Carnegie, Pennsylvania: Named for a Library

Just southwest of Pittsburgh, two small boroughs called Chartiers and Mansfield had been neighbors for years and had finally decided to merge. They needed a name for the new combined town, and in eighteen ninety-four they chose Carnegie, in honor of the Scottish-born steel magnate who had built much of his empire from the mills that lined the rivers nearby.

Andrew Carnegie, when he heard the news, was reportedly moved. He responded the way he usually responded to expressions of gratitude: he offered to build a library. On April twenty-sixth, eighteen ninety-eight, Carnegie donated two hundred thousand dollars for the construction of a public library, music hall, lecture hall, and gymnasium. The Andrew Carnegie Free Library and Music Hall opened on May first, nineteen oh one, and it still stands at the center of the borough.

The gesture was characteristic of Carnegie's theory of wealth. He had made his fortune by consolidating the American steel industry, opening his first steel mill in Braddock in eighteen seventy-five and eventually building Carnegie Steel into the largest such company in the world. When J. P. Morgan bought Carnegie Steel in nineteen oh one to form United States Steel, the sale made Carnegie one of the richest men in the world, with a personal fortune equivalent to many billions of dollars today. He spent the rest of his life giving it away, funding roughly three thousand libraries across the English-speaking world on the principle that a library was the best gift a community could receive because it required the recipient to do the work of educating themselves.

The borough of Carnegie, Pennsylvania, carries his name because it asked nicely, and received a building that still serves its community more than a century later.