The Attica Public Library

There is a common theme to these posts this week. It is me driving to or from a softball tournament when I made the image. This summer travel ball has taken me to a few towns that I have either never been to before or I have seen them once or twice. Attica is a town that I visited early on in the days of this blog. I was searching for epic landscapes at the time, and I skipped pretty much the entire town. When I was there a couple of weekends ago I found it to be full of things to photograph. It is funny how your idea of what makes a good photo changes over time.

Carnegie Library Week

Over the years I have often photographed libraries without knowing why. Certain libraries just looked amazing in small towns so I made a photo of them. This year I found the thread that binds them together. They were all Carnegie Libraries. From about a fifty year span around the turn of the 20th century about 2,500 libraries were built with funding from Andrew Carnegie. At one point about 80% of the libraries in the United States were built in part with funds from Andrew Carnegie. At first in the United States he just built around his home of Pittsburgh, but over the years he grew his reach to many across the entire United States. When it was all said and done almost 1,700 libraries were built here in America thanks to Andrew Carnegie. He really left his mark on many small towns in the United States. This week I am going to show off five of these libraries that I have visited in the last couple of weeks.