The Redwood Library & Athenaeum announced Monday it has successfully reached its $5 million endowment campaign goal, concluding a fundraising effort that began in 2019 but was interrupted by the pandemic and restarted in 2023.
The campaign’s success brings the nation’s first purpose-built library’s total endowment to approximately $17 million, which will fund the upkeep of its historic buildings, collection preservation and enrichment, and cultural programming including lectures, concerts and exhibitions.
“We are grateful to all of the contributors, large and small, local to national, who have helped bring this campaign to a happy close,” said Benedict Leca, executive director of the Redwood Library. “That said, despite this milestone achievement, the work towards long term sustainability never ends.”
The fundraising effort drew support from across the country, including grassroots donations, corporate contributions, major gifts from local donors and regional foundations. According to the library, the campaign’s broad appeal reflects the institution’s extensive reach across multiple demographics locally, regionally and nationally.
“I am thrilled by the overwhelming response from such a caring community, which proves how much the Redwood is valued both in Newport and across New England,” said Janet Alexander Pell, the library’s board president.
The campaign’s success mirrors recent growth in the Redwood’s membership and unrestricted donations, attributed to the quality and frequency of its programming and exhibitions.
Established in 1747, the Redwood Library & Athenaeum is America’s first purpose-built library and the oldest continuously operating in its original location. Housed in the earliest public neoclassic building in the United States, it contains Rhode Island’s first art gallery, dating to 1875.
The athenaeum houses 200,000 volumes with particular strengths in early American history, material culture, early modern architecture, decorative arts and garden design, 18th-century European illustrated books, and Newport and Rhode Island history. The museum holds an important collection of portrait paintings and artifacts and features two gallery spaces for rotating exhibitions.
Created by its namesake and 46 original proprietors in what has been described as the “greatest act of philanthropy in colonial America,” the library was established to “propagate virtue, knowledge and useful learning with nothing in view but the good of mankind.”
The institution acknowledges its founding on the profits of the slave economy of the 18th-century sugar trade and is now explicitly committed to the public humanities, using history and culture to address diverse communities to create a more enlightened and equitable world.
