Lavonia: The Smallest Carnegie Library Town

Lavonia grew up with the railroad. When the Elberton Air Line Railway came through Franklin County in the late eighteen seventies, it turned a rural crossroads into a cotton-market town almost overnight. Cotton-related industry followed, and the town began to take shape as a modest agricultural commerce hub in the northeast Georgia piedmont. The railroad had wanted a station farther north, and local businessmen built a town around it. Lavonia was incorporated in eighteen eighty and named for Lavonia Hammond Jones, the wife of a railroad official.

What makes Lavonia genuinely distinctive is a building that still stands downtown. In the early nineteen hundreds, steel baron Andrew Carnegie funded thousands of public libraries across the United States and beyond. He chose his recipients carefully. Lavonia applied, and Carnegie said yes. The library that opened here is believed to be the smallest incorporated city in the United States to receive an original Carnegie library building. The town was very small at the time. That a mill-road town this size convinced one of the wealthiest men in the world that it deserved a library says something about the ambition that ran through even the smallest places in this corner of Georgia. The Carnegie library dates to nineteen eleven. It is a one-story building in the Renaissance Revival style, and it has stayed in use as a library ever since.