John Carter Brown Library

The John Carter Brown Library began as one man's private obsession — John Carter Brown traveling Europe from 1845 onward, hunting books about New World exploration and colonization. What he built became something rarer: an independently funded research library on Brown's main green, housed since 1904 in a Beaux-Arts building, holding more than 50,000 primary sources on the Americas through the end of the colonial era. The exhibition gallery is free and open to the public. The collection is the reason to go.