Rock Island Public Library 1872-1901
In 1872 the Illinois State Legislature created a law that allowed city councils to create public libraries, by giving city councils the power to tax citizens for public library funding. Soon after the law was signed into law the Rock Island City Council was quick to implement the new tax, and the Rock Island Public Library opened its door on November 25, 1872 with Miss Gale as the head librarian. The new library's received their supplies and books from the collection own by the Young Men’s Literary Association, whom served as fee-based public library from 1865-1971. The library was located in the same rooms at the second floor of the Mitchell & Lynde Building on Eagle Street (now the location of the First of America Bank) that the Rock Island City Library and Reading Room Association was housed during it existence from 1855-1859. The library board decided that for all citizens to be able to use the library is had to be open seven days a week, since many people only had Sundays off. By the end of the first two weeks the library was opened over 1,000 books had been checked out and the library board decided to rent another room to increase space for new books and additional reading room for patrons.
Over the next ten years the library would continue to have budget and space problems. By 1891 Miss Gale, by the request of the citizens had organized the books by subject (history, travel, poetry and fiction) and alphabetical order within their subject. To raise money for more books at the library, Miss Gale sold copies of the books catalog for $.15 a piece. In 1899 the library had 14,866 books in their collection, 1,070 of them children's books. The Rock Island Public Library had out grown their three rooms at the Mitchell & Lynde Building and the library board started to look for land and financing to build a new library to support the library's collection of books and the growing population of Rock Island readers. On April 3, 1900 the library board purchased a lot for the new library and on January 10, 1901 the board chose to the design plans for an Ionic building finished in Italian Renaissance Architecture.
Read more about this topic: Rock Island Public Library
Famous quotes containing the words rock, island, public and/or library:
“So there he is at last. Man on the moon. The poor magnificent bungler! He can’t even get to the office without undergoing the agonies of the damned, but give him a little metal, a few chemicals, some wire and twenty or thirty billion dollars and, vroom! there he is, up on a rock a quarter of a million miles up in the sky.”
—Russell Baker (b. 1925)
“In all things I would have the island of a man inviolate. Let us sit apart as the gods, talking from peak to peak all round Olympus. No degree of affection need invade this religion.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“What the public wants is the image of passion, not passion itself.”
—Roland Barthes (1915–1980)
“Readers transform a library from a mausoleum into many theaters.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)