200 North Main St | Bloomington, Illinois | 309-827-0428
200 North Main St | Bloomington, Illinois | 309-827-0428
Seen here is 85-year-old Emma Cook, on the porch of her Saybrook home, looking at a portrait of her late husband Riley Cook, a veteran who died in July 1918. Mrs. Cook was the village’s last Civil War widow. She passed away on August 5, 1941.
In 1860, hearing impaired photographer Addison Pancake (1844-1900) operated a studio in downtown Bloomington. He was a graduate of what’s today known as the Illinois School for the Deaf and billed himself as a “deaf mute photographer.”
The week of September 2, 2015 marked 148th anniversary of the first official run of the Bloomington-Normal streetcar system. It was on September 6, 1867, that the Bloomington & Normal Horse Railway inaugurated its first line, which connected Downtown Bloomington with Uptown Normal. As implied in the system’s original name, the earliest streetcars were pulled by horses. The system was electrified in 1890.
This wine decanter originally arrived at the McLean County Museum of History as a time capsule.
Union Army veteran Gilbert Henderson Bates sought, in his own eccentric way, to help heal the sectional wounds of fratricidal bloodletting.
An early Bloomington settler and one time friend of Abe Lincoln was also a southern sympathizer.
Today's McHistory is about the Civil War Battle of Prairie Grove, Arkansas, which took place December 7th, 1862.