Carnegie Museum of Montgomery County

Crawfordsville, Indiana received a Carnegie library grant in nineteen oh one, and the handsome building that rose at Washington Street and Wabash Avenue served readers for decades before the library outgrew it. Today the building houses the Carnegie Museum of Montgomery County, preserving the history of a town that punches well above its weight in literary legacy. Crawfordsville was home to Lew Wallace, the Civil War general who wrote Ben-Hur in eighteen eighty, and to the poet Maurice Thompson.

Wallace's study, a separate Romanesque structure he called his pleasure house, still stands nearby and is open to the public. The museum and the study together make Crawfordsville one of the more surprising literary destinations on the Indiana prairie.