Rhinelander, Wisconsin



If there were a Hall of Fame or Nobel Prize to acknowledge those who have performed an exemplary deed serving or saving a Carnegie Library, Pat and Marty Reynolds of Ladysmith, Wisconsin would be a shoe-in for either.  Not only did they save the Ladysmith Carnegie from the wrecker’s bell, they restored it and turned it into a luxurious bed-and-breakfast, Carnegie Hall ( A Novel Bed-and-Breakfast Experience).

The library had stood empty for six years after it was replaced in 1993 and was on the verge of being turned into a parking lot, when Marty, an eight-time mayor of Ladysmith, though not at the time, went into action.  He tried to recruit various local businesses, including the dentist, into relocating into the historic building to save it.  All declined fearing the expense of rehabbing.  

So the Reynolds, who had grown up in the area and had patronized the library from their earliest years, and had a deep-seated attachment to it, stepped in and bought it.  Marty was a plumbing and heating contractor and Pat a kindergarten teacher.   They spent three years transforming the building into their home and a six-room bed-and-breakfast, each room with its own bathroom.  

Two months later a tornado took the roof off the building and filled it with water destroying all they had accomplished.  Undaunted, they spent another three years re-restoring it to a magnificence beyond anything it had previously enjoyed.  It has the full flavor of a former library with shelves of books in every room.  More than three thousand books fill its many shelves, ten times the number the library started out with in 1907.  

The six guest rooms are all themed with books to match.  They are named for Teddy Roosevelt, who was president at the time of the library’s construction, Jane Austen, Sherlock Holmes, the Civil War, and the Titanic.  A room with a hot tub and a balcony overlooking the Flambeau River is called The River Room.  None were occupied, as the bed-and-breakfast has been closed for eighteen months since the onslaught of Covid, though the Reynolds did accept some regular guests, just one roomful at a time, during the summer months.

I was fortunate to catch Marty in the parking lot returning from an errand, otherwise I wouldn’t have had the privilege of a tour and the remarkable story of the library still being there.  Only two items original to the building remain, the Carnegie portrait and a sink. Everything had been sold, including the circulation desk and the portrait.  He was able to track down both of them, but the new owner of the desk didn’t want to part with it, as he had turned it into a table in his workshop.  Marty replicated it for his check-in desk.

Anyone on a Carnegie trek could do no better than visiting the bike shop Carnegie in Hayward, fifty miles north, and this one.  One can learn more of what accommodations they might have at www.Carnegiehallbedandbreakfast.com.  One could not have a more affable host.  I didn’t meet Pat, but one could be sure that someone who served as a small town kindergarten teacher for twenty-seven years would be a charmer as well.  He said that the average owner of a bed-and-breakfast lasts seven years.  They have endured twenty and can’t imagine doing anything else.

I couldn’t gain entry to the new library, as it was only providing pick-ups in its lobby.  It was closed due to only twenty-seven per cent of the county being vaccinated, the lowest rate in the state, and one of the lowest rates in the country.  It was twenty miles east to the tiny town of Hawkins to the next open library, a non-Carnegie.  It was the first of this trip that not only required a mask but the sanitization of one’s hands as well. 

Then it was seventy miles to the next library in Rhinelander.  The road was dotted with picturesque run-down and abandoned buildings. 

The overcast day prevented my solar lamp from charging enough to provide me more than thirty minutes of illumination in my tent that night.

After the dazzling new incarnations of the Hayward and Ladysmith Carnegies I was almost disappointed that Rhinelander’s Carnegie still served as a library. It had had a large addition to its side and rear in 1984 and was due for another.  Among its distinguishing features were two fireplaces and a tile mosaic outside the entrance. A matt covered most of it, as it was in the process of being restored. There was no portrait to be seen and the librarian didn’t know where it had disappeared to.

Rhinelander offered the first Aldi since Green Bay nearly two weeks ago. It’s dumpster had only a few bags of refuse, but they provided enough for a dinner of bean and guacamole dip, a slab of ham, two bags of chips, six bagels and a couple of bananas.  The quick food-grab saved me the bother of going inside and expending a valuable ten or fifteen minutes, enabling me to get an extra two or three miles down the road before dark.  I just hit eighty miles for the day, my sixth such effort of these travels, along with falling two miles short twice.  I’m approaching two thousand miles for this ride zigzagging across Wisconsin and into the UP.  Not likely to get a century or even a ninety-mile day with the ever shortening days.