Paulding County Carnegie Library: A History of the Library, Established 1916

Andrew Carnegie initially refused Paulding County’s request for a library grant, citing insufficient population — until the Library Association proposed county-wide service through book stations, at which point he granted $40,000 (county commissioners A.E. Blakeslee, S.O. Jackson, and J.L. McClure matched it with a continuing maintenance fund equal to 10% of the grant). The site — four lots on South Main Street, part of an 1835 congressional patent deed to George Marsh, who platted the Village of Paulding in 1850 — was donated by Rebecca S. Latty, widow of A.S. Latty, who had acquired the lots by 1854; the grounds had also served as the Latty family’s private cemetery before the bodies were exhumed and relocated.

The Columbus architectural firm Howard & Merriam (which had also designed the first U.S. presidential library, the Rutherford B. Hayes Library in Fremont, Ohio) designed the building. Construction began in 1914 — the Willing Brothers of Bellevue, Ohio handled general construction, Bashore Brothers of Paulding the heating, plumbing, and lighting — and the library opened to the public on March 3, 1916, with an initial collection of 4,000 books and a staff of three (librarian Ella Smith, assistant Vivian Jackson, and shipping clerk A.V.R. Mott). The first patron to check out a book, on a subject fittingly close to the county’s roots, was A.A. Abuer — a book about agriculture.

See the full PDF for the building’s detailed architectural description and later expansion history.