Welwood Murray Memorial Library

Before Dr. Welwood Murray built an adobe lending library behind his hotel in the 1890s, loaning out books from his personal collection to desert visitors, he’d earned his medical title not in school but on a Civil War vessel, tending to the wounded. The Scottish horticulturalist-turned-hotelier planted 22 varieties of fruit trees around his Palm Springs property and worried about his guests having nothing to read. In 1938, his son donated land for a proper memorial library, built on the very spot where Murray’s hotel once stood, creating a full-circle literary legacy in the sand.

Most of what Murray built didn’t survive him. An eleven-year drought killed the orchard he was proudest of, and he spent his last years trying, unsuccessfully, to sell a hotel nobody wanted anymore. The Palm Springs Hotel closed in 1909 and was torn down in 1954. But the library outlasted the trees and the building both: it opened in 1941, designed by John Porter Clark, one of the architects who’d go on to define Palm Springs’ desert modernist look, and today doubles as the city’s visitor center. A man who never finished medical school ended up better remembered for a room full of borrowed books than for anything he actually built to last.