History

"The Ashfield Library Association was formed in 1866, through the influcence of Prof. Charles Eliot Norton

Charles Eliot Norton

Charles Eliot Norton, was a leading American author, social critic, and professor of art. He was a militant idealist, a progressive social reformer, and a liberal activist whom many of his contemporaries considered the most cultivated man in the United States.-Biography:Norton was born at...

 and Hon. George William Curtis

George William Curtis

George William Curtis was an American writer and public speaker, born in Providence, Rhode Island, of old New England stock.-Biography:...

, summer residents of the town. It absorbed the books formerly belonging to the Second Social Library of Ashfield [est. 1815] ... and these volumes, with liberal donations from the gentlemen above named, formed the nucleus of the library."

Around 1911 "Andrew Carnegie

Andrew Carnegie

Andrew Carnegie was a Scottish-American industrialist, businessman, and entrepreneur who led the enormous expansion of the American steel industry in the late 19th century...

 ... offered to give $3,000 for a library building

Carnegie library

A Carnegie library is a library built with money donated by Scottish-American businessman and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie. 2,509 Carnegie libraries were built between 1883 and 1929, including some belonging to public and university library systems...

, on the usual terms, but there [was] opposition to accepting the offer."

The current building was donated in 1913 by silk manufacturer M.M. Belding, a New Yorker. At the time, Belding's gift was considered particularly generous: "The announcement that the little town of Ashfield in Western Massachusetts -- a town once famous for its summer colony of learning and culture ... -- is to be presented with a 30,000-dollar public library by a filially affectionate native of the place, Mr. M.M. Belding of New York, prompts the query whether a little farming community of less than a thousand inhabitants, barely making its rock-ribbed acres yield it a livelihood, will thoroughly enjoy the prospect of maintaining the splendid institutions whose marble walls, bronze doors, pedestal lamps, and other luxurious appurtenances, will present an appearance so strikingly at variance with their simple rural environment."

External links

• http://beldingmemoriallibrary.org/
• Google blog search. Posts about the Ashfield library.
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/wildfieldstudios/4031089363/