A piece of history that I would like to talk about is the Bruce County Public Library in Port Elgin. I would go to Port Elgin every summer for the majority of my life and every summer, my family and I would make at least a couple trips up to the library every time we visited the town. The building has always intrigued me when I was younger from its interesting architecture to the very comforting smell that the old books and the dated wood provided.
Upon further research, it was very interesting to learn that the Port Elgin Library dates back over 100 years, which was built as early as 1908. As well as antoher thing that I learned that was very interesting to me was that the Bruce County Library is one of the few Carnegie Libraries that are still around and is considered to be an important historical landmark to Port Elgin.
When I read this, I was a bit confused on what a Carnegie Library was. However, when I did some more research, I learned that Andrew Carnegie was a self-made millionaire who was an industrialist and attributed a lot his success to books. Because of this, he wanted to give back to the community, and he figured that the best way to do this was to “gift” communities with free, all access libraries (Beckman, 1984).
Public History in Practice 