Carnegie Library of Ballinger

Ballinger was a railroad's creation. When the Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe built west from Brownwood in 1886, it chose a site where the Colorado River and Elm Creek meet for the water, five miles from Runnels City, the county seat. Newspaper ads across Texas and half-price excursion trains from Dallas brought 6,000 people to the lot sale on June 29, 1886, and about half the lots sold the first day. The railroad offered free land to anyone who would move a house from Runnels City and to any church that would build. The town was named Gresham, then Hutchings, and finally Ballinger, for William Pitt Ballinger, a Galveston lawyer and Santa Fe stockholder.

The library came in 1909. Andrew Carnegie's grants paid for 32 library buildings in Texas, on the condition that each town maintain its own, and before them few Texas towns outside the largest cities had public libraries. Ballinger's is two stories of native limestone in a plain version of the Classical Revival style, designed under the supervision of the Rev. J. D. Leslie of the First Presbyterian Church, with a portico of white ashlar and fluted Ionic columns.

More than a century on, it still lends books from the same rooms, one of the few Carnegie libraries in Texas still operating in its original building. The restored 1911 Santa Fe depot nearby now serves as City Hall.