Although Owatonna, Minnesota, enjoyed a limited amount of social
library provision from the mid-nineteenth century onward, it was
not until the 1890s that pressure mounted for a public library to be
established under the terms of the State Library Act of 1879. The
opportunity to provide a public library arose with a bequest from
Mr. and Mrs. Elisha Hunewill, who had run a hardware business in
the town. Attached to the money they left in their wills for a library
building and books were conditions not greatly different from those
imposed by Carnegie, but without the detailed design guidance that
was later pioneered by Carnegie’s organization. This paper focuses
on the way that the leaders of the community went about planning
and building the new library, with the services of an able architect,
but also with a determination to learn lessons from the users of
earlier buildings that was to prove sadly unusual in the architectural
history of a building type that combined to a high degree both functional
requirements and cultural values.
Publisher
Johns Hopkins University Press and the Graduate School of Library and Information Science. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
ISSN
0024-2594
Type of Resource
text
Language
en
Permalink
http://hdl.handle.net/2142/31869
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1353/lib.2011.0031
Copyright and License Information
Copyright 2011 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
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