The Carnegie Library in Pickerington was built in 1916 with a $10,000 Carnegie Corporation grant and dedicated on September 4, 1916, as the Violet Township Public Library. Pickerington was one of the smallest of the 1,946 communities in the United States to receive an Andrew Carnegie grant for a public library. Although Carnegie grants were not available to municipalities with fewer than 1,000 people, the 1910 census showed Pickerington had 310 residents and Violet Township had about 2,000, allowing the population requirement to be met. In 1915, the Library Board of Trustees, the Pickerington Village Council, and the Violet Township Trustees passed a joint resolution pledging financial support for the library's maintenance, and the Village of Pickerington provided the site. E. S. Matheny was the architect, J. D. Van Gundy was the contractor, and the building was constructed of Flemish bond red brick with limestone trim in a design typical of many Carnegie libraries. It originally had gas lighting, gas heat, and running water supplied by a cistern. In 1961, the library was renamed the Pickerington Public Library. For more than 77 years, the building served as Pickerington's public library, but after residents of the Pickerington Library District approved a bond issue in the late 1980s for a new building to meet the needs of the growing community, services were transferred in April 1993 to 201 Opportunity Way and the old building closed as a library. In September 1993, the deed to the building and land was turned over to the City of Pickerington on the condition that it would lease the property to the Pickerington - Violet Township Historical Society for educational and historical purposes, and on September 2, 1993, the building was placed on the National Register of Historic Places by the National Park Service of the Department of the Interior.