Stark Street Library

In 1891, after 27 years of dedicated fund raising, the Library Association of Portland opened this two-story, solid stone building on Stark Street.  It was built to house 20,000 volumes, and served as Portland’s cultural heart as well.

The group that would later become the Library Association of Portland began soliciting subscriptions for the library located on Stark Street in 1863. The initiation fee was five dollars with an annual subscription rate of twelve dollars.  The first group of subscribers included many of Portland’s notables, among them, William S. Ladd, Judge Matthew Deady, Henry Failing, and Henry W. Corbett. 

The library first opened in rooms in a building owned by Benjamin Stark.  By March of 1864, 153 members had paid $2,500 in dues.  Deady was the earliest proponent of a free public library system and worked toward that goal for many years.  Getting Portland’s elite to support the library was trying for Deady, but when Stephen Skidmore  left the library $5000 in his will, other large bequests followed.  It was twenty-seven years before the library association had enough money to construct the 1891 building.  The library’s design was influenced by the 1850 Bibliothèque Sainte Geneviéve in Paris.

The Library Association, which guided the library for 126 years, managed without public funding for almost 40 of those years and continued to govern itself until it transferred ownership of the library, books, and holdings to the people of Multnomah County in July of 1990.  The Multnomah County Commission now administers the library.

Further Reading:
MacColl, E. Kimbark. Merchants, Money and Power: The Portland Establishment 1843-1913. Portland, Oreg., 1988.

Written by Trudy Flores, Sarah Griffith, © Oregon Historical Society 2002.