Warder Park is located in Jeffersonville, Indiana

Jeffersonville, Indiana

Jeffersonville is a city in Clark County, Indiana, along the Ohio River. Locally, the city is often referred to by the abbreviated name Jeff. It is directly across the Ohio River to the north of Louisville, Kentucky along I-65. The population was 44,953 at the 2010 census...

 on Court Avenue. This park has been a part of the community since the mid-19th century, when it had a bakery to produce hardtack

Hardtack

Hardtack is a simple type of cracker or biscuit, made from flour, water, and sometimes salt. Inexpensive and long-lasting, it was and is used for sustenance in the absence of perishable foods, commonly during long sea voyages and military campaigns. The name derives from the British sailor slang...

 to Union soldiers during the American Civil War

American Civil War

The American Civil War was a civil war fought in the United States of America. In response to the election of Abraham Lincoln as President of the United States, 11 southern slave states declared their secession from the United States and formed the Confederate States of America ; the other 25...

. The park wasn't established officially until the year 1881 and is named after then Mayor Luther Warder

Luther Warder

Luther F. Warder was born in Kentucky and moved to Jeffersonville, Indiana when he was twenty years old at the start of the Civil War. He then worked in railroad shops and later politics until his death. Luther in 1875 would become mayor...

. Warder had wanted the site for a new city hall, but the city council chose a site between Spring and Pearl on the north side of Market Street for the city hall, and named the park after Warder as a gesture of goodwill. A Carnegie Library

Carnegie Library

Carnegie Library, Carnegie Public Library, Carnegie Free Library, Carnegie Free Public Library, Andrew Carnegie Library, Andrew Carnegie Free Library or Carnegie Library Building may refer to any of the following Carnegie libraries:- California :*Carnegie Library , listed on the National Register...

 was built in 1903.

Carnegie library

The Carnegie Library was one of the early Carnegie libraries funded in Indiana

Indiana

Indiana is a US state, admitted to the United States as the 19th on December 11, 1816. It is located in the Midwestern United States and Great Lakes Region. With 6,483,802 residents, the state is ranked 15th in population and 16th in population density. Indiana is ranked 38th in land area and is...

 by Andrew Carnegie

Andrew Carnegie

Andrew Carnegie was a Scottish-American industrialist, businessman, and entrepreneur who led the enormous expansion of the American steel industry in the late 19th century...

, to the tune of $15,000. The Neo-Classical architecture was done by Arthur Loomis

Arthur Loomis

Arthur Loomis was an architect who worked in the early 1900s in Kentucky, and Clarke & Loomis is one of the architectural firms in which he worked.He designed the Carnegie Library in Warder Park, in Jeffersonville, Indiana, from which he was a native....

, a nationally respected architect in the firm of Clarke & Loomis Architecture, with the cornerstone being set on September 19, 1903. Loomis was a native of Jeffersonville. The building once held classes for Indiana University Southeast

Indiana University Southeast

Indiana University Southeast is a regional campus in the Indiana University system and is located in New Albany, Indiana, in Floyd County, which is in south-central Indiana and part of the metropolitan Louisville, Kentucky, area.- History :...

. The Carnegie Library is the central focus point in Warder Park and now contains the Remnant Trust of Rare Books and Documents.

The building will eventually hold an extensive collection of titles, including:

• A 19th-century edition of Life and Times of Frederick Douglass
  Frederick Douglass
  Frederick Douglass was an American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman. After escaping from slavery, he became a leader of the abolitionist movement, gaining note for his dazzling oratory and incisive antislavery writing...
  
  
• A 560-year-old page of a Gutenberg Bible
• A 1350 copy of the Magna Carta
  Magna Carta
  Magna Carta is an English charter, originally issued in the year 1215 and reissued later in the 13th century in modified versions, which included the most direct challenges to the monarch's authority to date. The charter first passed into law in 1225...
  
  
• A copy of the first British Edition of Lewis and Clark's Travels to the Source of the Missouri River
  Missouri River
  The Missouri River flows through the central United States, and is a tributary of the Mississippi River. It is the longest river in North America and drains the third largest area, though only the thirteenth largest by discharge. The Missouri's watershed encompasses most of the American Great...
  
  .

The Carnegie Library opened Oct 25, 2006 after a 4 million dollar renovation for the Remnant Trust and also included a bas-relief sculpture, titled The Timeline of Liberty, by sculptor Lorenzo Ghiglieri

Lorenzo Ghiglieri

Lorenzo Ghiglieri is an Oregon artist and sculptor. The Portland, Oregon newspaper Willamette Week has referred to Ghiglieri as "one of the Northwest's best-recognized and most prolific bronze sculptors."...

. The The 6-ton, three panel (7 feet tall and 20 feet wide), bronze sculpture traces 2,500 years of human liberty from ancient Greece to modernity.

Thomas Jefferson statue

In 2002/2003 the park was cleared and renovations started. This included a ten foot tall cast bronze figure of Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson was the principal author of the United States Declaration of Independence and the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom , the third President of the United States and founder of the University of Virginia...

 by sculptor Guy Tedesco. The 900-pound statue was commissioned for the Jeffersonville town bicentennial and for the "Falls of the Ohio" signature event to mark the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial.

Summer concerts

The gazebo located in the middle of the parks field holds concerts during the summer. The local newspaper The Evening News

The Evening News (Jeffersonville)

The Evening News is a six-day daily newspaper serving Jeffersonville, Indiana, and Clark County, Indiana. It is owned by Community Newspaper Holdings Inc....

usually posts the dates and times of the shows.