Marshall Carnegie Library
— a red-brick reading room from the century before last.
Not only on a wall.
Marshall Carnegie Library, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
“A two-story Classical Revival library in red brick and cream limestone, built in 1904 with a $10,000 grant from Andrew Carnegie. It sat as the city's public library for nearly seventy years and survived when most Texas Carnegies were torn down. The columned portico still frames the door it framed in 1904, on a quiet street a few blocks off the Harrison County courthouse square. from the studio
The place, in three passes.
The Marshall Carnegie Library was built in 1904 in Marshall, Texas, with a $10,000 grant from steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, who funded more than 1,600 public libraries across the United States between 1883 and 1929. Texas received roughly thirty Carnegie buildings; fewer than a dozen survive intact, and Marshall's is one of the most complete. The two-story building sits on West Houston Street in the downtown grid laid out around the 1900 Harrison County Courthouse. It served as the city's public library until a larger facility opened in the 1970s.
The building is a textbook small-town Carnegie: Classical Revival red brick over a raised limestone basement, with a four-column portico, a central entrance, and tall round-arched windows on the main floor. The exterior detailing in cream-coloured limestone frames the brick and gives the facade its weight. Inside, the original plan placed the reading rooms on the main floor and a lecture hall below, a layout Carnegie's standard architectural guidelines promoted nationwide. The building was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1979.
Marshall sits in East Texas about 40 miles west of Shreveport, Louisiana, on Interstate 20. The Carnegie building is a short walk from the Harrison County Courthouse and the Michelson Museum of Art, both inside the small downtown grid. Visitors usually combine the library with the Texas and Pacific Railway Museum and the historic square. There is no fee to walk the grounds; interior access depends on the building's current use, which has shifted between civic and cultural functions since the public library moved out.
