Ottawa’s first schoolhouse stood at 3rd and Walnut, where a city parking lot now stands, but after damage from a tornado and an earthquake and as the number of schoolchildren doubled yearly, the district built Central School at 5th and Main in 1872. Criticism of Central School included steep stairs connecting its three floors, and in 1898 the building was rebuilt on the same foundation with only two floors as Washington School, which shared students with neighborhood ward schools being built around town. A new high school rose south of the Washington School site in 1917, and in 1927 a new junior high school was built on the old Central and Washington school site at the southwest corner of 5th and Main Street. New high school and middle school buildings were later constructed south of 11th and Ash in 1966 and 1999, and the 1917 and 1927 buildings then ceased to be used as schools. City Park, part of Ottawa’s original 1864 plat, once lay on both sides of Main Street, but the west side was soon given over to educational use, while the east side gained the Carnegie Library in 1903. The small creek flowing through the park, originally called Park Creek, came to be nicknamed Skunk Run, and in 1960 the 1859 Dietrich Cabin was moved into the park as a memorial to the county’s first settlers as Kansas prepared for its centennial. The park has long hosted band concerts, festivals, and weddings, although a microburst in 1999 felled many old trees. Ottawa’s library began in 1872 when literary women started a collection of books administered by Julia Walsh, the community’s first librarian, who served from 1872 to 1882 and again from 1887 to 1905 while the library occupied rented upstairs downtown rooms. After Andrew Carnegie offered library buildings to towns that would support them, Ottawa architect George P. Washburn designed the golden brick Carnegie Library in City Park, which served readers from 1903 to 1996 before becoming the Carnegie Cultural Center, home of the Ottawa Community Arts Council and the Suzuki Strings. On the site of this intersection stood first a one-room Campbellite church, later attached to the stone Presbyterian Church built in 1867, and after Central School was built nearby, overflow classes met there in what became known as the white schoolhouse. Though named for its paint, it held a segregated class of Black children of recently freed slaves who had come to John Brown’s Kansas, and in 1880 several parents, including Elijah Tinnon, sued for integrated classrooms. Judge Nelson Stephens issued a rare nineteenth-century ruling that the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution barred segregated schools, and although the Kansas Supreme Court upheld the order to integrate, the district did not comply immediately.