The Pottsville Free Public Library

The Pottsville Free Public Library stands at the northeast corner of Third and West Market Streets — a two-story red-brick Georgian Revival building that Pottsville, on the day it opened in 1922, likened to Independence Hall. But the building is the easy part of the story. The library as an institution was already eleven years old when it moved in, and the road from a Y.M.C.A. meeting to an open door ran through a subscription canvass, a coal family’s memorial gift, and a public quarrel over a Carnegie grant that Pottsville’s city council refused.

The lot before the library

The corner of Third and Market was the Rosengarten homestead. Henry Rosengarten, a native of Germany who “followed the Schuylkill canal” as a young man, married Elizabeth Bohler around 1839 and kept a green-grocery at Centre and Mahantongo for some forty years. Henry died in 1893; his widow Elizabeth died in the corner house itself, at 4:20 on the morning of January 26, 1903, “in her 82nd year.” What stood on the ground was a two-and-a-half-story frame building with a forty-two-foot front on Market Street, running a hundred and fifteen feet back along Third to Goforth Alley. After the Rosengartens the property passed to Dr. J. J. McKinstry and then to W. H. McQuail, in whose estate it sat when the library came looking for a site.

An institution before a building (1911)

The movement launched at a meeting in the Y.M.C.A. assembly room on the night of January 16, 1911 — front-page news the next evening under the banner “FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY MOVEMENT IS STARTED.” A two-week canvass that winter, led by the education committee of the Women’s Civic Club with the cooperation of the school board, secured pledges the association reported as $10,775.75 (the library’s own history gives it as $10,775.25). The school board approved a charter for the “Pottsville Free Public Library” on April 12, agreeing to levy a half-mill maintenance tax; the Court of Common Pleas granted it that May, and it was placed on record with Recorder Bailey on May 9, 1911. The library opened for circulation at one o’clock on November 9, 1911, in rented rooms at 208 West Market Street — a first-floor space that had been a saloon — with children making up most of the first day’s borrowers.

The site and the Carnegie fight (1914–1916)

On January 9, 1914, the trustees bought the Rosengarten corner from the McQuail estate for $23,500 — intending, the Republican reported, “to eventually put up a modern library building on the site, possibly through the aid of Andrew Carnegie, although there is considerable sentiment against receiving Carnegie aid.” The money was not the trustees’ own: “earnest friends of the library” — identified by the library’s own history as the Sheafers — made the down payment and quietly carried the mortgage, interest-free, promising to cancel it once a building rose.

The Carnegie chapter proved as contentious as that 1914 note hinted. At the mayor’s application of December 1915, the Carnegie Corporation of New York promised the city $45,000 by letter of January 28, 1916 — its standard formula of twice the city’s population, on a guarantee of one-tenth the grant for annual upkeep. Then Pottsville’s city council refused the gift. The Corporation’s secretary, James Bertram, put it flatly in a letter to school-board president T. W. Swalm printed at the end of 1916: “we have documents from the city formally renouncing the donation.” The School District of Pottsville took the city’s place as beneficiary, and because its guaranteed appropriation was smaller, Carnegie cut the pledge from $45,000 to $36,000.

Construction at last (1919–1922)

The war years stalled everything, and the reduced pledge sat unspent. Two things unlocked the building. First, once the Board of Education guaranteed a permanent maintenance income, the Corporation restored the full $45,000 — the question now, the paper reported in March 1920, was “only whether it will take $45,000 or lose it” (the board’s hope that the new census might lift the gift to $60,000 came to nothing). Second, a death completed the arithmetic. E. Louise Sheafer — a philanthropist whose causes reached from Pottsville to Philadelphia and New York, president of the Pottsville Free Kindergarten, and daughter of the coal geologist Peter W. Sheafer — had died on April 5, 1919; in the spring of 1921 her brothers Henry and Arthur W. Sheafer gave $55,000 for the building in her memory, the larger share of its $100,000 cost.

The design came from the Philadelphia firm Harris & Richards — successors to the Wilson Brothers, one partner with Pottsville roots — retained by the building committee in May 1920; the superintendent of construction was a Pottsville man as well. The general contractor was Brindle Bothwick & Son of Chestnut Hill. Razing of the old frame buildings began on May 3, 1921, and the cornerstone went down at seven on the evening of August 6, 1921, before a crowd lining the streets and the trolley tracks. Librarian Edith Patterson — begging off a long speech by invoking Lincoln at Gettysburg — laid the stone herself; association president W. K. Woodbury dedicated it “to the pleasure, instruction and inspiration of the people of Pottsville and vicinity.”

Opening day — May 1, 1922

The building opened at noon on Monday, May 1, 1922, to hundreds of visitors, a High School orchestra playing through the afternoon and clusters of white electroliers set to light the Third Street entrance after dark. “The beautiful colonial structure,” the Republican told its readers, “appears almost as a replica of Independence Hall, Phila.” — a comparison that has stuck locally for a century, if one the scholarly Buildings of Pennsylvania survey would temper to a “mild-mannered Georgian Revival.” Inside, above a colonial fireplace in the south wall, hung a painting of two Indigenous figures, one writing on parchment, “making figures for the purpose of conveying thought,” as the paper described it.

Since 1922

The library has worked from the corner of Third and Market ever since. It became a district library center in 1962 and a Federal Depository Library in 1967, and in April 1999 it grew by more than 22,000 square feet, volunteers shifting some 120,000 books and materials into the new wing over a single weekend while the original reading room was restored. The building stands within the Pottsville Downtown Historic District, listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982; whether the library is counted a contributing building is unconfirmed — the district’s 1982 nomination has not been digitized. Down the block toward Centre Street stands the Lee Building; the county’s Historical Society — represented on the platform at the library’s 1921 cornerstone — keeps its own home a few blocks north in a former grammar school. Current hours and visitor details are on the library’s directory listing.