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1872–1969 · AND THE MOTTO OVER ITS DOOR
The wanderings: Mishawaka's library began, on the surviving record, with a fire: the earliest-known collection, the Maclure library, was destroyed by fire in 1872, the year of the town's Great Fire. What followed was a generation of borrowed rooms — and one resting place no other library in this record can match: the subscription collection that succeeded it ended its wanderings, in the Libraries section's own words, "in the restrooms of the rubber works," the Ball Band plant's facilities serving as the town's book room before the school board's tax levy of 1906 put a public library in a second-floor room of City Hall in September 1907, one part-time librarian, Miss Olive Long, presiding for nine years. The Carnegie building that replaced the room, opened 5 May 1916 at 122 North Hill Street, carried a motto over its entrance in terra cotta: "An Idle Book Never Loses in Power. An Idle Man Does." And when the library outgrew the Carnegie and moved in the summer of 1969, it moved the way the record delights to state: with book carts pushed along the Lincolnway sidewalks, the collection trundled down the street from the old building to the new. The Carnegie still stands a few blocks west of its successor — in daily use still, serving dinner.
Sources: the Libraries section of this history — the Maclure library and the fire of 1872 (National Register nomination, Carnegie Library, 1997, section 8); the subscription collection's course and the rubber-works restrooms; the 1906 levy and the City Hall room of September 1907, Olive Long librarian 1907–1916; the Carnegie opening of 5 May 1916 and the terra cotta motto; the 1969 move by book cart; the Carnegie building's present use.