Olivia Raney Library, Raleigh, NC
Our Flashback Friday postcard this week features the Olivia Raney Library, once known as Raleigh’s “Taj Mahal.” The beautifully detailed Italian Renaissance building was erected in 1899, but sadly, this Hillsboro St. landmark is now long gone.
Olivia Raney Library. The splendid Raney Library building, on the corner of Hillsboro and Salisbury Streets (opposite the Confederate Monument), and its contents, were the free gift of one of Raleigh’s citizens, Mr. R.B. Raney. The building and a well selected library of 9,000 volumes cost $50,000.
The Olivia Raney Library opened in 1901, and was Raleigh’s first public library. Construction was funded by Richard Beverly Raney, proprietor of Raleigh’s famed Yarborough House hotel. Raney had erected a neoclassical mansion for his beautiful young wife, Olivia Cowper, on Hillsboro St. shortly after their marriage. Heartbroken by Olivia’s untimely death in 1896, Raney offered to the city the library as a memorial to his beloved spouse. It was built directly across the street from their home.
The yellow brick, red-tiled ‘Italian palazzo’ was designed by Nicholas Ittner of Atlanta. The three-story building featured street level retail space on Salisbury St. and an apartment for the resident librarian around the corner on Hillsboro. An elegant entrance led to the library itself on the second floor. An auditorium, or “music hall,” occupied the third. This large room was used for public gatherings, lectures, and often, as a dance hall.
As with most of the structures once encircling Raleigh’s Capitol Square, the Olivia Raney Library was demolished by the state of North Carolina in 1966 and replaced by an annex to the state revenue building. A state parking lot now occupies the site of the Raney mansion.
Incredibly, I recently discovered this photo in the the state archives which shows the Olivia Raney Library as it appeared soon after it was built. This photo is obviously the basis for the tinted halftone image seen in the postcard — down to the hitching post, newly planted trees, and even the trashcan sitting on the curb!
Another archival photo I found shows the library, the Confederate Monument, and the Raney mansion on the right.
Happily, although the original building is long lost, Raleigh’s historic first library lives on as a facility of the Wake County Public Library System as the Olivia Raney Local History Library.
Archival photos courtesy NC State Archives
Our Flashback Friday postcard this week was published by the renowned Raphael Tuck & Sons, of London and New York.
Raphael Tuck & Sons  1866-1960’s
London, England and 122 Fifth Ave, New York, NYTuck & Sons was founded in 1866 by Raphael Tuck. Tuck’s three sons joined the firm in 1871, and they began publishing their first Christmas cards. When Raphael retired in 1881, the company opened offices in New York in 1882 and Paris in 1885 to facilitate orders and distribution. By 1894, a year after they were appointed official printers to Queen Victoria, they printed their first Souvenir Card.
Postal regulations were changed after much lobbying by Tuck and others, providing better opportunities to enter the postcard market. Tuck immediately began the printing of postcards in chromolithography. By 1899, Tuck became the first publisher to print postcards in a larger size that we now call standard. While most of Tuck’s cards were printed in Prussia, Saxony, and Holland until the First World War, the images usually came from artists local to the subject at hand working through their international branches.
In 1904 Tuck began producing a postcard series specifically for the American market, all printed in Holland. The Raphotype view-cards, printed in tinted halftone are consecutively numbered 5000-6100. Some of these were issued in monotone. In the early 1960s the firm was purchased by Purnell & Sons.
“Flashback Friday†is a weekly feature of , Goodnight Raleigh! in which we showcase vintage postcards depicting our historic capital city. We hope you enjoy this week end treat!
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08/17/2012
I walk by there all the time. Interesting to see what I missed by a half-century or so. What were we thinking in the sixties that made a surface parking lot preferable to that home? We’re a mess.
08/17/2012
I remember the old Olivia Library very well. My mom took us all the time. I can even remember the first book I checked out there….”Walter the Mouse” :)
08/17/2012
Or maybe that was “Walter the Lazy Mouse” Oh well, it’s been almost 60 years ago:)
08/18/2012
During the summer months in the early 1960’s I was allowed to ride the bus downtown once a week, by myself, to go to the library, library card in hand. I had been signed up for some jr. egghead book group; we were supposed to read a book a week, then discuss it with the group. Our first book was Little Women (yes, the group was mainly girls). I loved the musty, dusty smell of the books in the old library, an olfactory memory that returned, years later, deep in the stacks of Wilson Library in Chapel Hill. After our meeting we would go down to the S&W cafeteria for a power lunch. A table full of 11 yr.-old girls giggling uncontrollably. They must have loved to see us coming.
I also was honored to spend an afternoon in the Raney mansion, I guess just before it was murdered. A friend’s father was an antique dealer, and he went to crawl around attic storage to see if he wanted to buy anything. My friend and I to this day maintain we experienced a ghost while waiting downstairs, the sound of footsteps behind us, cold, cold air, and the strong smell of perfume. We decided to wait for her father outside. We asked a guy working on the property if anyone ever saw ghosts around the house, he said yes, it’s an old house, it happens.
Ghosts have a hard time finding a place to hang out in Raleigh these days.
08/22/2012
Whenever I pass by a downtown gov’t parking lot (and many gov’t buildings, for that matter) I always see in my mind’s eye the beautiful and long-lost structures that once were.
My Mom also took me to Olivia Raney many times as a child to the ‘children’s library’ on the first floor. As I recall, my first library book was “The Little Engine that Could.” Later, we had the ‘book mobile’ in our neighborhood.
HWG — Maybe the footsteps and strong smell of perfume you experienced in the old Raney home belonged to Olivia Raney herself!
08/23/2012
Raleigh Boy….Like you, I also see in my mind the long-lost structures that have been replaced by govt. buildings and lament even more those structures that were demolished so the land could be used for parking lots. Not to open a can of worms here or pick at a scab, but was there any alternative to tearing down fine old homes to make way for these govt. buildings? I ask this question because I honestly don’t know the answer. Was there ever any discussion that you know of to “relocate” state govt. operations away from downtown Raleigh so as to save the old homes/buildings? Of course, there are now state and federal offices all over the city, many offices being in rental spaces.
08/23/2012
At the time there was a mindset to move Raleigh into the future, away from the small-town, limited Southern past and into a future in which Raleigh would be a national player. The airport was cozy and needed expanding (remember the Dinner Theater?), RTP was woodlands, Falls of the Neuse and Wake Forest Rd. didn’t intersect (remember the old houses and farms that got wiped out for that development?), Cary was cow pastures, and while, thank goodness, there were those who fought to hold on to some of the houses, there was no profit in architectural salvation, in fact, it cost money. In the 60’s and 70’s it was all about profit, development, attracting people to the area who would make Raleigh metropolitan. All those parking lots weren’t supposed to be parking lots, they were cleared land that was, shall we say, “shovel-ready.” Now, all these decades later, we are still looking at parking lots and pondering the wastefulness of destroying our heritage. I remember going to Umstead and seeing a display about the plans to make the Research Triangle, Knightdale and Louisburg one demographic. On Google maps, looks like mission accomplished.
08/23/2012
I guess we’ve gotta have those parking lots so the people working in all those govt. buildings will have a place to put their cars, right? And even then, there aren’t enough spaces for everyone.
Yep, I surely do remember the Dinner Theatre and also remember when going out to the airport was almost like a trip out of town,a big deal indeed…well, it WAS outside the city limits.
08/24/2012
I remeber trips to RDU. Sometimes it was hours between flights, you could actually go up in the control tower and chat with the controllers.
08/26/2012
(hi Conway!)
I also remember the old days when passengers walked out the door of the terminal, across the tarmac, and up the steps right onto the plane. And bystanders could go outside with them as far as the gate. As a little kid, I remember thinking it was a big thrill when the propellers started up and nearly blew you into the air (if you were a little kid, of course). Good times…
08/26/2012
We took Sunday afternoon drives out to the airport in the late 50’s to visit my aunt who worked for Eastern. Her boyfriend worked in the tower, and he allowed my brother and I to go up for a bird’s eye view of the place. If we were lucky we were able to actually see a plane land or one take off….which were few and far between.
08/27/2012
As I said, the airport was cozy, and a true indicator of the small Southern town Raleigh was. In 1965 I flew (for the first time) to Atlanta, and was amazed at how modern and huge the airport there was. They had those newfangled accordian walkway things that went right to the plane. RDU was waging a lengthy campaign to expand, impact Umstead, swallow up the Dinner Theater. People fought the changes for years; the easier expansion path was downtown, clearing outdated buildings off land that would, developers hoped, become golden. I seem to recall a brief movement to build a government complex out Six Forks Rd.,where land was plentiful and reasonably priced. You would have thought they were trying to put State Gov’t on the moon. Much too far for anyone to drive every day.
08/29/2012
Leaving the Raleigh/Durham airport and returning to the Olivia Raney Library building, I just noticed in the 1934 Raleigh City Directory a listing under “apartments” for “Olivia Raney Library Apartments” at 105 Hillsboro. There was much more to the building that I would have ever expected.
09/28/2013
Not to split hairs but the site of the Raney mansion is occupied by a *church* parking lot, not a State parking lot. Churches have been horrible caretakers of downtown’s history (note All Saints Chapel having to be moved to avoid demolition). Anyway, love the picture!
09/28/2013
Talk about churches being horrible caretakers of downtown’s history….take a ride around ITB residential areas and look at what churches have done to the neighborhoods. Entire blocks have been gobbled up by churches over the years and in many cases, houses have been torn down to make way for parking lots, which sit empty most of the time. But even the parking lots aren’t enough to accommodate all the cars on Sunday and days when there are big funerals/weddings/meetings—then the cars clog up the surrounding residential streets. Ah, but all this is material for another thread…
12/19/2014
In 1955 my parents purchased a farm near Lexington, NC. The old house on the property was built around 1830 and was in need of many repairs. My mother had always wanted a “colonial” style front porch with large white columns, but this particular house did not have a front porch. Sometime in the 60’s we added a front porch to the house and my mother always told me that the columns had come from the Raney Mansion in Raleigh. The original wooden columns were approximately 21-22 ft. tall and 2ft. in diameter and had to be cut down to fit our house.
Here is a link to a picture of the columns as installed on our house. http://www.carols62.com/columns.jpg
If anyone reading this has a better picture of the Raney Mansion, I would love to see it. You may contact me at charlie@carols62.com
12/29/2014
Charles Bernhardt — Thanks for sharing the link to the photo of your parents’ house. Those columns sure do look like the ones that once graced the Raney Mansion. Charles Barrett was the architect and in 1903 published a promotional booklet of his work. In it are photos of the interior and exterior of the mansion. There is an excellent view of it on page 25. https://archive.org/stream/colonialsouthern00barr#page/25/mode/1up
12/29/2014
The picture of the Raney mansion sure does look like the house my Boy Scout troop met in. Troop 388 was sponsored by the First Baptist Church. We met in a white house facing Hillsborough St. that was very close to the church.
02/28/2015
Aha! Now I see that the architect is identified as Nicholas Ittner. Do you know the source of that information?
Catherine Bishir
ncarchitects.lib.ncsu.edu
02/28/2015
Catherine Bisher — My source re: Nicholas Ittner as architect of the Olivia Raney Library is from Elizabeth Reid Murray’s Wake County History, volume 2 (page 177). She cites the N&O 12 April 1899 and (Raleigh) Morning Post 26 January 1901 as her sources. Mrs Murray was my mentor, and any time I am looking for a Raleigh history fact check I go to her! BTW — I have found very little info on Ittner on the internet.
02/28/2015
Thank you. Indeed it was a great privilege to learn from ERM and I continue to do so. It timer was a contractor, and I wonder if it was his design too, or another architect’s.
09/11/2015
Back to Mark’s comment in 2013 about the parking lot where the Raney mansion once stood, and not to continue splitting hairs, but that parking lot does belong to the state. Nearby churches use it on Sunday as do museum visitors and others after workday hours. The Raney house was long gone as of 1968 when I came to Raleigh, and that corner lot was already being used for parking. The state has a policy to acquire land within a designated area whose boundaries include that lot. And to Raleigh Native51, the house where the Boy Scouts met was probably the Johnson House. It faced Hillsborough Street and was also used for Sunday School classes until demolished for the John and Jean Lewis Educational Building of First Baptist Church. That was 1969-1971 more or less. PS: This is a fantastic site!