Carl Sandburg and his wife Lilian “Paula” Sandburg dreamed in 1908 of having a "shack in the woods with a roof, four walls, three chairs (one for company), a hat rack, a bread box, and a bowl for wild flowers and a coffeepot."

The Sandburgs moved to Connemara because it provided them with what they needed: space for a large family and natural surroundings.  Carl and Paula were raised with a mind for conservation and a strong work ethic.  By the time they moved to North Carolina they could have purchased new furniture but they preferred their existing furnishings.  More important to them was that Connemara offered gardens full of vegetables and flowers, a natural setting for the family to explore, a place for the goats to pasture, security for two adult daughters and solitude for the poet.

Carl Sandburg found Connemara to be an accommodating place for his large book collection too.  The home bends under the weight of nearly 15,000 books. 
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Books range from philosophy, to history, to poetry, to political science, to religion, to music, to literature wherever his myriad interests led.  The books have bookmarks marking pages that interested him. There is writing in the margins with comments like “great” or “good.” The books Sandburg wrote are here too, including his Pulitzer Prize winning biography of Abraham Lincoln and his Complete Poems, for which he won a second Pulitzer Prize in 1951.

In 1956, Sandburg sold over 3,000 Lincoln books from his collection, with notes, photographs, newspaper articles, and letters related to his research to the University of Illinois. Also included were first editions of all Sandburg’s own works and many of his contemporaries; journals and notebooks full of items never published; tape recordings of radio broadcasts, letters from friends, and copies of Sandburg’s responses to letters received or sent.

“That a poet, ballad collector, singer, and biographer should have had the patience and foresight to collect and sort so much material, —a task to daunt ten librarians—reveals another side of Carl’s genius….” Bruce Weirick, librarian, University of Illinois (Niven, p. 646).