Illinois State Museum

The Illinois State Museum is dedicated to inspiring people of all ages to discover and care about Illinois’ natural and cultural resources and artistic heritage.

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State Museum in the Centennial Building

In 1917, the State approved plans for a building to mark the Illinois Centennial. The building (now the Howlett Building) was completed in 1923, and the Illinois State Museum moved into 12 rooms on the 5th floor and basement levels. This was the third home for the Museum.

Learn more about the history of the Illinois State Museum at the Story of Illinois State Museum website bit.ly/ISMstory. 

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State Museum in the State Arsenal

The Illinois State Museum was originally housed in the Illinois Capitol Building. in 1903 it moved to the State Arsenal where it remained until 1923. This was not the arsenal visitors to Springfield see today, but one built in 1903 which burned in 1934.

The Museum occupied the south end of the second floor.

By the 1920′s the exhibits had grown, and the Museum’s curator began looking for a larger dedicated space for the Museum.

Learn more about the history of the Illinois State Museum here: bit.ly/ISMstory 

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Snow Bird Club

On December 24, 1830, it began snowing in central Illinois. By Christmas Day, there was a foot of snow on the ground. By New Year’s Day, the snow was three feet deep and still falling. Precipitation fell almost continuously for nine weeks, sometimes as snow, sometimes as sleet or hail that froze into an icy crust. For most of that time, the thermometer hovered around zero degrees, occasionally dropping as low as twenty below, and only climbing to above freezing twice. In some areas, the depth of the snow reached four or five feet. The snowfall threatened the lives of humans and animals alike, as both found their food supplies buried.

Those who survived the "winter of the deep snow” called themselves snow birds and considered themselves the true original settlers of Illinois. In 1882, a group of male snow birds formed a Snow Bird Club for the purpose of calling on elderly settler ladies every New Year’s Day. A copy of this photo, depicting the 23 members of the Club, was given to each lady they visited in 1884.

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Amos Henry Worthen was the Illinois State Museum's first curator from 1877-1888. At that time the Museum was known as the State Historical Library and Natural History Museum and it was housed in the third floor of the State Capitol building.

Visit the Story of the Illinois State Museum site to learn more. #history #museums #StoryofISM

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No Small Feat

Albert Small was a foreman at the Ottawa Silica Plant; he had no quilt making experience. Nevertheless, he was sure he could create a quilt containing the most pieces of any quilt ever made. After working with dynamite and heavy machinery all day, he picked up his needle and thread at night. The result was this quilt, which has more than 123,000 pieces, each just a quarter of an inch wide. It was featured in Reader's Digest in 1973, Ripley’s Believe it or Not in 1995, and has been named one of the Top 100 Quilts of the 20th Century.

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Printing Butterflies

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the ability to capture a color photograph and print that image in a book or magazine page was in its infancy. To bring colorful butterflies and moths to life on the page, and produce the most accurate guides possible, naturalists preserved specimens by means of a process called lepidochromy.* 

Simply put, it involved humidifying the wings and using papers prepared with an adhesive so that when the specimens were pressed between the papers, the scales on both sides of the wings would be preserved. The papers were then mounted to a plate or in a book, and the bodies were drawn in to provide detail.

The Illinois State Museum has a set of 250 transfer prints of butterflies and moths collected in France. We do not know the exact year or creator of the plates from France. We do know the original owner of the prints purchased them through the mail from a bookseller in New Jersey in 1926. In addition, the Museum has a three-volume set of books by Sherman F. Denton published in 1900 containing numerous additional prints. Images here are taken from both collections.

* Lepidochromy is a combination of Lepidoptera (Latin: lepido meaning "scale" and pteron meaning "wing, feather"), the insect order which contains moths and butterflies, and the Latin noun chroma meaning color.

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Dedicated to the Birds

Museums are places of preservation and education, but also of on-going and important research. Curator can be defined as a keeper or custodian of a museum collection, but many curators are also researchers who work in the field as well as in the collection vaults. 

H. David Bohlen curates the Ornithology collection at the Illinois State Museum and conducts long-term research on Illinois bird populations. In 1989, Dave authored “The Birds of Illinois,” a comprehensive survey of natural history information and museum records for 439 species of birds known at the time to occur (or previously occur) in Illinois. 

Since 1970, Dave has monitored birds at locations all over Sangamon County, often going out in the field seven days a week and documenting many of his observations with photographs. 

In 2013, he published the results of 40 years of study, reporting patterns of bird populations, including migration, breeding, arrival of new species in the area, and rare bird occurrences. Dave continues his field observations, now in his 48th year of study.

Long-term studies like this are invaluable sources of information about the natural world and how it has changed over time. They are a record of distribution and population trends that can be used to aid conservation efforts for species and the habitats they need to survive.

Photos by H Dave Bohlen: Black-bellied Whistling-Duck , Black-necked Stilt, Yellow-bellied Sapsucker, Yellow Warbler

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Hazel's Taxidermy

Hazel Biggs Palmer (1889-1960) was part of a multi-generational family of taxidermists with a love for natural history and education. Hazel and her sister Olive were trained in taxidermy by their father, Oliver S. Biggs (1861-1947). He had been taught in turn by his own mother. Hazel eventually became a professional taxidermist. 

The Biggs family had a natural history museum in the attic of their home in San Jose, Illinois. School groups and scout packs from the area had regular field trips to the house. After Oliver Biggs passed away, Hazel took over the family practice. 

In addition to her taxidermy skills, she was knowledgeable about the natural history of the animals and she maintained a library of information on nature and wildlife, using this information in presentations she gave to visiting school groups. 

Hazel eventually built a free-standing museum to house the growing collection. The Oliver S. Biggs Museum of Natural History was dedicated in 1954. Hazel ultimately donated the museum to the San Jose school system. Hazel ran the museum for the remainder of her life, passing down her passion for taxidermy and museums to her granddaughters, Audrey and Marizelda Ames. Marizelda in particular enjoyed collecting and preparing insects. 

When Hazel passed away in 1960, Marizelda became the curator of the museum at age 15, filling the role for a few years. The San Jose school system continued using the museum in classes for many years, eventually donating the collection to the Illinois State Museum in 1989.    

Today, these specimens are often used in public programs and seen on school tours. Many are also of historic value due to their age and use for documenting species in central Illinois.

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Exciting New Acquisition: 1846 Men’s Shirt

The first thing you need to know is it’s fairly rare for 19th century men’s shirts to survive today. They’re not pretty like ladies’ dresses, and most of them got cut down for children, cut up for bandages, or turned into rags somewhere along the way. Men’s shirts with a documented history - now those are SUPER rare.  That’s why we, at the Illinois State Museum, were so thrilled with the recent donation of this shirt, which dates to 1846.  

We know who made it.  We know who wore it.  We even know the day it was worn.

The shirt was made by Salome Enos (1791-1877), one of the “founding mothers” of Springfield, Illinois. She and her husband Pascal came to Springfield in 1823 and became one of the first four landowning families of that town. When her husband died in 1832, she took over management of her husband’s land holdings and brought up her five young children on her own. On at least four separate occasions, Salome hired Abraham Lincoln to help untangle legal issues associated with her husband’s estate.

Salome made the shirt by hand, using stitches so small they are nearly invisible.

In the first half of the nineteenth century, gentlemen’s suits (vests, pants, and coats) were relatively complex to construct and therefore often made by a professional tailor. Shirts, socks, and handkerchiefs were less complicated and thus usually made by female family members. Instructions for sewing a shirt appeared in Eliza Leslie’s popular House Book, first published in 1840. (Mary Lincoln had a copy of this book).

The “sleeve gussets” mentioned above were triangle-shaped inserts under the sleeves to permit wider range of motion:

Even though “ready-to-wear” shirts could be purchased from merchant-tailors by this time, many women took pride in the fact that their husbands, brothers, and fathers wore shirts lovingly stitched by hand. 

The shirt is made of linen, the preferred material for shirts in the 19th century.  Linen is durable, easy to launder, warm in the winter, and cool in the summer. It was made to be pulled over the head and fastened at the throat. The collar is high to accommodate a cravat, the neckwear of choice for antebellum American gentlemen. 

Ruffled shirts were considered fancy at the time and were typically worn by urban gentlemen. They even had political connotations - politicians of the day who wished to paint their rivals as elitist and out-of-touch often accused each other of wearing “ruffled shirts.”

Salome made the shirt for her son, Zimri Allen Enos (1821-1907). Zimri was only two years old when he arrived in Springfield. He lived through the winter of the “deep snow” in 1831 and later wrote a detailed reminiscence about it. After briefly practicing law, he became a surveyor and civil engineer.

We know this shirt belonged to Zimri because his mother monogrammed his name onto the left mid portion of the body.  This was a common practice for fine shirts. The “6″ stitched below may have indicated that this was the sixth in Zimri’s wardrobe of shirts. 

Finally, we know when Zimri wore this shirt because of a little note pinned to its front:

“Wedding shirt of Father’s made by Grandma Enos.”

Zimri Enos married twenty-one year old Agnes Dickson Trotter on June 10, 1846, wearing this shirt. He probably continued to wear it as a “good” shirt for several years afterwards. His family saved it for the next 172 years until an Enos family descendant donated it to the Illinois State Museum just this month. 

Look for the shirt to be on display at Illinois Bicentennial and Beyond: The Illinois Legacy Collection, which will open on June 30 of this year at the Illinois State Museum. 

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Unsung Heroes

The Illinois State Museum is excited to announce the opening of Unsung Heroes.  This exhibition  profiles Anna Heistad, Thomas R. Jones, and Minnie Vautrin, three ordinary Illinoisans who did extraordinary things with their lives. Our hope is that it inspires you, the viewer, to think about the unsung heroes in your own life and the ways in which you are a hero to others.

ANNA HEISTAD

Anna Heistad was born in Norway in 1868 and immigrated with her family to Wisconsin in 1871. Anna was one of ten children, and money was tight in their household.  When she was 16, she left home for Chicago and found work as a seamstress in a garment factory.

Anna sewed dresses for more than a decade.  And then, one night, she had a dream that changed her life.  A deeply religious woman, she dreamt she met her creator and was filled with shame that she had nothing to show for her life other than the clothes she had made.  Anna awoke determined to dedicate her life to the service of others. 

She enrolled in nurses training at Augustana Hospital.  When she graduated, she became a travelling nurse, going into Chicago’s immigrant slum neighborhoods to provide free medical care to the people that lived there.

In 1911, she became the dispensary nurse at the Marcy Center settlement house.  In 1918, she became Marcy’s director.  Under her leadership, the Center continued to provide social services to the surrounding community, including medical care, child care, American citizenship classes, Bible studies, and youth programs.

After her retirement in 1939, Anna turned her attention to the plight of Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany who were settling in Chicago. She did what she could to ease their transition to life in America by loaning them money, helping them find jobs,and personally checking in on them to see that they had found suitable housing among kind neighbors. 

At the end of her career, Anna Heistad said “there’s nothing extraordinary in my life.  Just steady work.”  But during the course of her steady work, she had an extraordinary impact on the lives of the people around her.  She left a legacy of people whose lives were improved through medical care, classes, or services offered at the Marcy Center, as well as a generation of young social workers who learned from her.  When a young businessman on Maxwell Street was asked if he knew Miss Heistad, he said, “I’ll say I do, half the business men of this neighborhood were raised by Miss Heistad.”

MINNIE VAUTRIN

Wilhelmina “Minnie” Vautrin was an Illinois missionary who, in 1937-1938, as Acting President of Ginling College for Women in Nanking China, protected as many as 10,000 women and children during the Nanking Massacre.  For her willingness to set aside her personal safety to protect the lives of the powerless, some in Nanking revered Minnie Vautrin as the “Goddess of Mercy” or “Living Goddess.”

Minnie Vautrin was born and raised in Secor, Illinois, northwest of Bloomington. She trained as a teacher in Champaign at the University of Illinois, where she became involved in missionary activities. In 1912, at age 26, Vautrin joined the Foreign Christian Missionary Society and set off for China. Upon her arrival, she was moved by the pervasive illiteracy among Chinese women and devoted her life to promote women’s education and help the poor in her community.

At the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese war in July 1937, Vautrin defied the American embassy’s order to evacuate the city. In December, the capital city of Nanking fell to Japanese forces, and soldiers marauded through the streets looting, raping tens of thousands, and killing an estimated 300,000 civilians.

With only the protection of American flags and proclamations from the U.S. Embassy, Vautrin made Ginling College a sanctuary for women and children. Risking her life, Vautrin confronted armed soldiers who stormed the campus, and refused to let troops ransack the school or seize the refugees.

After the siege ended in March 1938, Vautrin devoted herself to caring for the refugees, by helping the women locate husbands and sons who had been taken away by the Japanese soldiers, teaching destitute widows the skills required to make a meager living, and using what limited resources she had to provide the best education possible to the children of Nanking.

Exhausted and suffering psychological trauma from the events, Vautrin returned to the United States in 1940 for medical treatment. A year later, believing herself a failure, she ended her life.

Vautrin was one of twenty-some Westerners who remained in Nanking during the 1937-1938 siege. Although largely forgotten, a recent resurgence of scholarship, as well as the family’s donation of her collection to the Illinois State Museum, will ensure that the story of Minnie Vautrin and her efforts at Ginling College live on.

 THOMAS R. JONES

Thomas R. Jones was a Navy corpsman who served 13 months in Vietnam attached to the 3rd Marine Reconnaissance Battalion, where he served as medic for his patrol unit and as an informal chaplain for his division. Although he physically survived the war, the person he had been before combat did not. Tom ultimately became a new person, one who learned to reconcile his war experiences with life in civilian society through service to other veterans.

Tom was born in Quincy, Illinois on November 17, 1944.   In 1965, he decided to join the Navy out of a desire “to learn more and to see more,” and for the educational opportunities that the Navy offered.  Upon enlistment, Tom took an aptitude test and was told he should either become a corpsman or a dental tech.  Tom, in his own words, thought “Why would I want to be a dental tech and mess around with people’s mouths?  I’ll do a corps.”

As a corpsman, however, Tom ended up seeing much more than the inside of people’s mouths. Within two years of his enlistment, Tom would be sent into combat in Vietnam.  As a corpsmen, he dealt with every battlefield injury imaginable, trying to keep wounded soldiers alive until they could be medevaced  to safety.  

After Tom returned from Vietnam in 1968, he struggled emotionally with the readjustment to life in the United States.  He was haunted by memories of the killing and brutality. He had nightmares and flashbacks.   His friends and family told him he’d changed. The old Tom was gone, and the warrior he became had no place in a peaceful society.  He had to find a way to become a person  who could reconcile his combat experiences with his new civilian life.

Ultimately, Tom found peace through service to other veterans.  During his tour of duty, he had been not just Doc but Chaplain, someone his fellow soldiers sought out to talk them through their fears and troubles.  As a civilian, he found himself counseling soldiers through their battlefield experiences and readjustment to society.  He also became involved with several veterans’ organizations, including the Order of the Purple Heart, Veterans of Foreign Wars, American Legion, and Vietnam Veterans of America.  He served as on the Illinois delegation to the committee responsible for planning the Vietnam Memorial in Washington D.C. and  was a driving force behind the construction of the Purple Heart Memorial in Oak Ridge Cemetery.  From 2013-2015, he served as project liaison to combat veterans working to recreate the Lincoln funeral hearse for the 2015 Funeral Reenactment.

In 2005, Tom published Lost Survivor, a fictionalized account of his combat experience and subsequent readjustment to civilian life.  It had taken him 20 years to write, but ultimately writing  proved a cathartic outlet for the emotional trauma he still carried from the war.  The book was later adapted into a theatrical play, A Long Way From Home,  which was produced in Springfield in 2010.  Both the book and play were praised by other veterans for their accurate portrayal of war and its toll on soldiers.

In 2015, Tom was diagnosed with bladder cancer, likely caused either by exposure to toxic water while at Camp LeJeune for marines basic training  or by exposure to Agent Orange in Vietnam.  He died October 7, 2017, at age 72, having proved that it is possible to survive the horrors of war without being possessed by them.

Unsung Heroes runs until June 10.  

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“Carbohydrate supplement” - Fallout Shelter Food

The threat of atomic warfare loomed large in Cold War America.  By 1961, the majority of Americans believed that Russia would initiate a nuclear attack within the next five years. Three million of them had modified their homes in some way to protect them from nuclear fallout.  Nine million had stockpiled food.

On October 6, 1961, John F. Kennedy urged families to build their own fallout shelters as a precaution against a nuclear attack by Russia. These shelters were not intended to withstand a nuclear blast; instead, they were intended to minimize human casualties by sheltering people from radioactive debris for up to two weeks.

Also in 1961, the Office of Civil Defense received $169 million to locate and mark potential group fallout shelters in existing public and private buildings. 

The Civil Defense also provided supplies to stock these public shelters, including water, medical supplies, sanitation kits (chemical toilets), and food rations. The food rations took the form of crackers, biscuits, bulgar wafers and carbohydrate supplement (hard candy, meant to  add flavor and break the monotony of the carbohydrate-based rations). The goal was to  provide each inhabitant 10,000 calories over a two-week stay (700 calories/day).  

The carbohydrate supplement tin in the Illinois State Museum’s collection was issued to Heyworth High School by the Office of Civil Defense in 1963 and discovered decades later under the high school’s stage.  The High School donated it to the McLean County Museum, who transferred it to the Illinois State Museum in 2013.

For more information on public fallout shelters, check out this Civil Defense film from 1965:

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New acquisition: GAR fundraising quilt

In 1889, Charity Hedge Lingenfelter was inspired to create a quilt to raise money for the Women’s Relief Corps, an auxiliary to the Grand Army of the Republic.  The funds would go to help Union veterans of the Civil War, and their widows and orphans. Charity had a personal interest in the plight of Civil War veterans.  Her husband, Aaron, had served in the 55th Illinois Infantry, and was part of Sherman’s March to the Sea.  He was wounded in the shoulder and lost a finger at the Battle of Bentonville in 1865.  Charity was a small woman, standing only 4′ 9″.  She was one of a set of triplets, though her sisters Faith and Hope did not survive infancy. But Charity was full of determination.  She went around to all of the local businesses in Caton, Illinois and requested a dollar to have their logo stitched onto the quilt.  

Charity designed, laid out, and stitched the quilt herself.  Some of the merchants’ images were adopted from their existing logos, others she created herself.

One businessman named J. Harter, refused to donate but wished Charity “good luck.”  Charity responded by creating a special square just for Harter:

“Good luck to all who buy of J. Harter.”

It’s been suggested that perhaps Harter was a Confederate sympathizer. A census search reveals a “Josiah Harter”, living in Canton in the 1880s. He had recently moved to Illinois from Maryland, so perhaps there is merit to this suggestion.  His occupation is listed as “blacksmith,” which might explain Charity’s clever use of the horseshoe motif.

Charity’s friends and neighbors each paid 10 cents to have their names embroidered on the quilt.  She further embellished it with the names of the GAR members (including her husband) and the names of the local Women’s Relief Corps members.  She even stitched the music to the GAR’s song at the bottom of the quilt:

Charity presented this quilt to the Wormen’s Relief Corps on October 24, 1889: 

She had raised $44 for the cause through the merchants’ ads and supporters names, plus whatever price the quilt fetched at auction.

The quilt’s whereabouts were unknown for several decades after it was sold.  In the 1920s, Mr. Elmer Hall of Moline, Illinois, acquired it.  In 1976, Hall’s son tracked down Charity’s granddaughter and returned the quilt to her.  It remained with Charity’s descendants until December of last year, when it was donated to the ISM.  We are thrilled to acquire this important artifact and look forward to the opportunity to display it in our upcoming Bicentennial Exhibition, which will open this July. 

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From Springfield to the Rhine

A century ago, when the United States entered World War I, Kent Hagler of Springfield Illinois was desperate to join the army.  A 19-year-old student at Harvard University, Kent wanted a grand adventure.  But he was medically rejected from service due to an old eye injury and a recent back injury.

Undeterred, Kent signed up to be an ambulance driver with the American Ambulance Field Service, which was initially attached to the French army.  Kent arrived at the front lines in the summer of 1917, almost a full year before American soldiers began arriving en masse.  Consequently, he saw firsthand the horrors of trench warfare in a way that many Americans did not.

On the battlefield, wounded soldiers were dragged back from the front lines by their comrades, then carried by stretcher-bearers to aid posts that offered some protection but were still well within the zone of fire.  Ambulance drivers like Kent would collect the wounded from these aid posts and transport them to field hospitals farther back from the front.  

Ambulance work was dangerous, as drivers often moved at night under fire and clouds of poison gas along roads scarred by artillery and choked with dead horses, damaged ammunition wagons, and fleeing civilians.  During his time in France, Kent was wounded 12 times, struck by shrapnel twice, and gassed several times.

 While in France, Kent amassed a large collection of souvenirs, or “war trophies,” to bring home.  He picked up this Germany military-issue prayer book from a house in France that was being looted and burned by German soldiers.  Kent was struck by the irony of destruction being waged by someone with a prayer book in his pocket.

Kent rejoiced when the war ended in November, 1918, but it was four months before his unit was called back from the front and demobilized.  He returned to the United States in May, 1919 and resumed his studies at Harvard.

After graduation, he went to Paris to study chemistry at the Sorbonne.  On October 31, 1920, he was found dead in his apartment of a cerebral hemorrhage. Doctors speculated that his death may have been brought on by exposure to extreme shelling and poison gas during the war.  He was 22 years old.

Kent’s letters have been preserved by his family, and in 2015 they were transcribed, annotated, and published by Dr. Chris McDonald of Lincoln Land Community College.  The book, Three Lying or Four Sitting: From the Front in a Ford, is available on amazon. com.

Kent’s artifacts were donated to the Illinois State Museum in 1919, shortly after his return home.  A selection of them are currently on display in the foyer of the museum to commemorate World War I, and Kent’s brave service.

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“Just Good Art” Installation

On February 4, the Illinois State Museum will open Just Good Art: The Chuck Thurow Gift. This exhibition will feature works from a recent gift of over 100 contemporary artworks from Chuck Thurow, former director of the Hyde Park Art Center. You can learn more about the gift and some of the works here. The photos below are behind-the-scenes shots of the installation. Visit the Museum February 4 through May 7 to see the exhibition.

Photos courtesy Chris Young

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Robert Donley Cubbies and Other Personages 1982 61x48 inches, oil on linen Collection of the Illinois State Museum

Currently on view through mid-November at the Illinois State Museum, 502 S. Spring St. Springfield, IL.

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We're back! The Illinois State Museum re-opened to the public on July 2. Here are some great memories from our visitors and staff.

Check out this Storify page to see photos from our opening month! Share your photos with the #BackatISM and we might add them.

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Tomorrow, the ISM is back. Share your Museum-related posts with #BackatISM. We’ll feature some of the posts via Storify and our other social media pages.