200 North Main St | Bloomington, Illinois | 309-827-0428
200 North Main St | Bloomington, Illinois | 309-827-0428
In the week before Christmas 1958, Santa Claus paid a visit to Bloomington’s Forest Park to inspect the local reindeer stock. But Old St. Nick found his attention monopolized by a nosy llama.
My first day here I was given the task of making a finding aid for a nearly 100-year-old collection of World War I material, mainly books and military manuals. A finding aid is a typed inventory of the contents of an archival collection, and as such helps researchers and those interested in the collection find their way around the material.
Shotgun-toting and suspicious Mrs. Claus follows her husband around Bloomington as he is in the company of three attractive reindeer.
That had to be my favorite day, as it morphed from handling the objects in the room to having several employees in the museum show me the various archives and vaults that I had yet to see. I clearly didn't understand the scope of the museum collections nor what their accreditation meant for a museum in a city of this size.
Josephine Sanders was born in Bloomington, IL, on July 21, 1900. She was better known by her stage and screen name, Irene Delroy.
On the day before Thanksgiving in 1938, the Young Men's Commercial Club of Bloomington prepared gift baskets for local needy families.
Happy Halloween from the board, staff, volunteers and members of the McLean County Museum of History!
On April 5, 1941, "Tarzan," a beloved crow well known to children in the Illinois Wesleyan University neighborhood, was laid to rest in the backyard of the Elwood O. Allison home.
On Friday, February 3, 1939, four area men were killed in a late evening automobile accident on U.S. Route 66, about 2 miles south of Chenoa. The crash took the lives of Carl Weymouth, owner and driver of the car, Paul Trunk, Sr., Nelson Francis, and Claude M.
The Archives' photo collection is in the process of becoming more accessible than ever. The Archives Photo Scanning Project, conducted over the last year, will allow people within the Museum to have digital access to most of the photos in the Archives.
This wine decanter originally arrived at the McLean County Museum of History as a time capsule.
