Plainfield Site

A question that has repeatedly come up here at the Archives is 'where was the College located when it was in Plainfield?' (For those who don't already know, the College was organized in 1861 as Plainfield College. We moved to Naperville in 1870 as North-Western College). The Sharon Evangelical Church was instrumental in the choice of location by donating land and building/money for the College and thanks to their timeline on the website, we gathered enough information to track it down more specifically.

With the online Sanborn map from 1893 in hand, my student assistants Adam and Brittany and I all headed to Plainfield this past Friday for a research trip - to investigate what is there currently and take some photos. Turns out the Plainfield Academy on Lockport at Dillman is currently on the land originally used by the College.

Special thanks to a member of the congregation who let us into the Sharon United Methodist Church where we found an excellent photo on display showing exactly where the replacement building (the original College building was destroyed by fire in the early 1870s and rebuilt by Plainfield citizens as a public school) was located. The church is in the center of the photo and the old school building is in the upper right corner.

The Safe

Sorry - it's been a long while. Busy, busy and not much to say, I guess. Thanks to two history students prodding me, I've finally uncovered the story on the safe! (It's no longer a summer research project!). Thanks to Diebold company's 150th anniversary website (2009), the answer was easily found. According to their information, the company moved to Canton, Ohio and was named Diebold, Norris, and Co from 1874-1876. I finally had a manageable date to work from! Prior to this, I only knew it was purchased between 1864 and 1926 since the name on the safe was North-Western College.

I checked our newly transferred financial records from that time period and after skimming through everything from those years, found an entry in August 1876 for $200 for the purchase of a "new office safe". Since no more details than that are available, I'm making the leap that that is the one and same office safe that now lives in the archives reference room.

Fun photo

I ran across this fun picture in the online Chronicle from May 1959 and thought I'd share. I have no idea what the story is with it, but the picture made me smile.

On February 12 Oesterle Library hosted a party celebrating Abraham Lincoln's 200th birthday. The turnout was amazing and it received great local media coverage. While the majority of the items on display in the Archives Reference Room were from the special collections collection that Emily, our technical services coordinator oversees, I did find a few cool items in the College's Archives to add to the display. This was one of the items I pulled out.

One of the sons of the first president enlisted in an Ohio regiment and fought for the Union Army during the Civil War. He died of fever following the siege at Vicksburg in 1863. We have his diaries as well as some letters. This is one of the letters sent back to his family. I liked it particularly because of the stationery which says "But one flag from Ocean to Ocean."

The letter and diaries are part of our Smith Family Papers collection.

Other new stuff in the Archives

In addition to the digitization of the Chronicle, a few other projects have finally been or are close to completed. After quite some time, the topical files from the Office of Public Information have been processed (meaning weeded of duplicates/extraneous materials; placed in acid free folders and boxes; container list typed up; and labels put on boxes).

Another project that's coming up on completion is an in-house digitization project. In Merner Fieldhouse, the Athletic department over the years have hung photographs of individual and relay team CCIW champions, all-Americans, and National Champions. We've been working with Athletics and maintenance staff down there to get those scanned. We've scanned at archival resolution and format and are close to having these finished (560 with approximately another 50 remaining). This photo is of the 1996 4x400 women's relay team.

Additional materials received that are currently in process include the financial records of the College from 1860s through approximately 1950 (when they went machine readable) and the records of the Dean of Faculty from about 1960 through the early 1990s. More about these files as we get them prepared for researchers.

post-holidays update

Well, it's been a while now, hasn't it?? Vacation around Thanksgiving and then December general craziness. But, now the students are back and things are settling into a busy term. The biggest deal occurrence for the Archives this winter break was the digitization of the student newspaper. This is a project I really never expected to see happen, but it did! Planning for the College's 150th anniversary is happening now and the coordinator for the celebration saw the Chronicle digitization project as a crucial part of the preparations for the celebration of our long history.

We selected ArcaSearch as our vendor for this project for a variety of reasons and I cannot be happier with the job they did. It's an unbelievably useful resource for me and I anticipate many researchers using it in the future. For the first time ever, the student newspaper is keyword searchable (no index had existed previously) and it's available whenever, wherever with computer access. I'm still trying to figure out how to really get the word out there, but tomorrow I meet with the Capstone History class (our original research/historiography class for majors). If you're interested in taking a look, just head to https://www.arcasearch.com/us/nc/

I'll update in the next little while with other events & new accessions that happened this December.