The Carnegie library as a building: 124 East Michigan Street

Grant 14 September 1917; built 1921; Town Hall today

The town's best-documented civic building began as its library: the Carnegie building of 1921 at 124 East Michigan Street, raised on Andrew Carnegie's grant of 9,000 dollars dated 14 September 1917, and serving today as the Town Hall — the town governed out of its library. The grant's paper stands in the libraries leg, where the institution's course is dug whole: the foundation's list of Indiana grants carries New Carlisle's 9,000 dollars at line 104 of its roll, and the building rose in 1921 as the library's first purpose-built home, which it kept until the library's removal to 408 South Bray Street in 2002. As a building, its facts in the record read are its grant, its date, its address and its second life: the town's own pages seat the Town Hall at 124 East Michigan Street in the present day, so the Carnegie building's course runs unbroken from library to seat of government, the most durable piece of civic architecture the town owns. What the record read does not give is the building's architecture in the technical sense — no style is named for it in any source reached, and no architect — and the checklist's demand for both is answered with the want banked plainly as GAP-NC6-ARCH-2 rather than with a guess dressed as knowledge. (Many Indiana Carnegies of its year are the work of known regional firms; this section asserts none of them for this building, because none is in its record.) The settlers are named: Lewellen's photographic census of Indiana's Carnegie buildings, which the libraries leg used for the grant's concurrence and which carries a photograph of this building — a photograph noted in the pass's image list at TERMS-CHECK, its rights as the census states them; the Carnegie Corporation's grant file for the 1917 award; and the building's SHAARD record. When any of the three is read, the building gets its style and its architect in this article's place; until then it stands, like the town that uses it, well housed and under-described.

Sources

1. Carnegie Corporation / List of Carnegie libraries in Indiana — the grant, its amount and date.
2. Town of New Carlisle, official pages — the Town Hall at 124 East Michigan Street, read.
3. This build's Libraries — the institution's course: the 1921 opening, the 2002 removal, and the Lewellen concurrence.