. Sometimes I hate it when I act like a run-of-the-mill human, who is easily seduced by the allure of super-sizing and who at the same time systematically underestimates how much the super-sized container holds. Did I really want the huge buckets of corn and cola? Not really, and yet I bought them and finished every buttery kernel and every golden drop, even though I felt pretty gross by the end.
The multiplex was still deserted when Thelma’s was over, and I probably could have just walked into another theater and watched another show, as the bloated, lazy, and outlaw part of me is tempted to do. I don’t give in. I’m jacked up on caffeine and sodium as I leave the cool quiet of the building and find my way to Goldfinger, which was easy as it’s almost the only car on the lot. I’m heading further south towards Pittsburgh: the heart of Carnegie country.
The first libraries that Carnegie funded were in locations he was personally connected to: Scotland, where he was born, and Pittsburgh, where he made his fortune. The industrialist eventually financed 19 libraries in Allegheny County, with nine located in Pittsburgh proper. My destination today is Carnegie, Pennsylvania – one of Pittsburgh’s western suburbs – where the question “Which Carnegie came first? The town, or the library?” can be answered: the town. After it was incorporated in 1894, Carnegie was sufficiently flattered that he gave the town a library grant in 1895; it is the only library that bears his full name, the Andrew Carnegie Free Library. Tomorrow, I’ll make my way towards Braddock, across the Monongahela River and east of Pittsburgh, where Carnegie built his first American library in 1889; Homestead, where in 1892 Henry Frick, Carnegie’s manager of the Homestead Steel Works, violently crushed its union; and then upriver to McKeesport, where Carnegie’s 12th US library was built.
What inspired Carnegie to give $50,000 to build a library in Youngstown is unknown. Who inspired him to give it, is: Miss Anna L. Morse, the town’s librarian. In January 1908, Mr. Joseph Butler, a Youngstown banker, sought to meet with Carnegie in New York about “a matter of considerable importance” and Secretary Bertram responded that Carnegie “would be glad to see you.” The next letter from Bertram, written the following week, was not so positive: “Mr. Carnegie does not give interviews on library matters.” Moreover, Bertram continues, you already have $141,000 with which to build a library, and that’s more than enough. In February, Henry Taft, writing from a Wall Street address, asked Carnegie if he could give “Miss Morse, whom I have known for many years” a “few moments of your time.”
A mere five days later Bertram sends a letter to Morse, “Confirming Mr. Carnegie’s verbal promise of last Saturday, he directs me to say he will be glad to provide the last Fifty Thousand Dollars of the amount required to erect a Free Public Library Building at Youngstown.” Morse’s trip generated the headline in the Youngstown Telegram “$50,000 Donation with No Conditions: Mission of Miss More to New York Successful.” Local attorney W.A. Maline is quoted as saying, “I never expected that we would ever get anything from Mr. Carnegie but Miss Morse has succeeded wonderfully.” Whatever Miss Morse said, she said it persuasively.
Mr. Butler can’t take yes for a final answer, as after hearing the good news he immediately writes Carnegie again:
I was very much gratified to hear that you had changed your mind in regard to our Public Library here, and had agreed to donate Fifty Thousand Dollars. You have certainly done a wise thing, and something that is fully appreciated…
Please do not forget that I have in mind something for you to do here in an educational way, which I regard as of equal, 1r not greater importance than the library. This I will present to you in person after I have given the matter further consideration.
Bertram responds: go away.
I arrived at the Andrew Carnegie Free Library and Music Hall (nicknamed the Carnegie Carnegie, and one of only five libraries that he endowed) at 5.30 pm, and I thought I would be done for the day. It was hot and, after hanging out in the local DoubleTree lobby for a while, I was restless, which I blame on the residual effects of popcorn and Mountain Dew. Surveying my map, I realized that I would be trying to visit a bunch of urban librarians in Monday morning traffic, and off I went: the Carnegie Library Pittsburgh – West End at 7.20; the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh – Mount Washington Library, with its spectacular views of the city from the overlook across the street at 7.30; the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh – Southside at 7.45; the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh at 8.00; the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh – Lawrenceville (the first “open stack, self-service” library in the US); the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh - Homewood at 8.30; and what I hoped would be my last library, the C.C. Mellor Memorial (Carnegie) Library, in the Pittsburg suburb Edgewood, at 8.45. Instead of seeing the Mellor library, I stopped at the Edgewood Club which, to my weary eyes, looked like it could have been a library. The library’s address, which I had gotten from Wikipedia, was incorrect, and the library was some five blocks away. Today, then, led to one of my library “firsts”: my first correction of a Wikipedia page, as I updated the address from 1 Pennwood Avenue to 4400 Greensburg Pike.
Two stops to go before my wheels fall off. The Carnegie Free Library of Swissvale was the last Carnegie library to be built in Allegheny County, in 1918. Only the slightest bit of daylight still kisses the clouds just over its gothic entrance.
The windows are glowing gold in the Braddock Carnegie Library, which opened in 1899 as the first library that Carnegie funded in the United States. (Carnegie had opened a steel mill in the town – the first of the many that would generate his enormous wealth through a combination of “low wages, efficient technology, [shrewd investments], and efficient organization” – in 1873.) In his dedication address at the library’s opening, Carnegie acknowledged that he regretted having to increase his workers’ hours from 8 to 12 a day, yet what else was an oligarchic to do? He had no choice if his mill was to remain competitive. Still, he did want to keep things light: “Life must not be taken too seriously. We must have our hours for laughter and frolic.” When an addition was added in 1893, it was a one-stop center for human enrichment, containing in addition to the library a music hall, a gym, a swimming pool, and a billiards room, as Carnegie enjoyed chalking a cue from time to time. There was a fee for using the athletic facilities, and those working for the man got a 50% “Carnegie Club" discount.
Carnegie sold his stake in the steel business in 1901 for what $8.6 billion (in 2025 dollars), a vast fortune at the time, which today would rank him only about 150 on the Forbes 400 list of the richest Americans, (about the same as Nathan Blecharczyk, the co-founder of AirBnB). The US steel industry went into a deep decline in the 1970s, hitting Braddock hard, yet Carnegie’s Braddock mill (formally, the Edgar Thomson Steel Works) did not go out of business.
The Braddock Carnegie Library almost did. After years of neglect, it was closed in 1974 because the structure had deteriorated so badly. In the late 1970s it was slated for demolition until a group of citizen activists, led by its last librarian, David Solomon, purchased it for one buck and set about planning its restoration. Solomon “held an almost daily vigil at the abandoned building, gave dozens of tours to journalists and politicians and anyone else who showed an interest, wrote hundreds of letters seeking support and funds, and rallied a diverse group of supporters who succeeded in staving off the wrecking ball.”
One of those supporters was Vicki Vargo: I’ll come back to her story later.
The library, rechristened “Carnegie One,” reopened in 1983 and since then it – the music hall, the gym, the children’s library – has been gradually remade. It celebrated its grand reopening in May 2025, and I can’t wait to visit it again.
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