Eagle Grove, Iowa

The Carnegie in Iowa Falls gave me my first spontaneous, audible “Wow” of these travels. Each one I come upon gives the needle on my delight meter a nudge, but the magnificence of this one gave it an extra jolt and even before I noticed it’s coup de grace—an eagle perched atop it’s roof.

It’s soft yellow hue, fine stonework, inset columns, subtle ornamentation, classic light fixtures, large windows, “Carnegie Ellsworth Library” over it’s entry and setting on a slight hill with a block all to itself gave it an extra degree of magnificence. It had lost the distinction of being the town library, but still had a position of prominence as a historical museum.

It was one of two Carnegies in Iowa Falls, as Ellsworth College, just a few blocks away, also had a library funded by Carnegie. It was of more traditional design, but still the most noble building on the small campus. It’s facade identified it as “Ellsworth College Library” but it was now known as “Bullock Jones Hall” and had been converted into classrooms and administrative offices.

Just seven miles away along the Iowa River in the tiny town of Alden was another Carnegie. It had a slight addition to its side with a ground level entrance replacing the original entrance up a flight of stairs

The original building was adorned with two plaques. One dated to the opening of the library stating, “The erection of this building was made possible through the generosity of Mr. Andrew Carnegie. A.D. 1914.” The second was more recent after the building had been placed on the National Register of Historic Places. Regrettably the library wasn’t open, it being Saturday evening.

I biked on for another hour until near dark and nestled into a corn field once again. The pattern of a shower during the night continued, leaving me with a slightly muddy ground cloth the next morning when I rolled up my tent. Fortunately the temperatures have moderated with it now fall, so I didn’t need to be alarmed when I discovered the water bottle cage on the underside of my frame containing one of my four water bottles broke off as I was riding. I was startled that I hadn’t been aware of it detaching. My three remaining bottles were mostly full, so I had no concerns of thirst.

Amongst my road side gatherings so far has been a child’s-sized water bottle that I picked up as a curiosity and perhaps as a premonition. I had yet to use it, but I can now enlist it as my emergency water bottle. So far the pickings have been ho-hum, just the usual—several bungee cords, two license plates and just one coin, a nickle. No neckerchiefs yet.

If I were the destitute vagrant that I’m mistaken for, I’ve had the opportunity for free food besides the occasional dumpster fare I add to my diet. I’ve come upon a couple of what I thought were Little Free Libraries, but they were dispensing food, not books. One called itself a “Blessing Box” and was located at a commuter parking lot at the intersection of two roads out in the country.  

The other identified itself as a “Little Free Pantry” and was located by a library. Both stated, “Take what you need, give what you can.” Neither had more than a handful of basic items. One had a loaf of bread, a box of pancake mix and a bottle of syrup. The other had a box of macaroni and cheese, some fruit cups and some breakfast bars.  

The next two Carnegies were both exemplary enough to register delayed “Wows” after fully taking in their majesty. The first in Hampton facing the town park had the splendor of a baronial estate. It paid full homage to Carnegie with “Gift of Andrew Carnegie” in its facade below “Hampton Public Library.” And inside its entrance were the profound words of Carnegie—“A library outranks any other one thing a community can do to benefit its people.”

Forty miles down the road the dignified Carnegie in Eagle Grove placed its entrance at the diagonal of its corner lot between four columns that were set in a curve. A simple “C,” as if it were a Masonic symbol, was inlaid above the entry.  

The former “Free Public Library” etched in stone that had once graced the entrance was now a cracked relic residing to the side of building that had been transformed into a museum.

I was happy to camp in a grassy cemetery that evening, allowing me to wipe the mud from my tent. I stop at cemeteries two or three times a day in France for water, but I have never camped in one in France, as rarely do they have any grass. Cemeteries aren’t as common in the US, and never have I found a water spigot in one, not that I go searching with water so easy to come by at service stations, but I do occasionally take advantage of cemeteries as a place to camp in my US travels.

With my many thousands of miles biking around France engrained in me, my subconscious thought can often place me in France as I’m cycling along. I’ll be momentarily tricked into thinking a high silo in the distance is a village’s cathedral, as is a common site in France, before I’m reminded I’m in the land of commerce, not culture.

There are many aspects of French touring that I miss (the picturesque towns, the never bland scenery, the ease of camping both wild and in municipal campgrounds, the level of respect the touring cyclist is accorded, roadside picnic tables, toilettes publique, water in cemeteries, not to mention The Tour de France and the many cycling memorials and museums scattered all over the country), but touring in the US affords me some of my favorite things that France doesn’t—an abundance of libraries, ice dispensing machines in service stations and fast food restaurants, roadside scavenging, dumpster diving, and businesses not closing for lunch.

France can actually be cheaper than the US, with its subsidies making supermarket food less expensive. And there is a greater variety to the food choices. Plus there is menthe á l’eau. Both the US and France offer exemplary cycle touring. It would be next to impossible to rate one over the other as their pluses and minuses come close to cancelling each other out.  I couldn’t be more pleased to be riding the roads of either and absorbing all they have to offer.

Eldora, Iowa

Bike shops can be as amiable an environment as libraries and a welcome sanctuary similarly inhabited by people who find their work more of a pleasure than a burden. I would make them a regular visit along with the Carnegies, but it’s rare to find a bike shop in the small towns that are home to most Carnegies. Thus I was pleased to notice a bike shop across the street from the Carnegie in Perry, as I was in desperate need of work on my rear hub.  

I had managed to obliterate the sealed cartridge of ball bearings on the side opposite the free wheel and had been riding for nearly one hundred miles with bearings on just one side, leaving me with an extremely wobbly wheel. I had to release my rear brake with a couple of inches of play in the wheel making high speed descents an act of faith. It was a miracle that my axle remained intact and that I could continue to pedal at all.  

I was becoming accustomed to it, despite the considerable extra effort it took to pedal, especially uphill. I could have circled back to Des Moines and its many bike shops but had reconciled myself to pushing on to Council Bluffs and it’s Carnegie along with a couple of others along the way, even though it was one hundred miles away.

But then the bike shop in Perry popped up. I doubted it would have the obscure cartridge of bearings I needed for my rare 48-spoke tandem hub, but since I knew that Perry had a campground, I would be willing to stay over a day if the small part could be overnighted. Perry had a bike shop, as it is on the popular 89-mile Raccoon River Valley bicycle path that led to Des Moines. The trail is so popular that the new library in Perry had four bikes that could be checked out to ride the trail.  

An older guy was working on a woman’s bike outside the shop. He said he could help me in a moment. He was a welcome site, as he promised to be a wizened mechanic with years of experience and know-how. Unfortunately, he was a retiree just helping out at the shop when the owner moonlighted at the local hospital as an ambulance driver. He had never seen a hub like mine. He rummaged through a box of bearings, but didn’t recognize any that would work.  

He said it would be possible to order the part from Quality Bike Parts in Minneapolis, as I knew that is where my wizard of a mechanic, Joe of Quick Release in Chicago, had acquired the bearings when they last needed replacing over 50,000 miles ago, but he didn’t feel comfortable taking the axle out to determine what the bearings were on the still in tact side. I called Joe in Chicago hoping he could remember what they were, but it had been so long ago, he couldn’t precisely recall and paging through QBP’s catalogue didn’t help.

The part-timer called the shop owner to see if he was available for consultation. He couldn’t come to the shop, but I could meet him at the hospital a mile away. He had some expertise, but he’d never seen such a hub either, so didn’t know what to order and couldn’t dissect the hub there. He called a fellow bike shop owner 40 miles away who also worked on small engines, thinking he might have some knowledge and possibly the part. He too was flummoxed.  

At this point I was wishing there hadn’t been a bike shop in Perry and that I’d just paid my respects to its Carnegie, now a museum, and had been on my way. But after putting this much effort into it I took the bike shop owner’s advice to try Kyle’s Bike Shop In Waukee, twenty miles away towards Des Moines also on the bike trail. He said there were two Kyle’s around Des Moines that had large inventories of parts and were staffed by knowledgeable mechanics. He also said there was a campground in Waukee.

It was a pleasant ride on the paved bike path, a former rail line. The only other cyclists were retirees, mostly solitary men in Lycra, but a few couples as well. There were two people on duty at Kyle’s, but neither were mechanics. The man with that expertise had the day off, but they assured me that he would surely have the solution to my problem, as he’d been wrenching over twenty years and even rode a tandem. He’d be in at ten the next morning. The campground was three miles away, putting me within five miles of an REI and a bike shop called Bike World a few miles further.

REI opened at nine, so I made it my choice. A young, inexperienced mechanic thought she had the solution, placing bearings into the broken cartridge and fitting a seal over it. It didn’t even last a mile. Rather than going back, since there was nothing she could do, I continued on to Bike World. The mechanic there was a genuine expert, regularly taking weekends off to go to races all over the country to work for domestic teams. He knew exactly what I needed. He didn’t have the part. He called the two other Bike Worlds and the nearer one, just seven miles away, had the part.  

I didn’t want to get too excited, as I thought REI had answered my prayers, but when I walked into Bike World number two, a bag of the cartridges sitting on the counter looked like exactly what I needed. It took the mechanic, another woman, some effort to extract the broken cartridge, but she succeeded in the operation while I chatted with several other employees, one who knew all about the Carnegie in Cresco in the northeast corner of the state. It had recently been rehabbed by a team of Amish workers. There is a large community of them in the region.

It was my fifth bike shop in less than 24 hours and each had been a pleasure to hang out in. I had friendly conversations at all of them, even with an employee at REI who checked the serial number on my bike, under the pretense of entering it into my member profile, though it may have been to see if it ended up on some stolen directory.  

Even though I’d had a shower at the campground the night before, he may have taken me as a homeless transient, as is the standard profile of the touring cyclist in the US. It is a stark contrast to France, where traveling by bike is a respectable and enviable pursuit. Even the hard corps cyclists at both Bike Worlds were somewhat suspicious of why I’d want to bike around Iowa. I was beginning to wonder the same thing the last few days as my bike got progressively more difficult to pedal, but I am now resurrected.   

But this delay means I won’t be able to make a clean sweep of all the Carnegies in the state. I need to be back in Chicago by October 15 for a tribute at the Arts Club to the recently deceased Milos Stehlik of Facets. He passed away while I was in France. Tom Luddy, one of the founders of the Telluride Film Festival, will be in attendance. He lauded Milos in his pre-festival address to the staff, as did Ken Burns on another occasion during the festival, as Milos had been the chairman of the Board of Governors of the festival, which they also served on.

Before the Carnegie in Perry I limped along for twenty-five miles on the Covered Bridges Scenic Byway between the Carnegies in Winterset and Greenfield. Winterset is in the heart of Madison County where the movie starring Meryl Streep and Clint Eastwood was filmed. There weren’t any bridges on the highway, but signs pointed to several just off it. The Carnegie in Winterset is now it’s City Hall. It was unusual to see “City Hall” chiseled into the stone over the entry. Usually new tenants are content to let what was originally chiseled remain and let the building retain its birthright.

Winterset is also famous for being the birthplace of John Wayne. The main street through town is John Wayne Drive. Along with the attraction of the covered bridges and John Wayne’s home is also a Quilt Museum.

The Carnegie in Greenfield has also become a government building, this one housing the Chamber of Commerce. It is across the street and down the block from the new nondescript library that adjoins the city hall. It didn’t replace the old library because the town had outgrown it, but because the Carnegie had fallen into disrepair and it was going to cost too much to renovate and insulate it and put in an elevator.  

There was still anger in the voice of the librarian twenty years later that she had lost her magnificent place of work and was now forced to spend her days in a setting as sterile as a dentist’s waiting room. She said the town cared so little for the old library that it would have been torn down had not a local couple bought it and turned it into a small business for a few years before it became home to the Chamber of Commerce.

My day in Des Moines hanging out in bike shops was a rare day of not dropping in on a library.   It wasn’t until the next day, more than 48 hours since my visit to the Perry library that I made it to another library in Eldora more than sixty miles north of Des Moines.  It was the town’s replacement to its Carnegie, which it had outgrown thirty years ago.  The Carnegie faced the town’s towering Courthouse in its central plaza.  It had served as a law office until three months ago when the lawyer retired.  What will become of it is unknown.  The new library had a fish tank on the circulation desk.  It was a rare library that required signing in to use its WiFi.  The password was “blackbox.“  I asked what the story was behind that.  The librarian said she didn’t know, as her superior changed the password every day and turned off the WiFi when the library closed at night.  I’m glad I won’t  be camping near Eldora this night amongst such wary and suspicious folk.

Indianola, Iowa

This being a circuit of Iowa I was hoping to camp in a cornfield every night. I succeeded my first four nights, but night five I ended up in a forest. It would have received the Daniel Boone seal of approval as a most genuine campsite other than the constant din of traffic, as I was cocooned in a patch of forest on the outskirts of Des Moines just off a bike path surrounded by bustling roads.  

There were cornfields nearby, but none offered a vacant strip of turf for camping, either between the rows or besides them. Woodlands are always more alluring than pastures, so I didn’t mind bringing my cornfield streak to an end, allowing me more freedom in my camping choices in the days to come. 

My original plan had been to make a late afternoon transit of Des Moines dropping in on its lone Carnegie on the Drake University campus, then escape to the Carnegie and the cornfields of Indianola seventeen miles to the south of the city. But road construction and hills delayed me, forcing me to camp a little early before plunging into the metropolis.

Instead of a four Carnegie day, it turned into just a pair. The first came after a four mile stretch of gravel with some mighty hills, part of a shortcut from Knoxville where I had stopped for it’s Carnegie the evening before. Unfortunately, it was Sunday so I couldn’t get a look inside. An addition to its side had just been completed. It’s former entrance had been turned into a patio. The large addition matched the original brick and roof, at first tricking one into thinking it wasn’t new until one saw the present-day, glassy entrance.

On the way to the next Carnegie in Pella while still on the gravel stretch, I came upon a sign at the summit of its steepest hill that warned “Don’t drown. Turn back if the road is flooded.” There had been rain the day before, but not enough for there to be any standing water. After I returned to the pavement I crossed a dam with a sign warning of crosswinds.

After surviving this treacherous stretch Pella was a welcome oasis. It was a Dutch settlement with windmills and tulips. It’s Tulip Parade earlier in the year had drawn Bernie Sanders. Democratic candidates have descended on the state, but that was the first evidence I’d encountered of their presence other than reading that Elizabeth Warren and Joe Biden had joined striking GM workers on the picket lines somewhere in the state. 

The Pella Carnegie was now its City Hall. As with the Carnegie in Knoxville, it’s original entrance had been transformed into a patio. It was the first of the six Carnegies I had visited so far that had Carnegie on its facade other than the Grinnell College Carnegie that called itself Carnegie Hall. But it wasn’t simply Carnegie Library, but Carnegie Viersen Library. Neither of the women at the nearby Visitor Center knew who Viersen was, but one thought the name might have referred to a women.

A librarian at the new library four blocks away confirmed that Viersen was a woman and that she provided the land for the library in honor of her father and contributed $6,000 to purchase books, a tidy sum, as the standard Carnegie bequest of $10,000 was enough to build the library, pillars and all.

It had had a couple of additions over the years, serving as the town’s library for nearly a century until the new sprawling library opened in 2000 at a cost of five million dollars. It is roomy enough to have a small glassed in home for ten tiny, colorful birds.  

Iowa is famous for a library that was home to a cat by the name of Dewey, named for the decimal system, but I knew nothing of these birds. Dewey’s former home was in Spencer in northwest Iowa, in the library that supplanted its razed Carnegie. It is near a cluster of other Carnegies, so I will stop by, if only to see the statue of Dewey out front.

A best-selling book (“Dewey: The Small-Town Cat Who Changed the World” from 2008), along with a children’s book, has been written about him. He was the star of a documentary on libraries with cats, and Meryl Streep was all set to star in a Hollywood production telling his story until the studio decided to pull the plug on the project. The birds of Pella were endowed by a local with an affection for birds. Their chirping provided pleasant background noise. Two couches were arranged facing their enclosure. 

Des Moines lay just twenty miles to the west, but first I had to angle northwest thirty miles to Colfax for its Carnegie. The town’s population had declined by five hundred to just over two thousand since its Carnegie was built in 1913, so it hadn’t had any additions, though it had the space for it, residing on a grassy block that it had all to itself. I was happy to see Carnegie’s portrait over the circulation desk, just the second I’d seen so far, the other in the entry to the first I visited in Marengo. I arrived shortly before a hoard of students just out of school all coming to use  the computers. Some had to wait. The librarian offered me a cold bottle of water. I asked where I might plug in my iPad. There aren’t many electric outlets in these buildings, but a strip had been added on a window sill beside a table. It would have been nice to hang out for the rest of the afternoon, but Des Moines beckoned.

After my night in the woods I continued on the bike path into the metropolis of 655,000, the 89th largest in the US. The rush hour traffic was minimal until I turned on to University Avenue leading to Drake. The campus was abustle with students. Jeans with slits in them was a popular garb. It’s former Carnegie Library lives on as Carnegie Hall housing various administrative offices including student financial planning.  

The librarian in Pella recommended I include a visit to the city’s former Main Library along the Des Moines River through the center of the city in my library quest even though it wasn’t a Carnegie. It was built in the Beaux Arts style inspired by Chicago’s 1893 Columbia Exposition and served as the city’s library for over one hundred years until 2006. It now houses the headquarters for the World Food Prize, an annual award founded by Nobel Laureate Dr. Norman Borlaug in 1986 to recognize the importance of a nutritious and sustainable food supply. The building was surrounded by well-kept gardens. In the background across the river was the gold-capped State Capital.

When I stopped at a Walmart on the way out of town for provisions, an elderly gentleman handed me a “Suffering from Addiction?” card. He was right about me being an addict, though I doubt he realized my addiction was to the bicycle. He said I could call the telephone number on the card any time and someone could come help me. I was tempted to hand him a twenty to help with his ministry, but just thanked him for his concern.

The Indianola Carnegie was now home to the offices of the city opera. It had a glassy addition to its rear. The new library was two blocks down the street. It distinguished itself with signs on its tables reading “A shared outlet is a happy outlet. Please be mindful of others who may need some power.”

Trying to find an outlet has become a theme of my travels. I had to search all over in a McDonald’s the day before to find an outlet. None of the employees would admit to knowing where one could be found. Finally another customer told me the only one was at an already occupied table. When I took it over a few minutes later, it wasn’t long before someone else asked me if he could connect his cord into the outlet as well.

Oskaloosa, Iowa

For the second year in a row I broke my tradition of bicycling bike back to Chicago from Telluride after the film festival. Once again I drove back with Janina, complementing our drive out with visits to national parks and friends and art galleries. Our stop at the Nelson-Atkins Art Museum in Kansas City on the way back might have been the highlight of our month-and-a-half away, as unbeknownst to us one of our favorite artists, Andy Goldsworthy, was on the premises constructing a wall, affording us the opportunity not only to see him in action, but also to exchange a few words.

Goldsworthy’s constructions of stones and twigs have been a dominant theme in our lives, drawing us to many of his sites and inspiring us to make imitations in Janina’s yard. Two summers ago we biked across France to visit a series of cairns he had constructed in the foothills of the Alps. On our drive up to the Traverse City Film Festival at the outset of these travels we stopped off in Grand Rapids to see an arch of his. A documentary on his work from 2001, “Rivers and Tides,” is among our favorites that we watch from time to time. He was as affable and friendly as his screen personae. So was one of his assistants we spoke with, a fellow Brit who has been working with him for 23 years and can be seen in “Rivers and Tides” hoisting a large rock into place.

If we hadn’t encountered Goldsworthy, meeting the 78-year old Brit Michael Apted, director of the seminal “Up” series, who was presenting the latest installment, “63 Up,” at Telluride might have stood out as the most memorable event of our time away. But Telluride is always chock full of brushes with towering figures of cinema. Edward Norton and Willem Dafoe were in attendance with “Motherless Brooklyn.” Werner Herzog and Ken Burns are always there whether they have a film to present or not. Pico Iyer was the guest director. We had the great film scholar Mark Cousins nearly to ourselves for twenty minutes before four hours of his 14-hour film on Women in Film.  

I could go on and on but I’ll refer you to Janina’s Telluride Journal at her website merelycirculating.com. She had so much to comment on this year she’s still polishing it off.

The past two years I’ve devoted my fall bicycle tours to completing the slate of Carnegie libraries in Illinois, then Indiana. This year it is Iowa, a much more ambitious undertaking, as there are sixty-one libraries on my itinerary, compared to less than thirty I had left to reach on the past two fall rides. Iowa is one of six states along with Illinois and Indiana that had over 100 Carnegies. I’ve gotten to 37 of the still standing Carnegies in Iowa on three previous rides across the state, mostly in the southern half of the state, leaving me with sixty-one as ten of the original 108 have been razed, compared to eighteen in both Illinois and Indiana.  It will be a huge haul, but not as many as the eighty this past March in California.

We passed through Iowa on our return.  We were in too much of a hurry to stop at any Carnegies, though we did visit two in Kansas along with twenty on our way out through Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota and South Dakota when we weren’t so pressed for time.  It was tempting to have Janina drop me off in Iowa and let me commence my ride, but I had matters to tend to back home first.  I returned to Iowa via Amtrak after a week back home. I didn’t have a great choice of destinations, as Amtrak does not offer baggage service at many of its stops across Iowa.  

I had to get off at Mount Pleasant over eighty miles from the nearest Carnegie I had yet to visit in Marengo. Mount Pleasant had a Carnegie, but I checked it off four years ago on my ride back from Telluride. So few people get off at Mount Pleasant that the Chicago Amtrak station did not have pre-printed baggage tickets for it. I needed one for my bike and another for my duffle.  

This line had a bike car separate from the baggage car, so I didn’t need to box my bike and could hoist it on the train myself, sparing me the worry of it failing to be loaded on to the train, as has happened to me in the past. But I did have to worry that the handwritten tag on my duffle might get overlooked and miss getting off the train in Mount Pleasant. I knew it would be a short stop, and with the baggage car being all the way at the front behind the engine and me nearly at the back, I couldn’t get to it in time to make sure my duffle was removed.  

So it was a happy site to see an Amtrak employee at the end of the long platform approaching me in the distance carrying my duffle after I got my bike. My duffle was the lone article from the baggage car disembarking. I spared the station official lugging my bag any further, loading up my bike right there in the middle of the platform.  

I had ninety minutes before dark to get down the road and find a place to camp. I wasn’t concerned, knowing there were corn fields aplenty, though I have had the police called on me three times in Iowa for illicit camping, more than any other state. One just never knows when someone might catch a glimpse of me disappearing off the road and take it upon themselves to alert the authorities. I have been spared that so far this year, camping my first three nights in corn fields.

It wasn’t until late in the afternoon the next day that I reached my first Carnegie in Marengo. An unlocked bike sprawled on its side by the entry was an emblem of small-town America.  The original entry was blocked off as the building had been somewhat bastardized by an addition in 2007.  The new entry was in the middle between the new and old halves of the building. At least the new wing tried to replicate the original. After I staggered up the steps to the circulation desk, weary from the heat and seventy miles in the saddle, the elderly librarian asked if she could help me, more out of a concern of “what I was doing there“ than a welcome. She turned friendly though when I expressed my interest in the history of the library.

A little ways down the road I gained a semblance of understanding for her leeriness when I discovered a sheaf of diatribes in a Little Free Library directed at the owner of the local supermarket for his banning a customer wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat from his store. Evidently an employee took exception to the hat, which led to an altercation and the summoning of the police. The pile of letters in the Little Free Library to the owner were all written by right wing zealots bemoaning unrest in this small town where everybody knows everybody.

All the letters veered off into unrelated politicizing calling Hilary a felon and fearing the advent of SOCIALISM and accusing the owner of subscribing to “the planks of the Communist Manifesto” and castigating “leftists attempting to make criminals out of Catholic students from Covington Kentucky just because of the hats these students were wearing.” One letter concluded with “I suggest you get OFF UNITED STATES SOIL.” Another included a P. S.—“Jesus never lost an argument, but people like you crucified him anyway.”

This was a fine welcome to small-town America. It was quite a contrast to the book I had been reading on the train, 92-year old Jan Morris reminiscing about the “essential niceness” of such communities in his latest book “In My Mind’s Eye,” what she calls a “thought diary.” The book has 188 entries written over a year’s time, trying to avoid being upset about Trump and Brexit. She is constantly asking, “Why can’t people just be kind?”

After a rainy night in a cornfield it was on to the college town of Grinnell and it’s academic Carnegie Library, now used for classrooms and undergoing an extensive renovation. 

Grinnell was also home to one of the handful of banks Louis Sullivan designed between 1909 and 1919 that are scattered around the Midwest.  It resides in a prominent position in the town center.  Stained glass windows on its side let in light and a pair of lions guard its entry.

It was twenty-two miles south to the next Carnegie in Montezuma. This town of 1,700 wasn’t much larger than when it’s Carnegie was built, so it hadn’t necessitated an addition. It exuded the charm and warmth that characterize most Carnegies. It was now home to the local Historical and Genealogical Society. It was one of the last Carnegies built in Iowa with the year of its construction 19 and 18 flanking “Library” over the entry.

The Carnegie in Oskaloosa twenty-five miles away still served as a library, but had been doubled in size. It’s addition included pillars flanking it new entrance. A simple “Free” still resided over its original, now closed, entrance.