Lansing Carnegie Library
The Historical Society of Greater Lansing is holding its second brown bag luncheon Wednesday April 9 at 12:10 p.m. in the atrium of Lansing City Hall. The program lasts about 20 minutes and concludes with a tour of the Lansing Votes exhibit currently on display in Lansing City Hall. The program features Society President Valerie Marvin and Director of the Capital Area District Library (CADL) Maureen Hirten talking about the history of the Carnegie Library and CADL. The Lansing Votes exhibit looks at six votes that “changed” Lansing and one vote in 1902 was to decide if Lansing should build a Carnegie Library. Voters approval was necessary because Carnegie required the community to agree to fund the new library at a rate that was 10 percent of the cost; in this case $3500 a year.
The vote, however, was not the first local effort to establish a library. In the early 1860s the Ladies’ Library and Literary Association established Lansing’s first lending library located downtown on Michigan Avenue. As the library was a private institution, library patrons were required to pay an annual membership fee of $2.00. Shares in the library were sold for $5.00 each. The library was open on Saturdays from 2:00 pm – 9:30 pm. Lansing’s ladies, though, knew that this was not enough. Pooling their talents and their books, a few years later local women volunteered to combine their private library collection with that of Lansing’s high school. Conditions for the donation required the Board of Education to promise that the library would be open to both students and adults alike. The Board agreed.
This newly formed Public School Library developed rapidly, soon outgrowing the space in Lansing High School. The City of Lansing offered space for the library in the new City Hall building that opened in 1897. The Board of Education accepted, and the library moved. Unfortunately, this library was located next to the justice courts and the jail, which soon proved to be a distraction for youth who told their parents that they were ‘just going to the library’. Ultimately it was Mrs. Mary Spencer, the Librarian of the State of Michigan, who wrote to Carnegie’s foundation to ask for a library. When the conditions of the gift were made public, a fierce debate about the city’s ability to fund the library annually at $3,500 waged in the local papers. Ultimately the city decided to put the issue to a vote. When Lansing voters went to the polls on February 22, 1902 to decide the library question, few women in the community were able to participate, as Michigan law allowed only women who owned taxable property to vote in local elections. (Full female suffrage would not come about until 1920.) This left many of the library’s staunchest supporters able only to lobby their male friends and relatives for their support. When the polls closed and the votes were tallied, library supporters carried the day with 1,519 yes votes to 382 no votes. Construction began not long after. Almost exactly three years later, the library opened with a gala on February 22, 1905.
