Lane Public Library
Hamilton, Butler County, Ohio
Marker Inscription
Lane Public Library Clark Lane built this library in 1966 and donated it to the people of Hamilton two years later. The 1913 Great Miami River flood catastrophe damaged much of the building and many of its books and records. The refurbished library reopened in 1914 and was dedicated as the "Lane Public Library." A fire five years later did considerable damage but library leaders responded in the years following by enlarging the building, establishing community outreach locations and, in 1938, offered a bookmobile service to rural areas. After World War II, the library expanded into a system that, as of 2015, served over 187,000 people in western Butler County with libraries in Hamilton, Fairfield, and Oxford, the Smith Library of Regional History, the bookmobile, and a community technology center. Clark Lane Clark Lane (1823-1907), industrialist and philanthropist, was a son of John Lane (1793-1880) and Rosanah Crum (1795-1877). John came with his family to the Ohio Country when it was still part of the Northwest Territory. As a young man, Clark worked in his family's blacksmith shop, and eventually helped found Owens, Lane & Dyer Machine Company in 1854. It built agricultural machinery, sawmills, papermaking machines, and other products, initiating Hamilton's prominence in metals manufacturing. Lane funded the Butler County Children's Home, an orphanage for over a century, and constructed an octagon house as his residence on Third Street. He built this library in 1866, also an octagon, and donated it to the people of Hamilton. A 19th century admirer wrote, "The name and generous deeds of Clark Lane will never fade from the memories of a grateful people who have been recipients of his favor."
Erected by Lane Public Library, W.E. Smith Family Charitable Trust, and The Ohio History Connection
The Story
Industrialist and philanthropist Clark Lane built this octagonal library in 1866 and donated it to the people of Hamilton two years later. A son of a pioneer family that came to the Ohio Country in Northwest Territory days, Lane helped found a machine company that made Hamilton a center of metals manufacturing before turning to charitable works. Battered by the catastrophic 1913 Great Miami River flood and a later fire, the library rebuilt and expanded into a county-wide system serving western Butler County.
Why it matters
The library shows how the fortunes of 19th-century industry were turned toward public education and civic uplift, seeding an institution that still serves the community today.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · Clark Lane
- · John Lane
Related events
- · Great Miami River flood of 1913
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Bracken County, 1796
Augusta, KY
Bracken County, formed in 1796, was named for the frontier hunter and Indian fighter William Bracken, who ranged this country as early as 1773. For its size the county produced an outsized share of firsts: it cradled John Gregg Fee, founder of Berea College; the noted surgeon Joshua Taylor Bradford; and Augusta College, chartered in 1822 as the world's first Methodist college. In 1867 the first White Burley tobacco was grown from Bracken County seed, transforming Kentucky agriculture.
Amos Kendall House
Frankfort, KY
Massachusetts native Amos Kendall (1789–1869) migrated to Kentucky in 1814, tutored in Henry Clay's household, and edited Frankfort's Argus of Western America. Turning from Clay to Andrew Jackson, he helped carry Kentucky in 1828, followed Jackson to Washington as a trusted "Kitchen Cabinet" adviser and postmaster general, then grew wealthy as Samuel F. B. Morse's telegraph agent and helped found the school that became Gallaudet College.
Lane-Hooven House
Hamilton, OH
Local carpenter James Elrick built this house in 1863 for Clark Lane, a Hamilton blacksmith-turned-industrialist and philanthropist who lived here for more than a decade. Across the street Lane erected an octagonal library in 1866 and gave it to the city, part of a lifetime of civic generosity. Later home to the Hooven family and then donated by Bertrand Kahn as a memorial to his father, the Lane-Hooven House has long served charitable and civic uses and joined the National Register in 1973.
Village of Glendale, 1855
Glendale, OH
In the early 1850s the arrival of the Cincinnati, Hamilton, and Dayton Railway opened the countryside north of Cincinnati to a new kind of settlement — one drawn on paper before it was built. Laid out with curving, landscaped streets rather than a rigid grid, Glendale was incorporated in 1855 as a deliberately designed railroad suburb, a place where families could live in a garden-like village and commute to the city by train. It stands among the earliest planned communities in Ohio and the nation, an early experiment in the idea that a town's form could be composed in advance.