Though not featured in the 1918 Orange Judd photo book, this handsome home at 605 East Main, like many others in the neighborhood, invites further exploration. PHOTO BY WILLIAM FURRY If you’ve long thought Rochester the last exit on the Lost Bridge Trail, the end of the line for your urban adventures on the fringes […]
William Furry
William Furry is executive director of the Illinois State Historical Society and editor of Illinois Heritage, its popular history magazine. He is a former editor of Illinois Times.
Posted inSpecial Issues
The Nightingale of Andover
Though her name is more associated with nursery furniture today, Jenny Lind was without a doubt the most remarkable singer of her day, a celebrity of celebrities whose admirers included Queen Victoria of England, Harvard’s Edward Everett, poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, orators Daniel Webster and Henry Clay, and German composer Felix Mendelssohn, who called Jenny […]
Posted inNews
They saw him standing here
The 50th anniversary of the Beatles’ first visit to America will be commemorated in February 2014. The Liverpool lads, shortly after their single “I Want to Hold Your Hand” reached the top of the Billboard charts in the U.S., arrived on American soil on Feb. 7, 1964, and stayed until Feb. 21, playing such venues […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Lithuanians in Springfield
The placing of a church cornerstone is an act of faith. For the founders of Springfield’s St. Vincent de Paul Lithuanian Catholic Church it was an act of survival. Exiled from their tiny homeland on the Baltic Sea, they came to America at the turn of the last century seeking peace, opportunity and religious freedom […]
Posted inNews
Shadows of the Motherland
T he trained eye rarely misses them: three-barred crosses and primitive, colorful icons, occasionally spotted in roadside cemeteries and out-of-the-way chapels from Chicago to Carbondale. Onion-shaped domes, curious spires and cupolas — the international symbols of Eastern Orthodoxy — still adorn churches in small, former mining communities where Baptists, Methodists and Evangelicals now abound. The […]
Posted inOpinion
Filling Lincoln’s shoes, size 14
This week is without precedent in our city’s history. Not only are we celebrating the 200th birthday of Illinois’ favorite son in the community he famously called home, the newly elected leader of the free world, President Barack Obama, also an Illinoisan, has chosen to speak in Springfield at a non-political dinner to commemorate the […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Grave robbers and academics
Untitled Document The subtitle of David LaVere’s Looting Spiro Mounds is a footnote to perhaps the greatest public grave robbery in history: Howard Carter’s 1924 discovery, opening, and emptying of King Tutankhamun’s tomb in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings. That story, which ran in The Times of London and captured headlines around the world, legitimized treasure […]
Posted inOpinion
Guy Noir meets El Presidente
It was a strange, serendipitous Springfield moment, an unlikely conjunction of comets and pinto beans. But it happened last Tuesday afternoon, just as the downtown parking garages relieved themselves and the September sun dipped below the capitol minarets. Garrison Keillor — bestselling author, national columnist, and rhapsodic host of A Prairie Home Companion and The […]
Posted inNews
Found and lost
For archaeologist Robert Mazrim, director of the Sangamo Archaeological Center in Elkhart, last weekend’s dig in downtown Springfield was simply another revelation of Illinois’ all-but-forgotten prairie past. But for city historians Curtis Mann and Linda Garvert, every turn of the trowel was nothing less than a miracle. The site was Second and Jefferson streets, the […]
