Around New York City, all the public libraries of a certain age like St. Agnes in my old neighborhood tend to look alike and no wonder. In 1901, the year he retired, Andrew Carnegie gave $5.2 million to the city to build dozens of branch libraries to bring books to the people. That same spring Alton in Southern Illinois became one of the few cities in the country to turn down his largesse, because of strings attached. A Carnegie library would require yearly taxation. Alton had had a free library since 1852 thanks to some civic-minded ladies and a grieving widower.
It was the ladies who really got the library off the ground in 1866 when they bought the original Alton Library Association at auction, having raised enough money to pay off the library’s $165 debt and buy $300 worth of new books. Believing it was the library’s mission to contribute to the city’s social and intellectual life, they invited speakers like Ralph Waldo Emerson to the river city. The library thrived. By 1888, it had outgrown its corner room in the City Hall.
When Jennie D. Hayner, a Library Association director, died that year, her husband John decided to underwrite a library building in her memory. Hayner, who had come to Alton in 1848 from upstate New York, was no Carnegie, but he had prospered, moving up from cashier to stockholder in the First National Bank. He commissioned Theodore Link, later one of the architects of the St. Louis World’s Fair, to design a redbrick building with a modest tower. It was completed a decade before Carnegie decided to fund libraries. The German-born Link liked turrets and towers, which he incorporated into his designs for the Monticello Seminary in nearby Godfrey in 1889 and Union Station in St. Louis in 1894.
The library did seem like a castle to me when I was growing up. In grade school, I could walk down Christian Hill to the corner of 4th and State and enter the children’s library through the lower door. I worked my way through the biographies, learning about Sibelius before I ever heard his music, and children’s novels with gutsy female heroines. Being a visiting nurse captivated me until I read The Silver Pencil and knew I wanted to be a writer as well as a reader.
I don’t remember when I first was allowed to creep up the backstairs to check out books in the adult library, but I do remember the first book borrowed – The Good Earth by Pearl Buck, which was decidedly racier than the visiting nurse novels. That’s what I told Ms Buck when I interviewed her decades later for the Miami Herald. She wasn’t impressed.
It was in the arched interior of the Hayner library that I learned the Dewey Decimal System to find books on the id and super ego and researched Francisco de Miranda, a dashing Venezuelan who fought in the French Revolution and romanced Catherine the Great. Wherever my curiosity led, the library provided answers.
I hesitate to go back to that temple of my childhood, now housing genealogy and local history, but I already have my card to the main library in a storefront down the block. The quarterly newsletter just arrived, alerting me to new books. Was it a sign that near the top of the list was Fergus Bordewich's The Great American Debate: Henry Clay, Stephen A. Douglas and the Compromise That Preserved the Union? When I see Fergus next week at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism reunion, I will remind him that Douglas and Lincoln had a go at it right here in Alton in the 1858 Senate race, which Lincoln lost.
But now to the Hayner Library website. I just got an email alerting me that an e-copy of Massie’s Catherine the Great is ready to download to my Kindle. Maybe de Miranda is mentioned.
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