Biography | Andrew Carnegie — The Cottage in Dunfermline Before the Mill Towns

People treat Carnegie as a Pittsburgh skyline and a hall on Seventh Avenue. The first room is a weaver's cottage. Andrew Carnegie was born on 25 November 1835 at what is now the Andrew Carnegie Birthplace Museum, at the corner of Moodie Street and Priory Lane in Dunfermline, Fife. His father William was a handloom weaver. Steam looms were already emptying that trade. In 1848 the family left this street for Allegheny, Pennsylvania. The cottage is two rooms and a loft. A memorial hall was added later by Louise Carnegie. The pin is the cottage, not the later steel works at Braddock or Homestead, and not the hall that opened in New York in 1891. Those are later chapters of the same life. This is the address the money was meant to answer. Dunfermline still sits above the Forth. The abbey and the palace ruin are a short walk from Moodie Street. Carnegie paid for a library in this town before he paid for the ones that carry his name across the United States. The pattern started on this corner.