Sydney, Nova Scotia

Wikipedia generally gives the addresses of Carnegie Libraries, which is very helpful, especially when they no longer serve as a library.  It didn’t list the addresses thought of the two in Sydney, just the year the funds were granted, both in 1903, and the architects of each.  Though both were color-coded as still serving as libraries, I wanted to be sure I reached Sydney during their hours when they were open in case there were any complications.  I was set to arrive in Sydney on a Saturday, when smaller town libraries aren’t always open or have limited hours.  Sydney being a sprawling port city with a population of 30,000 thankfully had Saturday hours of ten to four-thirty.

I began the day sixty-two miles east of Sydney.  I had been held under seventy miles the past two days by hilly terrain, which had the possibility of relenting as my route followed the shoreline of scenic Bras d’Or lake. 

But it was still up and down terrain with several six per cent climbs of a mile over high humps gaining three hundred feet each, so I had to limit my breaks and keep plugging away.  I made it to the library with an hour to spare.  At first glance it looked like another Carnegie that had been disfigured/mutilated by multiple-additions as three of the four sides were of somewhat modern brick and glass.  There didn’t seem to be a single feature that made it a historic building other than possibly a back wall of plain red brick that might have dated to 1903.

I asked the pair of librarians at the circulation desk if this library had been funded by Carnegie.  It hadn’t, as it was built in 1960 and replaced a library that had been in the courthouse that had burned down in the ‘50s.  They knew nothing of there having been a Carnegie Library in Sydney.  That was deflating, but I was greatly relieved that I had arrived when the library was open to give me the opportunity to find the Carnegie.

I told them of what I knew from Wikipedia.  The younger male librarian said he vaguely remembered reading a while ago that the city had been granted a Carnegie, but it had never been built.  Meanwhile, both he and the older woman librarian went at their computers trying to solve this mystery.  A third librarian joined in on the search on a third computer, all there at the circulation desk.  They found it highly unlikely that there had been two libraries and speculated that since the two grants were two months apart that the second superseded the first.  One of them found that the architect of the second grant listed his design of the library among his work, though there was no picture of it, the first confirmation that there had been a Carnegie.

The woman librarian disappeared and returned with a manila folder full of yellowing newspaper clippings from the time when the present library was built.  As I rummaged through them I came upon an article titled, “The library that was not built.”  

At the same time the librarian who was on the trail of the architect of the library discovered a 1910 court case before the Nova Scotia Supreme Court of the City of Sydney versus Chappell Brothers and Company with the architect seeking to collect his fee for designing the library.   The three-page judgement that the librarian printed out for me revealed that the city had reneged on its pledge to build the library.

At last, we’d gotten to the bottom of the mystery of the library that wasn’t.  It was almost as thrilling as actually finding the library.  The thrill overcame any feeling that I had wasted a week biking to see something that wasn’t there, as it got me to Nova Scotia and a couple of license plates as souvenirs, including a battered bright yellow commercial one that I rarely saw.  I could only chuckle that this long ride had seemingly been for naught, though no bike ride is ever for naught.

The writer began his story wondering how many citizens of Sydney knew that just after the turn of the century the town had been offered $15,000 by “none other than the late Andrew Carnegie, the famous American industrialist and philanthropist” to build a library in Sydney “long before the era of regional libraries.” It was a good question to ask, as none of these librarians, sixty some years after the article had been written, knew it.

The article stated that the town council gave the go-ahead to purchase a plot of land for the library and pledged an annual sum of $1,500 maintain it.  It went on to say, “Then the roof fell in…one is left in utter bewilderment as to why this splendid and advanced project went up into thin air.  Equally bewildering is why the good town fathers of the day refused to pay for the plans and specifications which had been called for and approved and adopted by the library committee.”

The article then explained that the town refused to pay the architect for his plans forcing him to take the town to court to recover his fee of $426.63.  The court granted him $250.  The town appealed to a higher court, which sided with the architect ordering the town to pay him the full $426.63 plus expenses.  The article concluded, “The architect got his money, but the town didn’t get its library.  Perhaps some student of Sydney’s history might be able to furnish us with the behind the scenes story of the building that was never built.”

It had to have been a highly divisive issue at the time between the readers and non-readers of the community with the non-readers winning out not wishing to raise their taxes a modicum to support the library, no doubt infuriating the readers when they thought they had won the battle to have a temple of a library that would still be standing to this day.  It had usually been women’s groups that spearheaded the drive for a library.  One can well imagine their anger and fury when the male elected officials reneged on their initial promise of accepting Carnegie’s funds and the conditions that came with it of providing land for the library and an annual maintenance fund of ten per cent of his grant.  Several times as we unraveled this story, all three librarians muttered it sounded like current times, as they could use further funding, which the community is disinclined to contribute.

A further mystery is why Wikipedia bungled this issue and that no one has righted it. As we googled Canadian Carnegie libraries, of which there are 125, or rather 123, the several articles all referenced Wikipedia as having the definitive list of the libraries. I would have thought the person who wrote a book on the one hundred or so Carnegie Libraries in Ontario, might have had an interest in the handful of others scattered in Alberta, British Columbia, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Yukon and New Brunswick, though not Quebec, and righted Wikipedia’s mistake that the duplicate grants to Sydney never resulted in a library.  Evidently whoever posted the list of Carnegies in Canada went by a list of grants Carnegie had given.

I felt no fury towards Wikipedia, just thanked it for providing me a nice ride from one end of Nova Scotia to the other and back.  It’s far from the first mistake I’ve discovered on its addresses and status of Carnegies, but easily the most extreme.  Wikipedia isn’t the only one to make mistakes regarding Carnegies.  Many of the plaques in front of them dispense faulty information.  The Fort Fairfield plaque in Maine said it was one of seventeen Carnegies in the state, when there are actually eighteen plus two more on college campuses.

I asked the senior woman librarian if she knew of a cheap motel.  She said she did but she wouldn’t even send her worst enemy there, as just in the past week it had been in the news with several arrests made there.  She conducted a search similar to the one I had already made and found nothing cheaper than $109 Canadian, about $80 US.  She said she had just returned from a vacation in Perth over in Ontario and the hotel prices had nearly doubled since a year ago, so she wasn’t surprised at there being nothing under $100.  I glanced at her computer screen and noticed one for $99.  She said that was the one she had been telling me about.

I was prepared to pay whatever the going rate was, but with a rare sunny day and a temperature of an unseasonably balmy seventy and two hours of light left I couldn’t resist riding in these ideal conditions.  It would be like wasting a strong tail wind.  Rain is in the forecast for the coming week, so I gladly pocketed my night in a motel for later. I headed out excited with the prospect of a night in my tent rather than in some cell or another.

The librarian recommended the alternate route I had avoided thinking it would attract more trucks and would entail more climbing, but she said locals don’t prefer one over the other and that they are through similar terrain and have an equal amount of traffic. The last twenty miles of the road I had come in on was thick with civilization, which would make for difficult camping,  so I was happy for the other, less developed route. Now it’s four hundred miles to the next Carnegie in St. John, New Brunswick, which Wikipedia provides an address to, then two hundred miles to the next in Maine, where a bunch await me and I don’t have to worry about a day without a Carnegie.