The 1891 Library Room
What it was
Before the Carnegie library on the corner opened in 1912, this room — on the north side of the 1884 City & Town Hall — was Rochelle's first public library. A subscription library had circulated books here since 1891; the free public library was voted into being the following year, and this is the room where it lived.
The room is small on purpose. A late-nineteenth-century town library was a reading room more than a stacks; you came in, sat down at one of a handful of tables, and read the books that stayed with the librarian. The furniture that survives — a table, a card catalog cabinet, the original circulation desk — makes that scale visible in a way the modern branch across town cannot.
When the Carnegie building opened in 1912 the collection walked one block west. The room went back to municipal use, then to storage, then, in 1968, to the Flagg Township Historical Society when the whole building was saved from demolition for one dollar. It has been a museum room ever since.