Alexandria Carnegie Library

This handsome building is the Alexandria Public Library, and it is one of the largest Carnegie libraries in all of west central Minnesota. It went up in nineteen oh three, paid for by the steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, who funded thousands of public libraries across America in the early twentieth century as his way of giving back a fortune built on iron and steel.

The town had run a public library since the eighteen eighties, but Carnegie's money gave it a permanent stone home. An architect named Henry Foeller designed it in the grand Beaux Arts style, all balance and classical dignity, a statement that even a small prairie town in Minnesota took learning seriously. It earned a place on the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen eighty-five, and more than a century after it opened, it still stands as a monument to the idea that knowledge should be free to everyone.