Kaukauna, Wisconsin

  

One of the saddest days in a town’s history has to be the day when it’s Carnegie is replaced as the town’s library. An even more heartbreaking day is when the building is razed.  Fortunately, more often than not the extinct Carnegie transitions to another municipal building, such as a museum or historical society, or falls into private ownership and becomes a law office or restaurant or someone’s residence or, horror of horrors, a car dealership, as in Racine. About a third of the time when a town outgrows its Carnegie it retains its identity as a library with an addition, some a nice blend and others an unfortunate distortion. 

The closing of the library can also lead to a seminal day in the town’s history, the day of the transfer of the books from the Carnegie to the new library when it is done as a community effort, particularly when that transfer is made the old-fashioned way with a chain of residents handing books from one to another often for several blocks.

Ripon was a community that had such an event in 1973.  It had to have brought out hundreds as the new library was four blocks away.  The intersections would have had to have been blocked, and there would have no doubt been a celebratory picnic afterwards with food provided by local restaurants.  It would have been a huge community event.  On occasion I have met a librarian who has participated in such a transfer.  They have such fond, vivid memories of it, they enthusiastically recall it as if it happened just the week before, though it may have been decades ago.  

It conjures up images of a barn-raising, a massive community effort that is a celebration of a sort.  What joy it would be for the many involved having the privilege of laying hands on hundreds of books, glancing at their titles as they pass them on and trying to remember those they’d like to give a read.  It would give them a connection to all the books in the library’s collection, a life-long sensation that would trigger ripples of joy whenever they enter the library.

I didn’t have the good fortune of finding anyone in Ripon who had participated in its transfer nearly fifty years ago, but it lives on, featured on a plaque outside the Carnegie, which now serves as the office of the president of Ripon College.  It has to be one of the grandest collegiate presidential offices anywhere.  The neo-classical building is a gem with a pair of columns at its entry and sides with arched windows.  The bold “Public Library” chiseled above its entrance hasn’t been buffed out nor the “Carnegie 1905” just below.  It’s on the periphery of the small campus. Just a block away is the Museum of the Birth Place of the Republican Party.

The Carnegie in Berlin fifteen miles north was another dandy on a slight rise, but it’s grandeur was undermined by a horribly designed addition obstructing one’s view of it. If there were a posse of Carnegie-preservationists, this addition would be high on their list to bull doze, or at least that portion that inexplicably extends out in front of it. 

I continued north to Waupaca, a Menominee word meaning Place of Tomorrow Seen Clearly.  It’s Carnegie, now a Historical Society, had several panels out front tracing the centuries of Menominees in the region until a treaty in the 1840s ceded much of the land to white settlers.  A Little Free Library also graced its grounds.  I’ve seen several a day, no surprise, as it was Wisconsin where this world-wide phenomenon originated. 

As with many libraries, Waupaca’s new library four blocks away had a feature unique to itself—a sign in its men’s room that said, “Do not urinate in the floor drain.”  It had just one urinal.  Evidently there are farm hands in the community unaccustomed to indoor latrines or those with a weak bladder unable to wait.

My zigzag about the state next took me east to New London.  For the first time I was besieged by mosquitoes in the forest where I took refuge for the night.  It was just sixty degrees, not quite cold enough to stymie their blood lust.  But forty-five degrees in the morning kept them at bay, sparing me the frantic dance I went through erecting the tent as I took it down. 

The New London librarian was the first of these travels to gladly and proudly usher me around her Carnegie pointing out its many features.  It was also the first of the fifteen I’ve visited so far with the framed portrait of Carnegie on display that the Carnegie Corporation made available to all the Carnegie Libraries in 1935 on the centennial of his birth.  It was relegated to the basement though, in a hallway leading to a meeting room that had a fireplace just below another on the first floor.  I asked when the fireplace had been last used.  The librarian didn’t know, but she deferred to her assistant who’d been at the library longer than her. She said she could remember it being used in the early days of her tenure thirty years ago.  

The library had an addition to its side, built in 1932 originally as a museum.  The museum was later moved downstairs and the library extended into the museum.  The librarian said that when they moved books into the addition the husky farm boys thought they could heft the shelves of books onto rollers, not realizing how heavy they were.

I continued east another thirty-five miles to Kaukauna, another town name taken from the Menominee language, meaning portage. My route took me past Appleton, whose Carnegie at Lawrence College was no more, and by the impressive football stadium of Appleton North High School, which has the unique nickname of Lightning. One can hardly imagine the antics and costume of its mascot.  I also passed a church whose pastor didn’t take kindly to locals who don’t live up to promises of attending a service.  His message board read, “There are seven days.  Someday is not one of them.”

The Kaukauna Carnegie was on an island in the Fox River sitting all by itself in a small park.  It had been replaced six years ago and was presently vacant after a short spell as a dance hall.  It is soon to be converted into apartments.  The new library a few blocks away was part of a large municipal complex.  An electronic message board inside the lobby of the library said that occupancy was limited to fifty people and that there were only six there now.

I will continue east as far as the road will take me and will at last set eyes on Lake Michigan in the town of Two Rivers.  Then it is on to Door County.  My GPS tells me I’m 165 miles due north, as the bird flies, from Countryside, where I started out from, and that I have another 210 miles to the northernmost point of these travels in the UP.  I’ve meandered nearly six hundred miles in eight days.  There will be less meandering and mostly heading north after I duck down from Door County to Green Bay. Biketober has finally arrived with the promise of more superlative fall cycling.  Heading north brings the possibility of colder days.  So far, after a couple of unseasonably cold days at the outset, the days have been pleasant enough for shorts and short sleeves for much of the day.  With swarming mosquitoes the last two nights in the increasingly forested terrain, I’m more concerned with fending them off than the chill.