Boys and Girls Library - Kenosha, WI
N 42° 34.948 W 087° 49.238
16T E 432660 N 4714776
The Boys and Girls Library was built in 1907 as a Unitarian Church. The Church was disbanded in 1926 and the building was turned into a boys and girls library in 1929. Today it is once again a Unitarian Church at 5810 8th Ave. in Kenosha, WI
Waymark Code: WM5H6F
Location: Wisconsin, United States
Date Posted: 01/07/2009
Views: 8
From the Church's web site (
visit link) :
"During the 20 years after Henry Simmons left, the congregation met only occasionally until it was rejuvenated by the Rev. Florence Buck, one of the first women ordained in the United States. She served the congregation from 1901 to 1910. In 1907, Z.G. Simmons financed an impressive new building for the Unitarian Society. The cut limestone structure was designed by N. Max Dunning, who gained fame as designer of Chicago's Merchandise Mart. The new church was built on the same site as the frame church. It was named as a memorial to the Rev. Henry M. Simmons.
During the late 1800s and early 1900s, Z.G. Simmons was a major factor in the Society's life, not only seeing to the construction of the new building but also paying the minister's salary some of the time. He died in 1910, three years after completion of the building.
That was also the year that Florence Buck, the congregation's last strong minister of the early era left.
After this double loss, a succession of ministers and a small loyal band of church members struggled to keep the Unitarian Society alive in a Kenosha changing from a progressive Yankee settlement into a manufacturing city heavily populated by European immigrants with strong Catholic and Lutheran ideologies.
Among the active lay leaders of the congregation during that time was Mary D. Bradford, a nationally recognized education reformer who was Kenosha's superintendent of schools from 1910 to 1921.
Perhaps the final blow to the Society was struck by the Rev. James Morrison Darnell, judged a brilliant young pulpit orator, who was called in November of 1914. By January, he was exposed as a bigamist and a fraud and fired by the congregation. A month later he was behind bars, eventually landing in the federal penitentiary at Leavenworth.
No further ministers were called. The congregation gradually disbanded and in 1926 the building was sold to the city to become a children's library, which seemed fitting.
The city sold the building in 1979 to a restaurateur and it was home to several eateries and bars before it was reclaimed in 1993 by a new generation of free thinkers."