Day 2

It is a beautiful day for Carnegie Questing, unlike yesterday. Today there is little wind and no rain. It is a perfect day to get in and out of the van without getting soaked by a sudden thunderstorm. We leave home early and on the way I call Sam on my cell phone. Does he want to go along with us? No. Would he like to meet us for breakfast? Of course. There is no question as to where we will meet. Sam's favorite breakfast place is the Breakfast Nook and Bakery in Parsons, owned by friends. They have wonderful pastries and breads. The fragrance of fresh breads baking fills the street outside. When we walk in, the owners say hi and show us to a table next to the window. It's a great start to a very promising day.

Carnegie Libraries in the News

There is so much variety in the architecture of the Carnegie Libraries. Winfield was no exception.

A co-worker of Phil's sent him this article about damage to a Carnegie Library.

Winfield Public Library seems to be about the size of our library and probably built around the same time. There is a large open main floor with meeting rooms down a long hall. Since I help with the displays at our library I am especially interested in the large moveable museum style cases displaying a history of the Nancy Drew books and the original Carolyn Keene. We hang out at the library for a while waiting for time to pick up Caleb. Caleb is a good friend of both our sons and I can’t wait to tell him all about our quest. He listens politely. “Do you know where the Carnegie building is,” I ask? “No? We’ll show you after supper.” He takes us to his favorite Mexican restaurant and it is just across the parking lot from the Carnegie building! We have a delicious meal and talk non-stop, catching up of all the news. It is dark when we start home and lots of thunderstorms and lightening in the distance. It is a beautiful night for driving. We are just behind the storms. We arrive safely home at around 11pm having driven about 350 miles.

Winfield, Kansas

I call our friend Caleb in Winfield to see if we can meet him for supper. He says 7pm will work out after he gets out of football practice. Hopefully he knows a good place to eat. We find the old Carnegie building fairly easily. We are getting pretty good at finding the older section of town and then spotting the Carnegie. This building has been purchased by a local dentist. His office is in the basement where the children’s room used to be. Upstairs there is a dance studio and the offices of a fraternity. At this time of day moms and dads are dropping their kids off for dance class. We wait for a break in the crowd to take our picture and go inside. We go into each room, asking and receiving permission to look around. There is still a lot of life in the old building. Kids, teens, music, activity. We visit the dentist’s office. The receptionist shows us an album of pictures of the remodeling that was done before the dental office moved in.

More pictures of the Wellington Library

Inside our first Carnegie Library!

Wellington, Kansas. Our first Wal-Mart sighting since leaving Coffeyville this morning. We find the library without stopping to ask for directions and without a detour to the Wal-Mart. The Carnegie is a beautiful building, but then they all are. This one still houses the library, our first since Caldwell was closed. There is a stained glass window over the front entry. Huge white half globe lights flood the room with light. Lots of beautiful refinished old wood everywhere. Dark green carpet covers the floors. The new blends with the old and the results are lovely. We meet the library director who is busily shifting books in the children’s room trying to stay ahead of the upcoming summer reading program, she tells us.

We take Highway 49 towards Anthony, KS. The sign says we’re on the Old Chisholm Trail.

Anthony, Kansas is a nice little town with wide streets. The houses sit on big lots with clean well tended lawns. Hours for the Anthony Public Library today are 9-11am and 1-7:30pm. We get a friendly greeting from the worker behind the front desk. This is the new library built in 1995- 1996. She shows us a photo album compiled as a 4-H project detailing the progress of this building. There is an internet station available so I get permission to send an e-mail to my boss and a co-worker. They’ve been supportive of our questing plan and will want to hear a bit about our experiences so far. We get directions to the Carnegie building and quickly find it. The dark red brick building is now home to a dance studio. The plaque by the front steps says: This building given the people of Anthony by Andrew Carnegie of New York City A.D. MCMIX Mauran- Russell- Architects.

The sign outside the Caldwell, Kansas Carnegie says it was built in 1912. Across the street is a high school built in 1916 and an elementary school built in 1922. This is our first opportunity to see a Carnegie Library still in use. It opens at 3pm on Thursdays. Across the street from the schools, it seems the perfect time to open. Not perfect timing for us, though. We peek in the windows and take a walk around the building. The street runs on either side of the library with the bottom step actually jutting out into the street. The library is an island among oak trees. Acorns crunch as we walk the grounds. This library is smaller and less ornate than the others we’ve seen today.

Except for some broken glass globes on the lamp posts out front (and what kid can resist throwing a rock at such a target?) the dark red brick building is in good shape on the outside. The grounds are trim and neat. It sits across the street is Cowley County Community College.

Highway 166 ends at South Haven, Kansas. We take South Highway 81 to Caldwell. The countryside is different from what we’ve seen so far this trip. There are verdant green wheat fields, some reaching almost to the door of the farmhouse they surround. We see cotton fields.

On to Arkansas City

It is a long drive across the Flint Hills and a beautiful time of the year for a trip like this. Some of the trees have just a hint of green. Others are a bright lime green in full bud. It is so windy that hawks float in mid air never flapping their wings. Just hovering. The heavy downpour and hail hits just as we are driving into Arkansas City. There are wild plums in bloom and ornamental pear trees blooming next to houses. When we get out of the van there are little white blossoms all over the ground.

We stop at a gas station to ask if anyone knows where old Carnegie Library building is located. The three or four people we ask are from out of town including the clerk. We finally ask where the Chamber of Commerce building is and are pointed in the right direction. We find the public library instead. The Arkansas City Public Library is housed in an old post office building. You can still see the old safe, some postage signs and a counter to buy stamps. When we walk up to the front desk the lady sitting behind the counter seems familiar. Apparently she is thinking the same thing about me because she finally says, “Do I know you?” It turns out that she is Robin who used to be a volunteer at Parsons Public Library before moving to Ark City and taking this job. She is able to direct us to the Carnegie building.

Note to self: Always ask a librarian. They are used to answering all kinds of questions and really want to help you if they can.

More Pictures of Coffeyville Carnegie

More information about the history of the Coffeyville Carnegie.

When I was a kid, I read a lot of books. I read from the school library during the school year and went to our small town library during the summer. When I would go into the library with my mom, she would always stand and talk to the librarian while I hunted for books. They were old friends. When I brought my selections to the desk, the librarian would pull out the cards and write my name on them. She’d known me since I was born. It was different when I went to the public library in Coffeyville. No one knew me. The card was orange and had a little metal rectangle stamped with an identification number. The librarian had typed my name on it with an old manual typewriter. My first library card! Somehow it feels right to me that we begin our quest here in Coffeyville.

The Quest Begins

We leave home on a windy morning in March. Make that very windy. We take a picture of our windblown selves beside the good old van and we’re off. First stop, the Woodshed Conoco in Edna to fill our coffee mugs. At 8am there is always a group of men sitting around, drinking coffee, discussing the day ahead, the news, weather, and so forth. Today is no exception. We say hello to the ones we know and hit the road. Next stop is Coffeyville.
Phil and I went to Coffeyville Community College for two years before we were married so the town is familiar to us. We know exactly where to look for the Carnegie and the newer public library. The Carnegie Library in Coffeyville has an abandoned look. When we climb the front steps, though we can see some sort of work in progress. They seem to be painting the floors. It is 8:45 and the library opens at 9am this Thursday morning. Since Coffeyville is so close to home, we’ll try to come back another day to visit.

Phil works at a community college and several staff and teachers are interested to hear about our plans. He learns a little more about the Carnegie Libraries from the history teacher. He’s surprised to hear that the Parsons Carnegie is the first one to be built in Kansas. He gets suggestions of good places to eat while we travel to the different towns. It looks like if we head straight west on U.S. Highway 166 we can take in several of the buildings in short order. Our goal is to start off with a bang and go to quite a few all at once. It will be harder to do this later on when we will have to travel farther. We’ll take a picture of the two of us on the steps of each building, go inside if possible and also visit the public library of the town if it isn’t housed in the Carnegie.

The Plan

The next step is to get a couple of days off from work to get started. Done.
Where exactly are these libraries located? I find a map of the state of Kansas on Mapquest and print it out.

Taking the list of Carnegie Libraries I begin marking the locations on the map. Our plan is to go to all of the buildings that are still in existence. It doesn’t take long to discover that I need to differentiate between the buildings that are still libraries and the ones that aren’t. Traveling to forty-eight Carnegie Libraries is a do-able quest. We haven’t bitten off more than we can chew. I’m confident. I e-mail the websites to Phil so he can take a look. After looking at the lists and some of the information I send him, Phil is still willing to set out on the Carnegie Quest!

The Next Step

There is a Carnegie Library in Parsons, but beyond that I don’t know much about them. I have heard of Andrew Carnegie, but I don’t know much about him, either. The internet seems like a good place to start and sure enough one of the first things I find is on the state library web site.
Best of all, there is a list of Carnegie Libraries still in use (24) and another list called Present Uses of Other Carnegie Libraries (24) and, sadly, a list of buildings that have been razed (12). I quickly print these lists off, not bothering at this point to read any of the other information available. I’m questing! Who needs details?

Inspiration

We were sitting at the breakfast table one morning when Phil started reading to me from an article in the paper.

It was about a Kansan who had eaten a hamburger in all 105 counties and another who had stuck his feet in all the Kansas fishing lakes. “Sounds like fun,” we said to each other. Little did Phil know what reading that little article in the Parsons Sun would spark. A couple of days later I said, “Why don’t we try a quest? It sounds like fun.” It sounded like fun to Phil too, but deciding on the particular quest was more challenging. What to do, what to do? Since I work in a library, a library related quest sounded fun to me. Phil, my partner in life and marriage for nearly 30 years is agreeable to most things. I talked to our oldest son and to my surprise he thought it was a pretty cool thing for his parents to do. When I told my best friend, Karissa of our plans and our wish to do something library related, she suggested that we go to all the Carnegie libraries in Kansas… and so we will.