Carnegie Offers Walla Walla $25,000 — If the City Will Say Yes
A Thanksgiving-week letter from Andrew Carnegie promises a library building for the city, on the condition that Walla Walla furnish a site and $2,500 a year. The council has not yet voted, and the Statesman is impatient.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
A splendid Thanksgiving offer comes to Walla Walla today from Andrew Carnegie, the great philanthropist who is trying to absolve himself from the sin of dying rich. In response to two letters addressed to Mr. Carnegie by a committee appointed by the Commercial Club — one before his return from Europe and the other since — his private secretary writes to ex-Governor Miles C. Moore, chairman of the committee, stating that Mr. Carnegie will give $25,000 for the construction of a library building in Walla Walla, provided the city will donate a site and agree to raise $2,500 a year for the maintenance of the library.
The offer of Mr. Carnegie is very reasonable and the terms can be easily complied with by the city. At the present time the city is raising nearly $1,500 a year for the maintenance of a library in rented quarters, and it can well afford to raise $700 a year more in order to secure the elegant building that $25,000 would provide.
The city council recently offered to purchase a $3,000 lot at the corner of Palouse and Alder streets for a library site, provided the Woman's Reading Club would raise $12,000 for the construction of a building. Mr. Carnegie's offer does not require that the city buy any particular site or pay any certain minimum amount for the same, but leaves this to the discretion of the council. It will be easier, therefore, for the council to comply with Mr. Carnegie's terms than it would have been to carry out its part of the agreement with the Woman's Reading Club. If the council hesitates to purchase a site, perhaps the ladies of the club will turn their energies to this object. As stated in a communication from one of the members of the club published in the Statesman a few days ago, the club has already received pledges of $2,500 toward the proposed $12,500 building fund, and probably the subscribers to this amount would willingly have it devoted to the purchase of a site instead of to the erection of a building.
Mr. Carnegie's offer is so generous and the conditions so easy that the Statesman can see no reason why the council should not meet at once and vote its acceptance of the terms.
The city now levies a half mill library tax on a valuation of over $3,000,000, which raises nearly $1,500 for the maintenance of the library. The increased valuation of next year should bring the amount raised by this half mill tax up to the $2,500 required by Mr. Carnegie for the maintenance of the library that he offered to establish.
“…the great philanthropist who is trying to absolve himself from the sin of dying rich.”
Carnegie's money came with strings that look entirely familiar: a private donor covers the building, and the public is asked to carry the operating cost forever. Walla Walla's library fight — a site on Palouse and Alder, a half-mill levy, a women's club that had already done the fundraising legwork — is the same argument cities have today about capital gifts, matching funds and who pays the staff.
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