Rapides Parish Library

The building exists because voters said yes. On July 25, 1961, they approved a $600,000 bond, 731 to 405, and the board bought half the block from Mrs. John H. Overton for $105,000 and a quarter from the Spellman estate for $40,000. The result is a one-story library of six-by-ten-foot precast panels with three arches each, inverted barrel-vault roofs that double as skylights, and slender columns with flared capitals finished in white onyx aggregate. Behind it, an open-air shelter on twelve columns covered the bookmobiles.

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 — 1.0 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 — 4.8 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

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