Carpenter Memorial Library - Manchester, NH - Libraries on Waymarking.com

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Carpenter Memorial Library
Victory Park Historic District
Manchester, New Hampshire

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The VICTORY PARK Historic District comprises 55 acres. The district was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1996 due to the significance of the social and architectural history of the park and the buildings in its vicinity.

The Amoskeag Manufacturing Company laid out the streets in this part of the city in 1838. This park, originally called Concord Common, was the first of six parks deeded to the city by the Amoskeag for the benefit of its citizens. The park was originally twice this size, extending one more block to the west. At different times the park was used as a playground for children, as the site of an early farmers’smarket, and at one time it was divided up into garden plots for the neighbors to use.

Of the classic buildings surrounding the park, this is the oldest. Much of the financing came from Frank Carpenter, owner of the flourishing Amoskeag Mills nearby on the banks of the mighty Connecticut River. He also financed the other buildings here. The building has been maintained well, and walking through the library, with its high ceilings, art work, stone stairs, and fine woodwork, one gets the sense of the grandeur of a century ago. But, all of the modern technology is there, too.

The "Carpenter Memorial Library" at 405 Pine St., on the east side of the park, was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1996 as part of the Victory Park Historic District, with the following description, in part:

"The first of the institutional buildings built fronting Victory Park (then Concord Common) and setting the stage for a future civic center was the Carpenter Memorial Library, made possible by the generosity of Frank P. Carpenter in memory of his wife. Constructed in 1914, the Carpenter Memorial Library is a two story structure faced with rusticated white Vermont marble blocks which conceal reinforced concrete floors and roof above a foundation of Concord granite. The building was designed in a decoratively rich Beaux Arts or Italian Renaissance style according to designs by Edward Tilton."

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