We Did It!  Thank You For Your Extraordinary Generosity!

The campaign to restore the Andrew Carnegie Free Library & Music Hall (ACFL&MH) had cause for celebration as 2008 drew to a close. On December 31, the last day of a daunting challenge grant, contributions came in totaling more than $25,000 to end the year with $1,016,132 in private donations. Click here to read Challenge Grant press release.

Capital Campaign

The Chartiers Valley Partnership's campaign to restore, renovate and revitalize the Andrew Carnegie Free Library & Music Hall has captured the hopes, dreams and support of Carnegie and surrounding Chartiers Valley Communities. We launched this effort in November 2003; the campaign has raised more than $6 million towards its ambitious goal. Funding has come from federal, state, county, local government and foundations. Remarkably, individuals and businesses from Carnegie and nearby communities have contributed nearly a quarter of the funds raised to date.

Indeed, Carnegie’s support of this campaign to restore the Library & Music Hall has assumed almost legendary proportions. This campaign began with an anonymous $500,000 challenge grant. The challenge was that Carnegie and neighboring communities must contribute a dollar for dollar match – in ten months time – to meet a September 30th deadline and secure the half million grant. In mid-September 2004, the campaign was just $45,000 short when disaster hit – the devastating flood that ravaged Carnegie and other Chartiers Valley communities. Astonishingly, instead of stopping the challenge in its tracks, Carnegie contributed $60,000 in the two weeks after the flood to meet and exceed the challenge.

The Andrew Carnegie Free Library & Music Hall has served its community since 1901. The Library was built with money provided by the famed industrialist. Although Andrew Carnegie’s name is internationally associated with libraries and he ultimately went on to build more than 2500 of them, the Andrew Carnegie Free Library & Music Hall is one of only four endowed libraries built by the philanthropist in the United States.

The ACFL&MH is distinguished not only by its age and architecture, but by the fact that the town it graces was named for Mr. Carnegie. In 1894, the two boroughs of Mansfield and Chartiers consolidated to become one – Carnegie – in order to encourage the philanthropist to donate a library to the new community. The Andrew Carnegie Free Library – the only one to go by the philanthropist’s first name – opened in 1901.

The “Carnegie Carnegie” is beautiful, Italianate structure, situated on a hill above Carnegie’s Main Street. As with only a few other historic Carnegie institutions, library does not adequately describe the facility. In addition to serving as a fine community Library of 20,000 volumes, the ACFL&MH houses a reception hall, a gymnasium, and an acoustically superb, 500-seat Music Hall – patterned after Carnegie Hall in New York – that is serendipitously located “where Broadway meets Main Street.”

The facility is home to a genuine national treasure: the Civil War Room that local veterans of that war used from 1906 until the mid-1930s for meetings and to house their collection of flags, books, prints and relics. When the Thomas Espy Post of the Grand Army of the Republic ceased operations, the Civil War Room was locked and left undisturbed for 50 years. Not only does it house invaluable artifacts, but the room itself provides a unique historical record of the first part of the last century. The Espy Post is one of the seven or eight most intact G.A.R. posts in the country.

The range of performances, programming and services listed in the Library & Music Hall’s Annual Program attests to the fact that the “revitalization” of the ACFL& MH has become reality. There is a performance in the Music Hall nearly every week, and last year, children’s circulation in the Library increased 161%! We could not be prouder!