Upon receiving word that Carnegie Corporation of New York would provide $5,000 to fund the library, Valeria F. Penrose wrote in a May 17, 1916, letter: “We are indeed grateful. The starved lives in little Avon are now assured of practical mental food with adequate housing and the people will increasingly avail themselves of the benefits, the summer people too.”
As an academic librarian at Monmouth University, one of my scholarly articles published was about the Carnegie Libraries in New Jersey. I used the microfilm archives to find stories from each of the active libraries, as well as photos of the exterior and interior of each library.
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