The move of 1969: carts on the Lincolnway

1964–1969 · from Hill Street to 209 Lincolnway East

The ground: The Carnegie building could not grow again — the nomination notes that its lot "allowed no easy method of expanding the existing Carnegie library again" — and so, in its sixth decade, the library did what the century's libraries did: it left the gift building for a larger one east of downtown. The 2025 News-Times feature reconstructs the new building's course from the press record: the site was the Rohleder-Groff building's, a 1924 commercial building that had housed the South Bend Tribune for thirty-eight years and was demolished for the project; the Mishawaka firm Donlon-Lofgren drew plans in 1964 for a building of more than 25,000 square feet; and the Lincolnway location was approved for construction in 1966. The building that rose is the modernist brick library that stands at 209 Lincolnway East today.

The move itself: The feature dates the transfer precisely: it began on Monday, July 14, 1969, a fortnight before the new library's unveiling, and it was done in the open — staff pushed trains of book carts along the Lincolnway sidewalks from Hill Street to the new building, and residents were invited to check out as many books as they could carry, on an extended return grace, so that the collection would walk itself east in the public's arms and the returns would not flood the opening weeks. The nomination fixes the other end of the course: "By 1969, at age 53, the Mishawaka Carnegie Library was officially closed and vacated with the opening of a new facility to the east of the downtown." One piece of the old building moved with the books: the terra cotta plaque from above its entrance — "An Idle Book Never Loses in Power. An Idle Man Does" — "was removed in 1969 and relocated to the new library," the nomination records, bricks set in its place on Hill Street. And the feature preserves the Tribune's John Coxeter measuring what the carts were carrying: "If a disaster tomorrow should turn Mishawaka into a 20th century Pompeii..." — the quotation stands here at the feature's attribution, its original date not given there and not fixed.

Sources:

1. Evans, "Pages in Transit," South Bend News-Times (2025) — the Rohleder-Groff site and its demolition; Donlon-Lofgren's 1964 plans; the 1966 approval; the move of July 14, 1969, the cart trains, and the carry-out invitation; the Coxeter quotation.
2. Fine, Carnegie Library nomination (1997), section 8 — the Carnegie closed and vacated in 1969 at age fifty-three; the entrance plaque removed in 1969 and relocated to the new library.