Articles
Filter by topic
Featured article
BroMenn donation speaks to 125 years of community service
By Bill Kemp. Published on July 4, 2021.
Carle BroMenn Medical Center has undergone one transformation after another since its modest beginnings 125 years ago. It opened on May 8, 1896, as the 22-bed Deaconess Hospital—this nearly a quarter century before the discovery of antibiotics. Today, the medical center offers everything from cardiac electrophysiology to interventional radiology. About the only thing that hasn’t changed is its central location—where Franklin and Virginia avenues meet in Normal. Deaconess Hospital owes its origin to a group of local doctors who believed Bloomington-Normal was ready to support a second traditional hospital, specif...
Mandolin enjoyed ‘golden age’ in late 19th century
By Bill Kemp. Published on September 29, 2019.
“The members of the Lotus Club last evening entertained their lady friends at their rooms on North Center Street,” noted The Pantagraph...
Washington Home couple worked ‘through the heart’
By Bill Kemp. Published on September 22, 2019.
“Cooks and counselors, painters and referees, they are also mom and pop to up to twenty children,” it was said of Louise and Napoleon C...
Sojourner Truth spoke in Bloomington
By Bill Kemp. Published on September 15, 2019.
One hundred and forty years ago this week, on Sept. 18, 1879, the incomparable Sojourner Truth spoke at Second Presbyterian Church in d...
Poor Farm home to society’s friendless and forlorn
By Bill Kemp. Published on September 8, 2019.
“Be careful or you'll end up at the poor farm” was a popular admonition well in the mid-20th century.From the early 1860s u...
Women’s suffrage debate captivates Twin Cities in 1870
By Bill Kemp. Published on September 1, 2019.
On August 26, 1920, U.S. Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby signed into law the 19th Amendment granting women the right to vote. The i...
Portable Elevator plant closed in 1987
By Bill Kemp. Published on August 25, 2019.
In the spring of 2018, Canadian agricultural equipment manufacturer Brandt Industries began assembling grain augers and belt conveyors ...
Harvey Hogg early martyr to Union cause
By Bill Kemp. Published on August 18, 2019.
The Civil War was a brutal, decidedly unromantic slog. By its cruel end, as Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee’s armies blackened the V...
Adam Bogardus, world champion wing shot
By Bill Kemp. Published on July 28, 2019.
In the fall of 1875, at a shooting tournament in Bloomington, champion marksman Adam H. Bogardus killed 25 of 28 pigeons in 2 minutes a...
Secor’s Minnie Vautrin, ‘Goddess of Mercy’
By Bill Kemp. Published on July 21, 2019.
Born, raised and educated in Central Illinois, Christian educator Minnie Vautrin was an eyewitness to one of the most horrific and crue...
Project to mark firefighter graves lesson in history
By Bill Kemp. Published on June 30, 2019.
As part of a Memorial Day observance last month, active and retired Twin City firefighters placed flags on the graves of former members...
Local tractor company never gained traction
By Bill Kemp. Published on June 23, 2019.
“More from the soil, with less toil” was the promise of the Illinois Tractor Co., which for a few short years sold its Bloomington-made...
Long-gone Franklin Park monument dedicated 150 years ago
By Bill Kemp. Published on June 16, 2019.
On June 17, 1869—150 years ago this week—area residents packed Bloomington’s Franklin Park to dedicate a monument to the more than 700 ...
Twin Cities once hosted own Chautauqua
By Bill Kemp. Published on June 9, 2019.
“The most American thing in America.” That’s what Theodore Roosevelt said of the Chautauqua movement, the popular, week-long outdoor ga...
‘Pop’ Dillon of Normal found baseball success in LA
By Bill Kemp. Published on June 2, 2019.
Bloomington-Normal’s ties to the national pastime are long and deep. Most famously, National Baseball Hall of Fame induct...
Teays River coursed through Central Illinois eons ago
By Bill Kemp. Published on May 26, 2019.
With no major navigable bodies of water, McLean County and much of east-central Illinois are landlocked. Yet that was decidedly not the...
Arrowsmith once home to small hospital
By Bill Kemp. Published on May 19, 2019.
“It is very seldom that a town of some 350 inhabitants can boast of an up-to-date hospital,” declared a spring 1923 advertisement for D...
Buck Mann Park hidden west side gem
By Bill Kemp. Published on May 12, 2019.
Tucked away on Bloomington’s far west side, Buck Mann Park is one of the lovelier, out-of-the-way corners in all the Twin Cities....
West side Subway Club earned notoriety in late ’50s
By Bill Kemp. Published on May 5, 2019.
Try as he might, Bloomington Mayor Robert McGraw could not close the Subway Club, an afterhours “set-up” joint on the city’s west side ...
ISU held racially segregated spring dances in the 1930s and ’40s
By Bill Kemp. Published on April 28, 2019.
The racial climate throughout the United States deteriorated steadily in the first quarter of the 20th century. During this period, Jim...
Women’s Improvement League kept Normal clean and healthy
By Bill Kemp. Published on April 21, 2019.
Editor's note: This is Bill Kemp's 650th original "Page from Our Past" column. Bill began writ...
‘Pop’ Horton organized campus circus fraternity in 1929
By Bill Kemp. Published on April 14, 2019.
Today marks the 38th anniversary of the death of Dr. Clifford E. Horton, one of the titans of Illinois State University athletics. Toda...
‘Spanish craze’ of 1920s left imprint on area architecture
By Bill Kemp. Published on April 7, 2019.
American residential architecture has long favored dominant English-inspired styles. When most folks conjure up their ideal of an attra...
Springtime once meant return of prairie flowers
By Bill Kemp. Published on March 31, 2019.
Novelist, poet, essayist and farmer Wendell Berry has said that we live in a time of “punishment and ruins.” This is certainly true whe...
Harry Forbes, champion boxer, once made Bloomington home
By Bill Kemp. Published on March 24, 2019.
Regarded as one of the greatest pound-for-pound boxers of his era, world bantamweight champion Harry Forbes lived and trained in Bloomi...
Central Illinois final resting place for once-enslaved persons
By Bill Kemp. Published on March 17, 2019.
The stain of slavery pervades the American experience, dating well before the nation’s founding to the present. Yet the all-encompassin...
Cousin Emmy had deep ties to Bloomington
By Bill Kemp. Published on March 10, 2019.
Cousin Emmy, a pioneering female country music artist affectionately known as “the first hillbilly to own a Cadillac,” spent a decade o...
Bloomington’s Cliff Carroll 19th century baseball standout
By Bill Kemp. Published on March 3, 2019.
With Major League Baseball’s spring training well underway in the warmer, sunnier climes of Florida and Arizona, thoughts of this write...
Pre-Civil War Butler House survived into 1920s
By Bill Kemp. Published on February 24, 2019.
On the western edge of downtown, the no-frills, mom-and-pop Butler House was an old friend to the weary traveler and local resident ali...
Museum’s newly acquired Lincoln letter window into legal career
By Bill Kemp. Published on February 17, 2019.
The McLean County Museum of History, as part of its Presidents Day activities on Monday, will have on public display its recently acqui...
Bloomington schools integrated decade after Civil War
By Bill Kemp. Published on February 10, 2019.
Although racially segregated schools are associated with the “Jim Crow” Deep South and the Civil Rights Movement, northern communities ...