Where did Andrew Carnegie grow up and live?

📍2 Moodie Street, Dunfermline KY12 7PL, Scotland

1835 – 1848

“I was born in Dunfermline, Scotland in 1835, the son of a hand-loom weaver, and my earliest memories are of the clatter of the loom in our cottage and the smell of linen. Dunfermline was a weaving town, and my father William was a skilled craftsman who watched the power loom make his skills worthless. We emigrated to Pittsburgh when I was thirteen — almost penniless, my mother having borrowed money for the passage — and the contrast between the Scotland I had left and the America I arrived in was the defining experience of my life. Scotland gave me poetry and history and a weaver's respect for craft; America gave me opportunity and the conviction that effort was rewarded. I spent my adult life in Pittsburgh and New York and the Scottish Highlands that I bought back when I had the money, but Dunfermline was always where I understood what poverty cost and what its absence made possible.”

👍 LovedDunfermline's cultural richness — the town's weaving tradition, its connection to Scottish history, the public library that a local benefactor had established and that gave me my first serious reading. The dignity of skilled craft work that my father's example taught me.

👎 DislikedThe poverty of a weaver's family in industrial Scotland as the power loom made hand-weaving obsolete. The humiliation of emigrating with borrowed money. The knowledge that the Scotland I loved could not provide what my family needed.

Map showing where Andrew Carnegie lived — 2 Moodie Street, Dunfermline KY12 7PL, Scotland

🗺️ Approximate location today

Street view of Andrew Carnegie's home at 2 Moodie Street, Dunfermline KY12 7PL, Scotland

📍 Street view today

Sources: Nasaw, D. Andrew Carnegie (2006), Penguin Press; Carnegie, A. Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie (1920), Houghton Mifflin; Wall, J. Andrew Carnegie (1970), Oxford University Press