The Carnegie Library and the Healdsburg Museum
Near Healdsburg, California
Just off the plaza stands a dignified little temple of pale stone and columns, and it holds the memory of the whole town. This is the old Healdsburg Carnegie Library, now the home of the Healdsburg Museum. Like thousands of towns across the country, Healdsburg wrote to the steel magnate Andrew Carnegie asking for money to build a public library.
The town applied in nineteen oh eight and was awarded a grant of ten thousand dollars the following year. The noted Bay Area architect Brainerd Jones drew up the design in the Classical Revival style, with the columns, broad steps, and pediment of a proper civic building, and it was completed in nineteen eleven. It served as the town library for more than seventy years, until nineteen eighty seven.
The Healdsburg Museum and Historical Society, founded in nineteen seventy six, eventually made the old library its home. Inside is one of the finest regional history collections in California, with Pomo baskets, pioneer artifacts, farm implements, and thousands of photographs and documents tracing the town from rancho days through the orchard years to the present. If you want to understand everything the surrounding valleys have layered over one another, from the Southern Pomo to the squatters to the prune belt, this small building is where the whole story is kept.
