From Mansion to McKune Memorial: The Story of Chelsea’s Library

Courtesy of the Chelsea Area Historical Society as written by Janet Ogle-Mater

Photo: McKune Library Hotel drawing 1874. Courtesy of CAHS

Chelsea’s founders were Elisha and James Congdon. In the early 1830s, James bought 320 acres on the west side of the north-south wagon trail, while the older brother, Elisha, bought 120 acres on the east side of present-day Main Street. Their holdings would eventually grow to over 500 acres, encompassing land from the railroad to Old US-12.

Elisha Congdon built the first general store and post office in the downtown area of Chelsea, and he became Chelsea’s first postmaster and village president. He donated land for the town’s Union School, the First Congregational Church, and for the First United Methodist Church.

By 1860, he was an affluent man in Chelsea, and he replaced his modest frame house with a stately brick mansion on the hill. Unfortunately, Elisha died seven years later, and the family sold the home to Timothy McKune in 1870. He operated the house as the McKune House Hotel for many years.

Tmothy’s son, Edward McKune, and his wife, Catherine, purchased the hotel from his parents in 1909. Catherine, outliving her husband, bequeathed their brick home to the Village of Chelsea for the perpetual use as a library at the time of her death in 1958.

A large community project commenced to fund the transformation of the McKune House Hotel into the McKune Memorial Library. It was successful, and the library opened in November 1959. Two years later, an addition was made to the north side of the building. In 1995, a replica of the original house front entrance was reconstructed in place of the crumbling full-length stone porch erected during an earlier renovation.

Space restrictions and structural needs of the building could no longer be ignored, and in 2000, a millage and bond were passed to expand the library. The Chelsea District Library found a temporary home at the Washington Street Education Center while the major renovation took place. In November 2006, the McKune Memorial Library reopened with an 18,000 square foot addition on the east side of the original Congdon mansion. In 2008, the library received the honor of being named the Best Small Library in America by the Library Journal.