Winona Public Library

In 1897, lumberman William Harris Laird offered to fund the designing and building of a library for the city of Winona. Two years later he presented this Classical Revival building to the library board. It is the oldest building in Minnesota built as a public library that continues to fulfill that function in the present day.

In 1863, the Young Men’s Library Association established a lending library in Winona. Ten years later it was reorganized as the Winona Library Association, acknowledging the large role that women had played in maintaining the library. Like other early Minnesota libraries, it was a private “subscription” library funded by membership fees and fundraising events.

Meanwhile, advocates for public, tax-supported libraries lobbied state legislatures to pass laws authorizing cities to create public libraries. Minnesota did this in 1879, and the Winona city council created the Winona Free Public Library in 1886. The Winona Library Association turned over its books and furnishings to the new public library. The new library board, however, could not persuade the city to build a library. The new public library had to make do with a drafty former school house.

Then came what the local newspaper called the “sweet surprise.” In 1897, William Harris Laird, one of the three partners of the Laird Norton Company (the most successful of the lumber companies along Winona’s riverfront) offered to build the city a $40,000 library. He hired two Philadelphia architects, one of whom was his nephew Warren Powers Laird, to design the building. His only conditions were that the city provide a site and add a new tax to maintain the library. The city quickly agreed.

Typical of its times, the library was a Classical Revival building with symmetrical facades. Patrons entered its first floor by climbing a dramatic staircase to a gabled entrance portico flanked by marble columns. Inside, they found themselves in an exchange room topped by a grand art glass dome. The reading rooms featured elaborate oak millwork, including columns, cornices, and arches. There was a large lecture hall in the basement. Two rooms were set aside for art galleries, and a permanent collection of painting and sculpture was planned. A separate wing contained iron book stacks divided into three levels, each with glass floors to allow natural light to filter through the shelves.

In the end, Laird donated over $55,000 to finance the building, in part because he bowed to his nephew’s desire to build the finest building possible. Warren Powers Laird’s work was well received, and later he was hired to design the Winona Masonic Temple.

The Winona library is easily mistaken for a “Carnegie library” because most of the sixty-five public libraries funded by Andrew Carnegie in Minnesota were Classical Revival buildings. In fact, Laird decided to make his gift to Winona two years before the first Carnegie library grant in Minnesota. However, Laird may have been influenced by Carnegie’s 1889 “Gospel of Wealth” articles, which urged the rich to give away their fortunes before they died, especially to libraries.

William Hayes hired Kenyon Cox to paint the “Light of Learning” mural in a lunette of the library’s dome. The mural was in memory of his deceased wife, Charlotte Prentiss Hayes, who had supported the library as a volunteer, board member, and librarian from the 1870s until her death in 1910. A nationally known muralist, Cox had recently completed a mural in the Minnesota State Capitol. William Harris Laird died the same year, and his family continued his legacy by funding the expansion of the stacks wing in 1914.

Over the decades, the number of people served by the library grew, as did the kinds of services offered. As early as 1921, for example, the library created a separate children’s department, which resulted in the loss of the lecture hall. In 1985, the need for more space and handicapped accessibility resulted in a plan to build a new library. Voters overwhelmingly rejected the idea, and the following year they approved a proposal to add a new accessible entrance and an elevator to the historic library.

After more than a century, the building that Laird gave Winona stands as a remarkable example of civic-minded philanthropy and neo-classical architecture.