Alexandria Library

Books came to Alexandria long before this building. A library society held a legislative charter as early as 1824, though no record of its building survives. The present library, offered in 1907, was designed by the New Orleans firm Crosby and Henkel, with Caldwell Brothers as contractors. It is a Beaux Arts building of brick and terra-cotta under a tile roof, with four pilasters and a central entrance framed in molded terra-cotta. Time has cost it an ornamental strip above the cornice, and its original windows were replaced with metal units.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Arna Bontemps African American Museum — steps away
  The restored Alexandria house where the Harlem Renaissance writer Arna Bontemps was born in 1902, on the Louisiana African American Heritage Trail.
• Forts Randolph and Buhlow State Historic Site — 1.1 mi
  Two Confederate earthen forts on the Red River at Pineville, built with enslaved labor and never attacked, beside the remains of Bailey's Dam.
• Kent Plantation House — 2.3 mi
  Rapides Parish's oldest known standing building, a Creole house with a February tour and a 2023 memorial that put the enslaved first.
• Louisiana Maneuvers and Military Museum — 4.9 mi
  A National Guard museum in a replica WWII barracks at Camp Beauregard, built around the huge 1940-41 war games in Central Louisiana. Free.

More markers nearby

• Rapides Parish Library — steps away
• Huie Dellmon House — steps away
• Post-Civil War Alexandria — steps away
• Alexander Fulton Park — steps away