Wooden chairs, the feel of paper, and light chatter at the computers make some feel at home. This place is the public library, visited by over 700 million people a year at locations across the country.
Logansport has its own library, called the Logansport-Cass County Public Library, with two locations. The main branch is at 616 E. Broadway in Logansport, and the second branch is in Galveston. It’s a popular place to meet and socialize.
“We have a lot of people that meet up here,” librarian Larnia Shaffer said. “Social workers meeting up with clients, a lot of people meet here because they don’t have an office to go to.”
Logansport’s first library was opened on Nov. 1, 1894. It was rebuilt seven years later thanks to funding from Andrew Carnegie, a man known for opening thousands of libraries on every continent.
“It was in the early 1900s, and I believe the original library was an Andrew-Carnegie library,” Assistant Director Scott Pletka said. “Andrew Carnegie was an industrialist and philanthropist and funded a lot of the early public library buildings in the United States.”
The library became the official Cass County library in 1918 as it expanded, adding a second floor and even an elevator four years later. However, the original library burned down due to an electrical fire in early 1941, destroying the entire library building and 25 thousand books with it.
“It was here for a number of years,” Logansport resident Mark Racop said. “Burned in 1941, and they had the replacement up and going the next year. It’s sad to look through the graphics and pictures and see what the old one looked like. The Carnegie libraries were very impressive.”
A group was formed shortly after the fire called the “Friends of the Logansport Cass County Public Library,” which successfully fund-raised enough money along with a bond from the school board to construct a new building. This building opened on Sept. 25, 1942.
The library is designated a non-profit organization and mostly relies on taxes to function and be maintained. Roughly 90% of the library’s funding comes from property taxes across the city. In 2019, they made 1.6 million dollars in revenue, with all but $56,000 of that revenue coming from county and state government funding.
The library is directly managed by two people, Director David Ivey and Assistant Director Pletka. However, the people who ultimately decide the policies and rules of the library are a group of seven people appointed by various places around the city, mainly the Logansport City Council and Logansport Community School Corporation School Board. This group is called the Board of Trustees.
“Anything that would be kind of a policy like how people behave and what books we would get,” Peltka said. “They would vote on and approve of those policies. The director will often recommend things for them to approve.”
From meeting pods upstairs to full meeting rooms downstairs, often reserved for children’s events, there is consistently something happening at the library every week, from concerts to a Lego Club.
Many people visit the library per day with roughly 30 people often coming in within three hours on a normal day. Anybody is welcome as long as you follow their rules and stay relatively quiet.
“I think people of all social and economic backgrounds and ages come to the library,” Peltka said. “I think that’s one of the amazing things about being here. You see people from all walks of life and all sorts of ages. Probably less young people than we used to have, I’ll admit. Apart from that, It’s a cross-section of every community.”
Nowadays, there’s more to libraries than a quiet place and thousands of paper books. The local library has access to DVDs, CDs, and even genealogy databases for tracing back family roots. They also have over 20 computers in total across the library, all connected to the internet.
If a patron just wants to use the computers, all he or she will need to do is show something like an ID from the school or any form of ID to get a guest slip for the computers. The guest slips last for a single visit before a person needs to get a new slip.
“If you just want to come in and read a book or use the wifi, just come in and go by the rules,” Racop said.
Getting a library card is still an easy process, but requires a few more steps. What a person needs to get a library card is to fill out the paperwork and give the librarians something to prove residence at a local address, like a piece of mail, a bill, or even a lease agreement. Then, new patrons will have their picture taken for their online database, so if your card gets stolen, the thief can’t use that card.
“If you’re under 16, we require a parent to be with you,” Pletka said. “That’s the main thing. But if you’re 16 or over, we require a photo ID of some sort, usually a driver’s license or a school ID. If the card doesn’t have your name or current address on it, then we need something with it on it. We do this because the library serves most of the townships in Cass County.”
