PPS is happy to announce that our 2024 keepsake ornament, featuring Knight Memorial Library, is now available! Proceeds from all sales will support PPS’s educational programs and advocacy work across the city in 2025. Place your order here!
Ornaments are $35 each, including shipping and handling, and will ship in early December. Read on to learn how the Library and this ornament embody Providence’s industrial and engineering history, civic life and the significant role women have had in shaping our public institutions!
Knight Memorial Library was designed by Edward Lippincott Tilton and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It was completed in 1924 on undeveloped land that had belonged to the textile industrialist Robert Knight (1826-1912) since 1869. Knight was born in Warwick and went to work in the cotton factories in the area when he was eight years old, moving up through the employment ranks to become clerk. He and his brother leased a factory when he was 21 and owned his first factory three years later. By the age of 72 in 1898, he was the single largest individual owner of cotton mills in the world.
But the story of this library begins with a group of neighborhood women, led by Emma Shaw and Carrie Hancock, who established the Elmwood Public Library Association in 1916 in response to data showing that children in the neighborhood were underperforming on literacy tests. Hancock organized a tea at her home in June 1915, and the women who attended got to work selling $1 membership subscriptions to finance the purchase of books; the first Elmwood library opened in a fire station on Greenwich Street with cheap bookcases and women serving as the first librarians (thank you, Anna E. Foster, Jeanne Butterworth, and Harriet Johson!).
Knight Memorial Library grew out of this effort years later when the Knight family provided funds for its construction as a memorial to Robert and his wife, Josephine Louisa. Like many other American buildings of this period, the Library looked backward in time and over the ocean to Europe and Greece for its style references but at the same time, it was thoroughly modern in its engineering and materials. When it opened, it was reportedly one of the few buildings in the city that relied upon reinforced concrete, rather than steel, to stand up. The building’s exterior includes Indiana limestone, brick and an unusual glazed green tile used for the roof.
The Knight Memorial Friends’ group was formed in 1983; the Library merged with Providence Public Library in 1995, then separated from PPL with the eight other community branch libraries in 2009. Read about this recent history here and here, and see how women have continued to play a critical role in stewarding this national landmark and community center up through today!
This ornament makes a great gift to the readers and neighborhood activists in your life, to friends and family who live in Elmwood, and, of course, to the women you know who drive civic life here in Providence! Place an order here.
Please email info@ppsri.org if you have trouble with the order form or call us at 401-831-7440.