Libraries

When the British burned Washington in 1814, the small Library of Congress burned with the Capitol. Thomas Jefferson offered to sell Congress his own library as a replacement, and in 1815 it bought more than 6,000 of his books. That purchase made the collection national in scope rather than a lawyers' reference shelf.

The library grew in the Capitol for most of the 19th century until it simply ran out of room. Its own building, now called the Thomas Jefferson Building, opened in 1897 across the street. It was decorated inside with murals, mosaics and sculpture on a scale no American public building had tried before, and it is one of the most photographed interiors in Washington.

The free public library is a younger idea than many people think. The Boston Public Library, which opened in 1854, was among the first large city libraries supported by taxes and open to everyone. Over the next century almost every American city followed. The New York Public Library's main building on Fifth Avenue opened in 1911, with its pair of stone lions out front.

Andrew Carnegie did more than anyone to spread libraries to smaller towns. Starting in the 1880s he paid for more than 1,600 library buildings across the United States, on the condition that the town provide the land and pay for books and staff. Many of these buildings are still standing, often with a classical front, a set of steps and a central desk where the librarian could see the whole room.

A collection like this tends to show the buildings themselves, the reading rooms full of people, the card catalogs and the long oak tables under tall windows. In the 1930s it also shows the WPA library projects, bookmobiles and the women who carried books on horseback into the hills of eastern Kentucky. Worth noticing is who is reading. The photographs show children, immigrants and working people, the very readers the founders of public libraries hoped to reach.