Carnegie Library - Perry, OK
Posted by: 
hamquilter
N 36° 17.174 W 097° 17.270
14S E 653760 N 4017056
Possible through a grant by the Andrew Carnegie Foundation, this library building still operates as such.
Waymark Code: WMEXRA
Location: Oklahoma, United States
Date Posted: 07/19/2012
Views: 7
PERRY, 85.7 m. (1,005 alt., 5,045 pop.), is a center for the surrounding agricultural area and seat of Noble County. On the morning of September 16, 1893, the first of the Santa Fe special trains entered the Cherokee Strip, loaded with eager, shouting land-seekers. The first stop was at a station named Wharton, one mile south of the present Perry station. Clambering off, the passengers rushed into the already platted townsite, which had been designed as a land-office town by the Department of Interior and named for a member of the Federal Townsite Commission. They drove their stakes into the ground, and the mushroom town of tents and clapboards was born.
Sooner Land (1929), by George Washington Ogden, a native of Kansas, gives a colorful description of the early days of Perry. It tells of the large number of Sooners, the fourteen saloons, the many gamblers, and their hangers-on which caused the Federal government to send three marshals here until a city government could be organized. The wooden buildings of the old land office still stand in Government Square Park, but a modern courthouse, a Carnegie Library, and the rows of parked automobiles now bordering the square eclipse them—the rip-roaring early days are forgotten. [Oklahoma - A Guide to the Sooner State, 1941.]
The Carnegie Library building stands at 302 N. 7th on the town square, with the post office and county courthouse. This building was constructed in 1909 with a grant of $10,000 awarded by the Andrew Carnegie Foundation. It is a red brick building, with pairs of slender ionic columns on each side of the entryway.
This building is the location of the Perry Library. Open from 9:00-6:00 Mon thru Fri and 9:00-12:00 on Saturday, it is a full service library, offering not only books and periodicals, but geneaology records, historical documents and county newspapers on microfilm from 1893.