The Building's History

The Snohomish Carnegie Library is one of Washington State’s remaining thirty historic Carnegie libraries. Its original construction represents the efforts of the City’s early residents and the Carnegie Foundation, which funded libraries throughout the country from 1886 to 1923, to build a new facility. The building is currently located within the Snohomish City National Register Historic District.

 

Frederick Thomas Bigger and James Smyth Warner, of Bigger and Warner Architects designed the building. The two relatively young architects had been educated at the University of Pennsylvania. From available records it appears that they moved West shortly after their graduation and secured the commission for the Snohomish Carnegie Library. Both men soon thereafter returned to Philadelphia, working during the period of 1910 – 1914 as Evans, Bigger and Warner with Edmund C. Evans. By 1914, Bigger moved back to his hometown of Pittsburgh, where he subsequently became a well-known planner, serving on both the National Capital and Pittsburgh City Planning Commissions, and as the chief planner for the Greenbelt Towns in Maryland, Ohio, and Wisconsin. The City of Snohomish has retained interesting correspondence from the original architects' files, along with letters between the city and the Carnegie Foundation.

The building’s design follows an early twentieth century prototype, based on the grant requirements of the Carnegie Foundation.

 

Completed in 1910, it was set on a large, landscaped site. The site contains many beautiful mature trees, which have been identified by a city survey for preservation. The building's location was somewhat separate from the city’s traditional commercial district, as was typical with most Carnegie Libraries. Currently single and multifamily wood frame residences fill the east side of the block.

 

The library building is a simple rectangular form on a tall raised base, with an original Meeting Room and services in a Basement level, and a large Reading/Reference Room on the tall Upper Floor. A central, symmetrical stair at the front, west facade provided public access. This layout was typical of most Carnegie Libraries, and it reinforced the democratic goals of early public libraries.

 

The building’s Renaissance Revival/Prairie School style is impressive. The exterior featured large wood frame windows, and cast-in place decorative bands and book publishers' printers' insignia that enlivened the white stucco concrete walls. The interior was characterized by a 17'-tall Upper Floor Reading Room, which was a lofty and light filled space. Because it was constructed in an earlier period of library design and philosophy, the building presents challenges for contemporary use, particularly with the floor levels, set high above and below grade, which do not easily meet current universal access goals.

 

The library served the City of Snohomish for over 90 years, but its size was clearly inadequate to house expanded library programs of the post war era. In 1968 an addition designed by Everett architect Harry E. Bostesch, was constructed on the south. The 5,352 square foot Addition to the approximate 4,000 square foot original building appears to have been designed with a primary goal of economic construction. It is a one-story, flat-roofed, slab-on-grade, steel framed structure with a single column in the middle of the large library Reading Room and wood frame interior partitions and roof joists.

 

In an effort to connect the two floors of the original building and the new grade-level spaces, the 1968 Addition featured an Entry Corridor, placed over portions of the original building's west and south facades. The new Entry Corridor on the west destroyed the original building's public entry and impacted its physical integrity. The 1968 Addition also featured a 3’ tall, olive-green colored plastic fascia, designed with a boxy geometric pattern. The intent of the fascia on the 1968 Addition may have been to recall the 6" tall decorative relief band on the original library's facades.