Blog post by Randi Richardson According to a column titled “Looking Back on Old Bloomington,” written by Seymour E. Francis and published in the Bloomington Telephone on March 24, 1930, p. 4, Bloomington’s first moving picture show, a nickelodeon, was established in 1906. That was just one year after the opening day of the world’s […]
Blog post by Randi Richardson Not much has been written about the Ku Klux Klan in Monroe County. So one must wonder if it was ever here at all. A review of the Fiery Cross, a Klan newspaper published in Indianapolis, Indiana, sheds some light on the subject. Copies are available online through NewspaperArchive, a […]
Blog post by Randi Richardson On Reel 18 of the Local History Microfilm Collection at the Monroe County Public Library is a paper titled “An Early Sketch of Bloomington and the Family of David H. Maxwell” written by Martha (Maxwell) Howard, a resident of Terre Haute, Indiana, in July 1907. According to that paper, Martha […]
Blog post by Randi Richardson David Starr Jordan was the seventh president of Indiana University. He was inaugurated on January 1, 1885, becoming the nation’s youngest university president at the age of 34 and the first president of Indiana University that was not an ordained minister. During the course of his six-year presidency he oversaw […]
Blog post by Randi Richardson In March 2019 two quilts by Elizabeth Jane (Goss) Martin, a native of North Carolina and the daughter of David and Mary (Kooter) Goss, were placed on display in the lobby of the Monroe County History Center. One of the quilts, Polk’s Fancy, was donated to the History Center by […]
Blog by Randi Richardson In the 1950s, two little girls, Margie and Linda Eberle, daughters of Earl and Marjorie (Minton) Eberle, believed their grandfather, Floyd “Dick” Minton, could fix just about anything. “He had a garage,” recalled Margie, now a grown woman with grandchildren of her own, “just west of the red brick building on […]
Blog post by Randi Richardson Although the location, or even the existence, of certain buildings in Monroe County are a mystery to some residents, everyone knows the tall, limestone building at Second and Rogers—Bloomington Hospital. I learned the early history of this building recently when Cynthia (Shephard) Burroughs from White Bear Lake, Minnesota, stopped by […]
Blog post by Randi Richardson The Curry family has lived around Bloomington for generations. The earliest of the Currys appeared in 1830 census records where William Curry was noted as a head of a household. In 1915, William. S. Curry established what is now known as the Curry Auto Center south of the College Mall. […]
Blog by Randi Richardson The Institute for Sex Research (ISR) at Indiana University was established in 1947 under the leadership of Alfred Kinsey. Prior to that time Kinsey had been extensively involved in sex research and had compulsively collected a great number of books and other related materials. Obviously thinking ahead to the needs of […]
Blog post by Randi Richardson Last week our readers were asked to guess when June Fulford assaulted the teacher of her first-grade son who had been whipped for laughing out loud. If you guessed 1937, you were right. The story was based on an article published on page one of the Bloomington (IN) Daily Telephone […]