Library of Congress Founded: America's Knowledge Secured

President John Adams signed an appropriation of $5,000 on April 24, 1800, to purchase "such books as may be necessary for the use of Congress," creating what would become the largest library in the world. The Library of Congress was initially a modest legislative reference collection, housed in the new Capitol building in Washington and limited to books on law, economics, and history that members of Congress might need for their work. Its ambitions were as small as its budget. The library's first major crisis was also its catalyst for transformation. British troops burned the Capitol during the War of 1812, destroying the entire collection of roughly 3,000 volumes. Thomas Jefferson, retired at Monticello and perpetually in debt, offered to sell Congress his personal library of 6,487 books, the largest private collection in the country. Congress accepted in 1815 for $23,950. Jefferson's library was encyclopedic, covering architecture, music, philosophy, science, and literature in multiple languages, and it fundamentally redefined the institution's scope. The Library of Congress was no longer a legislative tool. It was becoming a national library. Growth accelerated under Librarian of Congress Ainsworth Rand Spofford, who secured the 1870 copyright law requiring that two copies of every work registered for copyright be deposited with the library. That single provision transformed the Library of Congress into the de facto repository of American intellectual production. By the 1890s, the collection had outgrown the Capitol, and Congress authorized the construction of a dedicated building, the Thomas Jefferson Building, which opened in 1897 as the largest library building in the world. Today the Library of Congress holds more than 170 million items, including 40 million books, 73 million manuscripts, 15 million photographs, and 5.5 million maps. Its collections span every format from Gutenberg Bibles to digital archives. The institution Jefferson's purchase transformed serves not just Congress but researchers worldwide, preserving the recorded knowledge of human civilization on a scale no other institution matches. All of it grew from a $5,000 line item in a government budget.