A historically important library structure at South and Fitch streets in Auburn will benefit from foundation funds.
The nearly 100-year-old building will become an interpretive center to focus on Auburn, Cayuga County and central New York's Corridor of Conscience in an important human rights movement of the 19th and early 20th centuries.
The Osborne Memorial Foundation has committed $60,000 to begin transforming the structure via the Osborne Library Preservation Committee. The grant, at $20,000 a year for three years, brings the amount raised or pledged for the project to $173,500. Over the next 12 months, $300,000 is needed to preserve the building. Private or nonprofit concerns will be able to lease a portion of the two-story, 2,800-square-foot library to help sustain it.
Only the library remains of the D.M. Osborne Estate, at 99 South St. The First United Methodist Church of Auburn is located on the mansion's footprint. A passage linked the library to the estate.
The structure, behind the church, would also highlight the Osborne-Wright family's role in historical movements of that period: women's rights, abolition, the Underground Railroad, temperance, prison reform and the treatment of troubled children.
Julius Schweinfurth (1858-1931), an Auburn native and noted Boston architect, designed the library for Thomas Mott Osborne (1859-1926). Schweinfurth may also be among the library's exhibits.
The Corridor of Conscience, between Monroe County (Rochester area) and Madison County (just east of Syracuse), exhibited unusual religious and human rights activity throughout the 19th Century until America's entry into World War I in 1917. Sites in Rochester, Palmyra, Dryden, Canandaigua, Geneva, Waterloo, Seneca Falls, Auburn, Freeville, Syracuse and Peterboro are among places along the Corridor which interpret that activity.
No Corridor of Conscience site addresses why Auburn, Cayuga County and the whole corridor spawned so many movements. The Osborne Library would serve all those roles.
The Preservation Committee includes: Michael Deming, David Gelsi, Pamela Kirkwood, Barbara LoCastro, Michael Long, Alexander Meal, Lawrence Pritchard, the Rev. Jeffrey Childs (advisory), and David Connelly (chair). Its five-year completion goal is 2013, the centenary of the building's completion and of Thomas Mott Osborne's famous voluntary incarceration in the Auburn Prison.
Staff writer Kathleen Barran can be reached at 253-5311 ext. 238 or kathleen.baaran@lee.net
The Osborne Memorial Foundation has committed $60,000 to begin transforming the structure via the Osborne Library Preservation Committee. The grant, at $20,000 a year for three years, brings the amount raised or pledged for the project to $173,500. Over the next 12 months, $300,000 is needed to preserve the building. Private or nonprofit concerns will be able to lease a portion of the two-story, 2,800-square-foot library to help sustain it.
Only the library remains of the D.M. Osborne Estate, at 99 South St. The First United Methodist Church of Auburn is located on the mansion's footprint. A passage linked the library to the estate.
The structure, behind the church, would also highlight the Osborne-Wright family's role in historical movements of that period: women's rights, abolition, the Underground Railroad, temperance, prison reform and the treatment of troubled children.
Julius Schweinfurth (1858-1931), an Auburn native and noted Boston architect, designed the library for Thomas Mott Osborne (1859-1926). Schweinfurth may also be among the library's exhibits.
The Corridor of Conscience, between Monroe County (Rochester area) and Madison County (just east of Syracuse), exhibited unusual religious and human rights activity throughout the 19th Century until America's entry into World War I in 1917. Sites in Rochester, Palmyra, Dryden, Canandaigua, Geneva, Waterloo, Seneca Falls, Auburn, Freeville, Syracuse and Peterboro are among places along the Corridor which interpret that activity.
No Corridor of Conscience site addresses why Auburn, Cayuga County and the whole corridor spawned so many movements. The Osborne Library would serve all those roles.
The Preservation Committee includes: Michael Deming, David Gelsi, Pamela Kirkwood, Barbara LoCastro, Michael Long, Alexander Meal, Lawrence Pritchard, the Rev. Jeffrey Childs (advisory), and David Connelly (chair). Its five-year completion goal is 2013, the centenary of the building's completion and of Thomas Mott Osborne's famous voluntary incarceration in the Auburn Prison.
Staff writer Kathleen Barran can be reached at 253-5311 ext. 238 or kathleen.baaran@lee.net
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