Carrboro’s Drakeford Library Complex is officially open at 203 South Greensboro Street.
“This property used to be a parking lot, and today it is the largest public facility in the history of Carrboro,” town manager Patrice Toney told a crowd of over 100 Orange County officials, advocates, and library lovers at the opening ceremony in the building’s central atrium.
The window-filled 52,000 square foot complex includes, yes, the southern branch of the Orange County Library, but its three stories are also stuffed with classrooms, meeting rooms, a teen center, a career center, a radio studio, public art, a performance space, a Durham Tech Community College nursing aid lab, and more.
Advocates have pushed for the concept of a Carrboro library for decades, but it didn’t get off the ground until 2016, when the town and county agreed on a possible location. A wonderfully optimistic timeline hoped for “Ribbon Cutting!” in March of 2019 but the project didn’t receive funding until 2022, when the town and the county agreed to split the $42 million bill, kicking in roughly equal amounts to build Carrboro’s first freestanding public library on an entire downtown block.
US Representative Valerie Foushee, a Chapel Hill native and a veteran of Orange County government, said that she first voted for this project 20 years ago as a county commissioner.
“It should not be lost on any of us that it takes all of us to make a dream come true and the fact that we did not let this dream die—even though this dream was deferred, we made sure that it happened,” said Foushee.
Just last week, President Trump announced the all-but abolishment of the Department of Education and the Institute of Museum and Library Services, a major funder of libraries, museums and educational institutions nationwide. In ultra-progressive Carrboro the new library is a physical reminder of what a government with a vision of expansion—rather than a perceived mandate to cut, cut, cut—can achieve.
“They want us to think that this is not possible,” Mayor Pro Tem Danny Nowell said with a dry chuckle. “They want us to think that we can’t build this for each other. They want us to think that government doesn’t do this. We’re sitting at the end of a 40-year project…And it lifts my spirits. So thank you, and let’s fight for more of it.”
Speakers also paid tribute to the library’s namesake, who served as mayor of Carrboro from 1977 until 1983, and died in 2022.
“Robert ‘Bob’ Drakeford made history as Carrboro’s first Black mayor,” current Mayor Barbara Foushee told the crowd, voice cracking with emotion. “He was an advocate for public transit and cycling. Can I get a hand for some cycling?”
The crowd happily obliged.
Derrick Drakeford, the son of the former mayor, told the crowd that he remembers trying on his dad’s shoes as a toddler and tripping all over the place because they were literally too big to fill.
“My dad’s legacy is really mentoring,” said Drakeford. “There’s a young person out there today that needs you. Take them to lunch to split a burger, take them to the library to read a book with them. But we have to be parents to more than just our own kids. That’s what mentoring is.”
Snow delayed the planned February unveiling, so the building has already been quietly open for a month. Amid the stacks, laptop-holding teens draped themselves over couches while smiling librarians helped residents get their new library cards. Groups chatted over coffee and snacks on the third floor balcony, looking north over the murals of Main Street.
In the atrium, County Commissioner Sally Greene quoted local author Wells Tower, who worked on a novel at the Chapel Hill library.
“Unlike a coffee shop or my living room, spending time reading or writing in a public library is not time stolen. I do not worry about freeing a table once my espresso has been finished, because time reading and writing at the public library is time given to me by my community for that express purpose. It’s time built into the very building itself as a civic down payment on my needs and those of the community.”
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Reach Reporter Chase Pellegrini de Paur at chase@indyweek.com. Comment on this story at backtalk@indyweek.com.