The Lawrie Library

There is not a lot of info about this library online. It is one of the original buildings on the campus of the Indiana Soldiers Home. The building is no longer in use, and apparently will be torn down. The building materials of the time just make it unsafe to do anything in it anymore. I love these old libraries. It has the look of a Carnegie Library, but it would have been built just before the money started going out for those libraries. The era and look is right on though. I can’t believe that this library was in my own backyard for all this time.

Finding The Lawrie Library

It is funny how things work sometimes. I rarely get on Facebook. I went there to post something and the post at the top of my feed was a post by an account that I don’t follow. It was a photo of this library saying that it was slated for demolition. It looked enough like a Carnegie Library that I realized that I needed to find where it is so that I could photograph it before it is gone. At first glance I didn’t see anything about where this was in the comments of the post. I searched the Indiana Carnegie libraries to see if I could match the photo up to one of the libraries. Hopefully it wouldn’t be too far away. I had no luck with the library database so I went back to the Facebook post. I found a long string of comments where the location of it was hidden. It was at the Indiana Veterans home which is three minutes away from my house. I was preparing to drive for hours to find this library. To find out it was minutes away was a cool revelation.