Carnegie Library

By editor

Hamilton, Ravalli County, Montana, July 8, 1916

The Hamilton Ministerial Association opened the first free library in Ravalli County in April 1903 in a room donated by the Ravalli County Bank. This was a modest beginning, and the ministers knew it. A room in a bank is not a library. It is a room in a bank with books in it. Three months after the library opened, Hamilton voters levied a one mill tax to support it, and the enterprise passed from the ministers' hands into the public's, which was the appropriate direction of travel.

The library moved to the newly constructed city hall in 1907. When that space became inadequate, the community did what communities across America were doing in those years: they wrote to Andrew Carnegie.

Carnegie was, by 1907, the most prolific library builder in the history of the world. He had made his fortune in steel, sold the Carnegie Steel Company to J.P. Morgan in 1901 for $480 million, and spent the remainder of his life giving the money away. Libraries were his preferred instrument of philanthropy, and he had a system. A town that wanted a Carnegie library had to demonstrate that it could support the building's operating costs, and it had to provide a building site. Carnegie would supply the construction money. The town would supply everything else.

Hamilton's application stalled on the second requirement. Carnegie would not pay for land. The town needed someone to donate it. For several years, no one did.

The Hamilton Woman's Club revived the campaign in 1914. The club's members had been watching the library crowd itself into the city hall for seven years, and they had decided that the situation was unacceptable and that they were the ones to fix it. They identified the problem, which was the land, and they identified the person who could solve it, which was Margaret Daly.

Margaret Daly was the widow of Marcus Daly, the Copper King who had founded Hamilton in 1890 as a company town for his Big Mill. Daly had died in 1900, leaving his wife with the Bitterroot Valley estate, the Tammany stock farm, and a fortune that was large enough to make the donation of a library lot a trivial gesture. Margaret Daly made the gesture. She gave the Woman's Club the land on State Street that the library needed, and the club forwarded the application to Carnegie, and Carnegie approved the grant.

The new building opened on July 8, 1916. It cost $9,000, which was a standard Carnegie library budget for a town of Hamilton's size. The structure was what Carnegie libraries always were: symmetrical, classical, and built to last. A daylight basement brought light into the lower level. The facade was balanced, with the entrance centered between matching windows. The classical detailing -- pilasters, a cornice, a modest pediment -- signaled that this was a public building of some dignity without being extravagant about it. Carnegie had financed more than 1,600 library buildings across the country by the time Hamilton's was built, and the formula had been refined to the point where it could be executed efficiently and still look like it had been designed for the specific place.

The front portico was added later, which is the kind of detail that appears in architectural histories and means that someone, at some point, decided the entrance needed more presence. The addition did not change the building's character. It remained what it had been built to be: a public library in a mill town that had decided, by a one mill tax vote in 1903 and a Woman's Club campaign in 1914 and a copper king's widow's gift of land, that its citizens deserved a place to read.

The community built an addition in 1988, which allowed the Bitterroot Public Library to meet the growing needs of its patrons, as the marker puts it. The 1988 addition is larger than the 1916 building. This is the natural history of Carnegie libraries in towns that survived: the original building becomes the front door of something bigger, and the classical facade that Carnegie's money paid for becomes the face of an institution that the town built for itself.

Margaret Daly never saw the library open. She died in 1941, twenty-five years after the building she had made possible opened on State Street. The marker does not mention her. It mentions Carnegie, who gave $9,000, and the Woman's Club, who ran the campaign, and the Ministerial Association, who started the whole thing with a room in a bank. Margaret Daly is in the deed records.

See also

• Carnegie Library at Hamilton, Ravalli County (Montana Historical Society, erected 2018)
• Hamilton Commercial Historic District at Hamilton, Ravalli County -- the Daly mill town that needed a library
• Daly Mansion at Hamilton, Ravalli County -- Marcus Daly's estate, where Margaret Daly lived after her husband's death