The Library Built From a Loss

The stone library ahead almost did not get built the way anyone expected, because the man whose fortune created it died on a ship in the middle of the ocean, years before the fire that would shape its strangest irony. Walter Newberry, a Chicago merchant and early investor in the city's land, died aboard a steamship bound for France in eighteen sixty eight. His will set aside half his estate to found a free public library in the city, but only on one condition: it would happen only if his two daughters died without children of their own.

They did. Both daughters died in the eighteen seventies, neither having married, which triggered the clause Newberry had written years earlier. It still took until the eighteen eighties for trustees to finish settling the estate and begin building the library that bears his name.

There is a bitter irony folded into the story. Newberry had spent years assembling his own personal library before he died, but none of those books ended up inside the building that carries his name, because his private collection burned in the Great Chicago Fire of eighteen seventy one, three years after his death and more than a decade before the library trustees broke ground. The Newberry Library opened instead with purchased collections and donated gifts, built entirely from someone else's books, named for a man whose own could not survive the very city his fortune would go on to serve.

It remains, today, a non circulating research library, open to anyone willing to read inside its walls rather than check a book out.