Pickerington Carnegie Library celebrates centennial

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If Pickerington’s Carnegie Library building were a person, it would have a lot of candles to blow out this fall.

The building, located at 15 E. Columbus St. in Olde Pickerington Village, is set to celebrate its 100-year anniversary in September.

Though the library opened in 1916, the process actually began in 1911. At the time, the Violet Township Public Library consisted of 2,100 books housed in two 8-by-8-foot rooms. Seeing an opportunity to grow, E.R. Wooley, the mayor of Pickerington; Georgia Finley, president of the library’s board of trustees; and F.C. Wingier, president of the Violet Township Board of Education, applied for a grant from steel industry titan Andrew Carnegie and the Carnegie Corporation.

“You’ve got to admire their courage and their persistence for going after a Carnegie Library,” says Maggie Arendt, publicity director for the Pickerington-Violet Township Historical Society. “We were one of the smallest communities in the United States to get a library.”

The library program was a major initiative of Carnegie’s, dating back to the 1890s. In total, the effort resulted in the building of almost 1,700 libraries, many of which still stand, including the main Columbus Metropolitan Library.

At the time the library was built, the village of Pickerington had only 310 residents, not enough to meet the population requirement of 1,000 people to apply for a Carnegie grant. So Pickerington partnered with 2,000-resident Violet Township and passed a joint resolution to raise at least $1,000 a year to maintain the library, with Carnegie supplying a grant of $10,000 to get it built.

“It was fairly controversial at the time. Some people didn’t want (the joint resolution),” Arendt says. “A thousand dollars was a lot of money back in 1912.”

But those who pushed for the library were successful, and the Violet Township Public Library was dedicated on Sept. 4, 1916 at the Labor Day Homecoming Parade.

The library grew and changed over the years, adding multimedia resources and more books, forcing it to spread out between multiple buildings. In 1993, a levy was passed to build the new Pickerington Public Library on Opportunity Way.

The Carnegie Library building was then converted into a museum that serves as the headquarters of the historical society. Peggy Portier, president of the historical society, says the group was lucky to get the building, which is now owned by the city of Pickerington, as it affords the group more space for the historical artifacts.

On Sept. 18, the historical society will celebrate the Carnegie Library building’s 100th birthday with a party from 2-4 p.m. In celebration, the society is will present a special exhibit with items from the time period in which the library opened, including clothing and automobiles. Festivities will also include an Andrew Carnegie impersonator, a self-guided walking tour and live music.

Portier and Arendt agreed that they hope the library will remain a piece of the community for years to come.

“There are people who have no idea it exists, and we’d like to change that, but I think the people who know about us know that this is a significant historic building,” Portier says.

Hannah Herner is a contributing writer. Feedback welcome at gbishop@cityscenemediagroup.com.

Carnegie Library Building’s 100th Birthday Party

Sept. 18, 2-4 p.m.

15 E. Columbus St.

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