History

At the intersection of Lincoln Avenue and Edwards Street is a two-story building with a “For Lease” sign in the front window of the vacant first story. Until recently, the location served as a religious meeting house and, for many years before that, as an antique shop where a languorous cat spent her days blissfully, […]

Like most other capital cities, Springfield has always had a certain transient population whose ebb and flow are governed not by the moon but by the rising and falling tide of work necessary to efficient state governance. Some people come here to work, become attached to Springfield, and end up spending the rest of their […]

Photographer Herbert Georg captured a classic film noir image in early December 1938, with the neon of Springfield’s many movie theaters reflecting on the rain-washed bricks and streetcar tracks of South Fifth Street. Looking north from Jackson, we note a street full of sedans, but not a single person is in sight. Even the double-parked […]

Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo. Shovel them under and let me work — I am the grass; I cover all. And pile them high at Gettysburg And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun. Shovel them under and let me work. Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor: What place […]

Who has not gazed upon picture-book renderings of Ephesus, Rome, Tyre, Machu Picchu, Stonehenge, and other fantastic sites of archaeological remains and not wondered about the civilizations that inhabited those places? No one who is interested in history can view the pillars of a once-great temple, or a paved roadway that in its day was […]

If you’re like me, maybe you’ve wondered about the derivation of the “Aristocracy Hill” designation given to the historic neighborhood bounded by South Grand Avenue and Jackson, Second, and Eighth streets. Perhaps you’ve wondered (as I have) about the “hill” part of it — there doesn’t seem to be much of a hill there at […]

The cloud of fear and uncertainty that gripped the United States during the years of World War II began to lift with the defeat of Germany and Japan in 1945, but Americans felt the war’s aftershocks for a long time. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s death in April of that year took from many Americans the […]

With all the hyperbolic and near-hysterical rhetoric flying around Springfield like so much chaff at a threshing party (“Is Springfield ready?”), one might be excused for thinking that never before has this city found itself at the center of national attention for even so much as a day. It is true that Springfield is now […]

Just west of the Capitol complex, new markers have sprouted from street signs, identifying the area as the Pasfield House Historic District. The city-sanctioned designation honors the memory of one of Springfield’s great families and the site of their 40-acre “cosy rural retreat,” as it was described in the 1881 History of Sangamon County. The […]

It is, at first, a vexing and somewhat daunting undertaking to write about a nearly 100-year-old high-school athletic-team yearbook picture, especially when it requires more than a little sleuthing to merely put names to the faces. It is, for the writer, a revelatory experience, for the resultant effect of a little curious investigation is that […]

In 1915, the city of San Francisco, which had been nearly destroyed nine years earlier by a calamitous earthquake and resultant fire, threw a comeback party for itself called the Panama Pacific International Exposition. Officially it was a World’s Fair marking the opening of the Panama Canal and commemorating the “discovery” of the Pacific Ocean […]