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1914–1915 · the grant, the guarantee, and the gift
The asking: "The administration of the City of Mishawaka began courting the Carnegie Corporation in 1914 to provide $35,000 towards building a new library facility." The answer came in January 1915: the Corporation committed $30,000. "Although newspaper accounts report that officials were attempting to renegotiate for the full $35,000, the Carnegie Corporation rarely amended its grant amount and, in this case, did not provide the additional $5,000 as requested." The grant stood at thirty thousand, and the city's part of the bargain was the standard Carnegie maintenance pledge: in February 1915 "the City Council passed a resolution to guarantee a ten percent maintenance fund ($3,000.00) for the new library," the amount set, as the Corporation's formula ran, at $2 to $3 per resident.
The gift: The site was not bought; it was given. "Mishawaka's site for a new library consisted of two lots, donated by community leader Fred G. Eberhart, at the corner of First and Hill Streets" — west of the downtown business district and off the Lincolnway, with the high school directly across the street and the Mishawaka Woolen & Rubber works several blocks north along the river. The nomination reads the placement in Carnegie's own terms: a library beside a school, within walking distance of the works, stood "directly prescribed to Carnegie's goal of serving the labor class." The giver's whole course as the city's patron — the land, the 1909 pageant, the memorial church his children built — is carried in this history's culture record; what belongs here is the gift's consequence, which is the next article's building. The legal description in the nomination's boundary statement fixes the parcel as lots numbered ten and twelve on Hill Street in the plat of the Addition to St. Joseph Iron Works.
The committee and the correspondence: "To oversee the construction of the new public library, an executive board and building committee of fifteen members were formed with the Superintendent of Schools, J. P. Nuner, as the chairperson" — the school corporation that had levied the founding tax thus also built the founding building. The 2025 feature adds the campaign's civic machinery and one piece of the Carnegie correspondence: the building effort was aided by the Women's Club and the Men's Civic League, and in the summer of 1915 Carnegie's secretary James Bertram wrote to committee member John Nuner that the basement workspace in the plans was larger than needed and the lecture room too small — the committee at first argued, then agreed to Bertram's changes.
Sources:
- Fine, Carnegie Library nomination (1997), section 8 — the 1914 courting; the January 1915 commitment of $30,000; the unamended grant; the February 1915 maintenance resolution; Eberhart's two lots at First and Hill; the Nuner committee of fifteen; section 10, the lots' legal description.
- Evans, "Pages in Transit," South Bend News-Times (2025) — the Women's Club and Men's Civic League aid; the Bertram letter of summer 1915.
- The culture record of this history — Eberhart's patronage whole, at the size that file gives it.