Blog post by Rod Spaw Bloomington leaders celebrated when the city was designated in the 1910 Census as the mean center of population for the United States. It gave them a powerful tool for promoting commercial investment in Bloomington. As calculated by the Census Bureau, the mean center is the point of balance if every
Blog by Rod Spaw In Drawer 3, Unit N of Hallway Storage on the third floor of the Monroe County History Center is a scarred and scuffed piece of bamboo measuring 9 ¼ inches long by 1 ¼ inches in diameter. If not for the paper label glued to it, the hollow tube might be
Blog post by Randi Richardson Fourteen miles northwest of Bloomington lies the little town of Stinesville, Indiana. Founded in 1855, Stinesville was once a hub of Indiana’s stone industry. By the early 1900s, the Hoadley Limestone Mill was the town’s primary employer, and when the mill was destroyed by fire in 1916, the town went
Blog post by Randi Richardson On a moonlit night, under a star-studded sky, a melancholy, young man sat on the spooning wall situated on the south side of campus along Third Street. It was late summer before the students returned to campus for the fall semester of 1927. All was quiet as he pondered his
The summer of 1952 wasn’t just another summer. Swimming pools and movie theaters closed. Children were kept inside their homes by frightened parents. No doubt about it, people were scared. They had every right to be. It was an epidemic year for polio. According to one study, the only thing they feared more than polio in 1952 was
Blog post by Randi Richardson Several months ago I watched an Oscar-winning movie, Green Book, from the comfort of my home with ear phones and captions so I didn’t miss a word. The move is based on the true story of two men, an Italian-American named Anthony Vallelonga aka Tony Lip, and an African American, Don Shirley, a gifted
Blog Post by Randi Richardson Bill Griffy, the watchman at the engine house on the northeast corner of the square, sat outside as he often did on hot summer nights catching what little breeze he could. It was Wednesday, June 14, 1899, a few minutes after 1 AM. Other than an attack by a hungry
Blog post by Randi Richardson It was mid-August 1923. The people of Stinesville were alarmed when a number of dogs living in the neighborhood went mad. One of those dogs belonged to R. M. Snooks who lived half mile east of Stinesville. When R. M. noticed his dog had symptoms of the disease, he tried
Blog post by Randi Richardson Tony, a slave from Kentucky sometime in the years before the Civil War, escaped from his master and made his way north. He got as far as Monroe County before he was captured on a Saturday night by the Corsaws who were prominent among Bloomington slave catchers. The following morning
Blog post by Randi Richardson In the spring of 2019 a Bloomington resident who wished to remain anonymous donated five, small photos showing a large number of Ku Klux Klan members attending a burial ceremony. The photos had no identifying information and the donor didn’t even know how s/he came to have the photos in
