The Mission of the Andrew Carnegie Free Library & Music Hall is to build community
with a library, theater and historic site that welcome, inform, entertain and engage
the community and the region in lifelong learning.
The Andrew Carnegie Free Library & Music Hall (ACFL&MH) sits graciously on a hill above Carnegie’s Main Street. The 35,000 sq. ft. facility houses a beautiful regional library, an acoustically superb theater and a rare Civil War room. The Captain Thomas Espy Post No. 153 of the Grand Army of the Republic has been documented as probably the most intact G.A.R. post in the country.
Andrew Carnegie funded 2,500 libraries around the world. The historic landmark ACFL&MH is one of only four libraries in the country, five in the world, that the famed industrialist and philanthropist endowed. (The others are: the first Carnegie Library in the world in Dunfermline, Scotland, Andrew Carnegie’s birthplace; and Braddock, Homestead and the sadly demolished Duquesne Carnegie libraries, all in the Mon Valley, where Carnegie had his steel mills.)
In the early 1890s, the leaders of what were then Chartiers and Mansfield, on either side of Chartiers Creek, approached Mr. Carnegie with the proposition that they merge to become one town. The Borough of Carnegie incorporated in 1894.
The ACFL&MH was Andrew Carnegie’s legacy gift to the town that took his name. Ground was broken in 1899. The Library & Music Hall opened its doors in May 1901, and has proudly served its growing community of patrons and audiences ever since.
Carnegie and The Carnegie Carnegie have forged an historic agreement in December 2016. Read more...