Founded 1921: the library dates itself

1921 · THE LIBRARY'S OWN ACCOUNT, CARRIED IN ITS BYLAWS

The library's bylaws carry its own founding date in their mission statement: "The New Carlisle-Olive Township Public Library was founded in 1921." The sentence is older than the bylaws that carry it — the trustee orientation packet of January 2013 notes that the mission text was drawn from the library's 1980 long-range plan and revised — so the date is the institution's settled account of itself across at least two generations of its own planning documents. The same bylaws fix the legal form: a Class One public library, a municipal corporation, operating under the Public Library Law of 1947 and the Library Services Authority of 1967, exercising its powers under Indiana Code 36-12. The institution that dates itself to 1921 is thus, in law, a creature of the mid-century library statutes — the common Indiana pattern, in which a Carnegie-era library was re-founded on the modern code without losing its own sense of when it began. What the record reached does not contain is the founding instrument itself: no petition, election, or council resolution establishing the library stands in any source this section read, and the gap is not a formality — a Carnegie grant of 1917 (the next article) was made to a community that had already organized a library board and promised a tax, four years before the date the library gives its own founding. The organizing act of 1916 or 1917, and the levy that backed the grant application, stand as this section's first named gap, with their settlers named in the closing ledger: the Indiana State Library's Public Library Correspondence Files, which hold the state's Carnegie-era correspondence with its towns; the library board's earliest minutes; and the town and township records of the first levy.

Principal sources: Bylaws of the New Carlisle-Olive Township Public Library (revised December 2012), carried in the library's New Trustee Orientation Information packet, 14 January 2013 (read whole); the bylaws as republished on the library's own website, ncpl.lib.in.us (read whole).