After riding the ferry over to Madeline Island and playing tourist, we returned to the mainland and took a quick peek in a Carnegie Library.

After moving through the Apple Festival crowd, we stumbled across the Bayfield Carnegie Library. I am fascinated by Carnegie Libraries and hope to visit as many as I come across.

Andrew Carnegie was a Scottish-American industrialist, making his immense fortune by leading the expansion of the steel industry and later becoming the leading philanthropist in the U.S. and his native Scotland. During the last two decades of his life he gave away over $350 million (in today’s money that would be over $5 billion). The first library he funded was in his hometown back in Scotland, soon followed by libraries built in the Pittsburg area where he lived in the U.S. In collaboration with women’s groups throughout the country he began to fund more libraries. In total, Carnegie funded some 3,000 libraries, located in 47 US states, and also in Canada, Britain, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, the West Indies, and Fiji.

Funding was in extremely high demand, as few public libraries had dedicated spaces of their own. Carnegie began to use a formula to determine which of the many requests he would fund. Rather than endowing libraries, Carnegie required each town to contribute ten percent of the annual funding to its library, supply its own building site, and provide free service to the public.

This Bayfield library is one of the oldest free public libraries in Wisconsin, established in 1857, ten years after the founding of the town.

The funded Carnegie Library building was opened in 1904, and was named to the National Register of Historic Places as part of the Bayfield Historic District on Nov. 25, 1980. Architect Henry Wildhagen designed the Greek Revival Style building with the striking iconic columns of locally quarried Brownstone.

In 2020, work began on restoration of the Library. The brownstone had eroded in some places and required attention, particularly the big columns on the front. The work had been completed when we were there and the building was well worth the visit.

Next: On to Michigan – Lots of water falls and up to Copper Harbor near the tip of the Keweenaw Peninsula