LaSalle Public Library
A Carnegie library, opened January 19, 1907
305 Marquette Street, LaSalle, IL
Then
Period photograph forthcoming
Built in 1907 with a twenty-five-thousand-dollar grant from Andrew Carnegie and a thirty-five-thousand-dollar municipal bond. The lot at the northwest corner of Third and Marquette had been bought in 1905 for $4,260. When the doors opened on January 19, 1907, the library held three thousand three hundred and sixty-four volumes.
The children of the Hegeler-Carus family probably learned to read here. Open Court Publishing donated stacks of books. Today the library holds about sixty-five thousand volumes, expanded a youth services and meeting wing in 2003, and is one of only eighty-three Carnegie libraries still operating in Illinois — a small, perfect piece of the LaSalle that the gambling tourists never saw.