Michigan Today - October 2007

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North Quad and Nellie’s Books

by James Tobin


U-M's next dormitory, North Quad, is under construction. Though it will be an ultra-modern building with a high-tech infrastructure, its design incorporates an important chunk of history. The story of books, schools, a disastrous fire, and one energetic woman.

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“This is a university town—a town in which the conversation must be largely about books.”
Erastus O. Haven, president of U-M, April 1867

Carnegie Library facade in North Quad dorm
Architectural rendering of the planned North Quad dormitory, with the Carnegie Library facade visible at bottom left of building. Click on picture for more images.

On the north face of North Quad, the new residential/ academic complex that’s being built at the corner of Huron and State, we’ll soon see a kind of architectural ghost—a century-old stone façade embraced in the new structure. It’ll be a symbol of the ancient interweaving of town and gown in Ann Arbor, and of the large role of the book in the city’s life.

The truth is that in 30 years of driving past the Frieze Building, I never noticed there were two buildings on that site. I thought the three-story stone structure flush against Huron was just a wing of the Frieze.

But from 1906 to 1956, when the Frieze Building was Ann Arbor High School, everyone knew that the other structure—the one with the columns—was Ann Arbor’s public library, one of 2,507 libraries given to cities and towns around the world by the Pittsburgh steel magnate Andrew Carnegie. The buildings were connected by a passageway, but they were distinct. University planners decided in 2004 to tear down the Frieze Building, but the Carnegie structure—part of it—was slated to live on.

To understand why, you have to go back before Mr. Carnegie sent the city his check, to the founding of the Ladies’ Library Association.

In 1866, one year after Appomattox, 35 Ann Arbor women put in three dollars each to start a lending-library club and pledged a dollar a year to buy books, though you could donate books in lieu of the fee. As the collection grew year by year, the ladies moved the books from one downtown room to another, each bigger than the last, until in 1880 they built their own building on Huron near Division.

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Meanwhile, as the ladies settled into their new space, the school board was looking for someone to oversee their own collection of books—about 2,000 volumes housed in the Union School, the city high school, on the southeast corner of Huron and State. The board hired a 23-year-old Virginia native named Nellie Loving, recalled as “a good looking woman dressed plainly in the long dress of the day.” Loving had no library training, but she lived only a block away, and the job was expected to be easy. “She was urged to bring her fancy work so that time would not hang heavily upon her hands,” a chronicler remembered. “However, imbued as she was with the spirit of service, there was not time for this pursuit.”

That was for sure. Nellie Loving turned out to be a dynamo. For the next 39 years, she ran the school library for the students and the city alike, opening the collection to everybody and evangelizing for the cause of reading. She would say to boys: “I don’t care what you read, but read! Read!” She lent books to the YMCA. She went to the fire station and urged the firemen to borrow in bulk. “The men seemed to appreciate the interest and suggestion,” she reported, “but they have not called for any books… If they desire them only a fraction as much as I long for them to have them, we would be sending books to them every week.”

So there were two libraries in town—Loving's, located in Union School; and the Ladies' Library Association's—and in 1902, the redoubtable Anna Botsford Bach, president of the Ladies’ Library Association and a member of the school board, suggested it was silly to keep them separate.

As Bach well knew, the time was ripe for a merger. Andrew Carnegie, a zealot for self-education, was giving away much of his giant fortune for cities and towns to build lending libraries. So the ladies and the school board submitted a joint request. Carnegie promised $20,000 for a building, but the city would have to supply a site. The Ladies’ Library Association offered its Huron property. “Like all good enterprises,” said the Ann Arbor Argus Democrat, “the idea originated with women, and their perseverance seems about to be rewarded.”

But a fight broke out. The ladies wanted the new library on their property. The school board wanted it next to the high school. The ladies said to heck with it and took back their offer. So the school board sent off a new request to Carnegie, asking for another $10,000.

There matters stood when, in the early hours of December 31,1904, someone saw flames through the windows of the Union School. Alarms rang. Hundreds turned out to watch as the fire crept toward the library’s quarters at the north end of the building. If the firefighters had been indifferent to Nellie Loving’s books before, now they fought to save them. But a high wind was stoking the flames, and the pressure in the water hoses was low. Moving fast, Principal J.G. Pattengill and a band of teachers grabbed a hundred boys out of the crowd and hustled them inside and up the stairs. In a few trips, they brought out the science equipment and 8,000 books. They hauled them across State Street and piled them in the parlor of Nellie Loving’s church, the First Methodist.

With the old school in ruins, the city sold a bond to replace it, and Carnegie came through with $30,000 for a new library—a public library to be run by the school district. The architect for both buildings was Malcomson and Higginbottom of Detroit. To save heating costs, they built the school and the library with a common wall.

The library was a stocky, solid edifice like many others Carnegie paid for. With a capacity of 20,000 volumes, it had two main entrances—one connecting to the school, the other for the public on Huron. Both opened upon broad stone staircases leading up to high-ceilinged rooms with tall windows.

The school board acknowledged the Ladies’ Library Association’s role in the movement that “resulted in a beautiful and commodious library building.” But it was ten more years before the ladies handed over their collection to Nellie Loving.

She worked on. In 1910 she set up a children’s room, then started a course to teach the high school students how to use the library. She opened two branches and transferred books there. Ten years after she retired in 1922, Ann Arbor High pulled out its books and set up its own library. But every day, students continued their after-school migration to the Carnegie library to trade gossip and glances amid the appearance of doing homework.

Year by year the collection grew, and by 1950, the library no longer seemed so commodious. “It was a rabbit warren of a building,” one librarian said, “typical of libraries at the end of their life, with six times as many books as planned for, with stacks all over.” The old high school, too, was overburdened.

So in 1953, the school board sold both buildings to the University for $1.4 million, part of which the board used to buy a site for a new library at Fifth and William. The University renamed Ann Arbor High for Henry Simmons Frieze, the popular professor who had served three times as interim U-M president, and filled the classrooms with undergraduates. The Carnegie hulk, cleared of its stacks, took on a share of the University’s sprawling overflow—offices, study and storage spaces, audio-visual labs. The only echo of its old identity was the library of the School of Social Work, which took up residence on the first floor.

Fifty years later, hardly anyone remembered the old library. But President Coleman and campus planners did, and they decided its façade should have an honored place in the design of North Quad. (The decision came after local residents and history buffs protested that tearing down the old high school part of the building was tantamount to gutting the city's history. Despite the preservation of the library façade, hard feelings about the loss of the school building still linger among some Ann Arborites and alums.)

One of the new complex’s tenants will be the ultra-high-tech School of Information, which says the building will be “a showcase for the study of media and information in a technology-rich environment.” I suspect Nellie Loving would have liked that.

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James Tobin is an author and historian. His most recent book is To Conquer the Air: The Wright Brothers and the Great Race for Flight.