Swedish Consulate and Swante Palm Library

Palm read what he bought. His library, gathered over a lifetime from the United States and Europe, held Scandinavian works, books on Texas, classics, literature and science, and he knew English, French, Latin, German and several Scandinavian languages; copious marginalia show how much of it he read. After he gave the books to the University of Texas, he spent his last days there as assistant librarian, supervising their cataloguing and use. The collection, he said, "is closely interwoven with my very existence." He died in Austin on June 22, 1899.

What the plaque says

Swedish Consulate and Swante Palm Library Swante Palm, (1815 - 1899) vice consul to Texas for Sweden and Norway from 1866 until his death, built a small house on Ash Street (now 9th Street) in the 1850s. It was a repository for palm's extensive book collection and served as the Swedish Consulate, where Palm gave assistance to Swedish immigrants. To accommodate his ever-growing library, Palm enlarged the house in 1879. He donated his 10,000 volume collection the University of Texas in 1897, increasing the school's holdings by over sixty percent. Palm's house was razed in 1958. (1991)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Texas State Capitol — 0.3 mi
  Austin's fourth statehouse, a Renaissance Revival capitol of 1888 that stands 311 feet to its Goddess of Liberty and was restored after the 1983 fire.
• French Legation State Historic Site — 0.6 mi
  A raised pine house built in 1840 and 1841 for France's envoy to the Republic of Texas, who left Austin in a rage over a neighbor's pigs before it was finished.
• Bullock Texas State History Museum — 0.7 mi
  The state's history museum at the head of Congress Avenue, built around the hull of La Salle's ship La Belle, raised from Matagorda Bay with 1.8 million artifacts.
• Harry Ransom Center — 1.0 mi
  The University of Texas archive where a Gutenberg Bible and the earliest surviving camera photograph are always on view, free, beside the papers of Watergate and the movies.

More markers nearby

• Texas and the Civil War State Military Board — steps away
• Original Site of First Baptist Church of Austin — steps away
• Governor Andrew Jackson Hamilton — steps away
• Governor Edmund Jackson Davis — steps away