[9] Centers of higher education in Idaho were later founded in Moscow (1889), in Caldwell (1891), and in Pocatello (1901), but the Bennett committee was unable to establish neither a university nor a free library in Boise City.

[20] When the library opened in 1895, it included furniture formerly on display in the Woman's Room in the Idaho Building at the Columbian Exposition in 1893.

[21] The club also hired its first librarian, Ella Reed, in 1895,[22][23] and in that year the library catalog included 982 books.

[33] The site was the location of Pioneer School (1868-1905), built by early residents of Boise City, and the schoolhouse was demolished when the library building was nearing completion.

[37][38] Carnegie reduced his gift offer to $15,000 in 1903 when documents he received from the Columbian Club seemed to inflate the local population to 10,000 residents, not 5900 as reported in the 1900 census.

[42] Boise's Carnegie library was designed by Tourtellotte & Co. and built by local contractors Michels & Weber in 1904.

The building had been occupied by the Salt Lake Hardware Co. since its completion in 1946,[50] and it contained over 64,000 square feet of floor space.

[53] This proposed library/civic center was suspended by the citizens due to several issues: (1) Concerns with the cost and the method of funding, which included various combinations of City revenues, including using Reserve funds, urban renewal district funds, lease financing with high issuance costs and interest charges, and private philanthropy; (2) Lack of broad citizen input from across the entire City limits; (3) Concerns with why the City was not using the adjacent land parcel that had specifically been purchased for future library expansion; and (4) The collateral damage of relocating “The Cabin” – a New Deal – era historic log cabin constructed by the Civilian Conservation Corps in 1939 – 40, which has become an iconic downtown structure.

This group successfully drafted, circulated, and gained ballot status for two citizen initiatives requiring public votes on future library and sports park projects in Boise.

Their passage by 69.1 and 75.2 percent of the voters, respectively, brought a greater measure of oversight to methods of financing that were designed to circumvent a public vote on bond issues, as well as to the overall tax burden that such large civic projects would cause to average citizens.