Former Odd Fellows Hall - Shepherdstown, WV - Odd Fellow Lodges on Waymarking.com

The Old Market House, the town's former market built in 1800, with stepped gable ends. A second story was added in 1845 by the Odd Fellows with a 999-year lease. The first floor has been a public library since 1922.

From the Shepherdstown Public Library website:

The Shepherdstown Public Library was founded in 1922 by the Shepherdstown Women's Club, one of a number of libraries across the country that were projects of women's clubs. It was run by the club, funded by donated money and staffed by volunteer help, for about fifty of its approximately seventy years. Despite limited and unpredictable funding, the library thrived and gathered a well selected and reasonably balanced collection of books, thanks to the efforts of unusually competent women who committed themselves to the library. All accounts and evidence within the library indicate a remarkably successful volunteer effort.

At the time that the women's club decided to create a library, the front room of the old market house was vacant. The citizens of Shepherdstown had built the market house with enthusiasm and dispatch in 1800 in the middle of the central intersection of the town. Fifty-seven by twenty feet, it was an imposing building in early Shepherdstown. The business of the town was centered there -- not only the market, but the fire department, town council, public whipping post and pig pen. In 1845, the Odd Fellows added a second story, with a lease for 999 years granted by the town council.

By the early Twentieth Century, the old market house had fallen upon hard times. The fire department and the town council moved to better quarters, leaving behind only two jail cells. The lease to the Odd Fellows prevented demolition of the building, which now annoyed Shepherdstown's citizens by blocking the intersection. The council willingly granted space for the library in the market house to the women's club, happy to be relieved of a white elephant, and acquiesced to the gradual moving back of the partition. In 1948, the town was finally persuaded to remove the jail cells and the Odd Fellows in 1962 agreed to sell the remainder of their lease on the second floor to the women's club. In 1971, when the women's club turned over the library to the West Virginia Library Commission, the library occupied the entire building, except for a kitchen still belonging to the women's club.

Information about the eye above the entrance is available at the Shepherdstown Public Library website:

Why the Eye?
Above the entrance, marking the second story is a painted sign that bears the emblem of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows, the All-Seeing Eye. This image, “enveloped in a blaze of light and glory,” represents the eye of Omnipotence. The eye is resting on a book, which to our way of thinking represents the power of knowledge and information to be found within a library.