The Marietta Journal
September 13, 1893

The Sarah Freeman Clarke Library Building is about completed. It is situated on the old William Root lot on Church Street, in front of the Episcopal Church. The lot cost $1,300 and the building cost $2,200.

The building occupies the centre of the lot and is constructed with brick and cement walls. It is octagonal in shape and is thirty feet diameter inside and the same height. It is lighted by a skylight of rough plate glass, with galvanized iron frame, and has side ventilators which are open and shut from the floor by a patent arrangement.

The library will have about 4,000 books to start with - over 2,000 contributed by Miss Sarah Freeman Clarke and the balance by the Marietta Library Association. The consolidation of the libraries gives us a first class library in every particular, under a charter recently granted by the Superior Court. It will bear the name of the Freeman Clarke Library. The books will be placed in the new library by the 15th inst., and will be opened on October 2.

The Directors area: Judge Geo. F. Gober, Mr. J. F. Clarke, Mrs. C. S. McCandfish, Miss Annie Burnap, Dr. P. R. Cortelyou, Col. W. R. Power, and Dr. B. R. Strong.

It has been suggested that the Directors hold a meeting and provide means to clean off and grade the yard at once. The dedication or grand opening will take place about the 15th of October.

NOTE: "By the end of the 1950s Marietta's Clarke library moved from the tiny building on Church Street to the old U. S. Post Office, a 1909 classical revival structure on Atlanta Street." (Source: Cobb County, Georgia and the Origins of the Suburban South A Twentieth-Century history by thomas allan scott.) The library relocated To its present building on Roswell Street in 1989.