New Carlisle Libraries: The New Carlisle-Olive Township Public Library

Libraries · The New Carlisle-Olive Township Public Library

Every other institution in this history has a counterpart somewhere else — another town's school, another congregation, another paper. The library has none, because it is the town's own invention in the strictest sense: a board, a tax, and a building that Olive Township voted into being for itself and has now kept for a hundred and five years. It began with steel money — a $9,000 Carnegie grant in the last season of Carnegie's giving — and a brick building on Michigan Street that the town has since taken for its hall. It stands today on South Bray Street in a building finished in 2002, open seven days a week, governed by seven trustees appointed by five different bodies, and examined every two years by the State Board of Accounts down to the last dollar. Its record is unusually complete for a library of its size, because Indiana examines its libraries the way it examines its counties, and because this library keeps its own minutes in a public archive going back to 2010. What follows is the whole of that record, at the strength each part of it was actually read.

The libraries leg carried the public library whole from its Carnegie grant and printed its own unreachables honestly. This addendum seats the pre-public class as institutions or prints their absence at full size, carries the directors' line with its two named spans, states the collection at the strength it can be enumerated, and gives the modern rebuild its audited measure.