The Menominee library a lumberman built to look like a French chateau

Walk up Ogden Avenue in Menominee and you hit a building that looks like it wandered off from the French countryside. It is low and balanced, with fluted Ionic columns flanking a recessed front door, arched windows, and the calm symmetry of Beaux-Arts design. It is the town library, and it has looked this way since 1905.

The money came from Augustus Spies. He made his fortune the way most early Menominee fortunes were made — in white pine, when the river still carried logs to the mills by the millions. In March of 1903 he and his wife announced they would pay to build and furnish a library under their name. They put up $30,000, a serious sum then. The Chicago firm of Patton & Miller drew the plans, and they knew the type: the same firm designed dozens of Carnegie libraries across the Midwest. The building bid alone came to $21,950. The rest went to shelves, tables, and books.

The Spies dedicated it on March 30, 1905, and the gift kept paying off. The first plans set aside a museum room. It opened in 1926 and became the seed of the Menominee County Historical Museum. The children’s room still holds four paintings made in 1958 by a local artist, Marion Kassing.

A library funded by one man’s pine money, dressed up like a country chateau, doubling as the county’s first museum — that is a lot of jobs for one small stone building on the edge of Green Bay. It is still a working public library, which is the part the Spies would probably like best: not a monument, but a place where you can walk in and check out a book.