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The Grentz Saga: A Golden Age for Women's Basketball at UIUC
By Isabella Cook At the end of the 1994-1995 season, the Fighting Illini Women’s Basketball Team was close to a crisis. In twenty years of the program, they had achieved a 264-298 losing overall record and were used to sitting at the bottom of the Big 10 conference rankings(1). In a time when collegiate women’s basketball dynasties were emerging at schools like Tennessee, Stanford, and Connecticut, the Fighting Illini couldn’t even buy a tournament bid. And with the WNBA st
Isabella Cook
May 112 min read
More than Temperance: The CU Woman's Christian Temperance Union
By Sara Linne The Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) was not only a temperance organization. Members were actively involved in politics, suffrage movements, and, as the name suggests, Christianity and temperance. The national WCTU was established in 1874 and by the late 19th century had the largest membership numbers of any women’s organization (1). Its most famous and influential leader, Frances Willard, became president in 1879 and supported the idea of “Do Everythi
Sara Linne
Apr 110 min read
Prairie Prisons
FIG 1: 1858 Bowman Map of Urbana by Hannah Hedrick In the early days of Champaign County, when the prairie stretched on and on for miles with few people in between, there wasn’t much formally established in terms of law enforcement. According to local tradition, the first documented murder in the region, before the county was even a county, was of an unknown horse thief. Having stolen the horse in Indiana, the outlaw fled westward with a band of regulators chasing close b
Hannah Hedrick
Mar 111 min read
Flatville: Where they've come from and where they're going
By Julia Schultz Flatville is potentially the most unassuming name for a town. Whether it’s a faux location used on improv night, the sunshine street used in a children’s cartoon, or the first name that comes to mind when giving an overeager tourist the name of your hometown – Flatville may appear to be the John Doe of villages. While calling Flatville home is not something that many people can say, those who can are residents in a town that is rich in German and Luthera
Julia Schultz
Jan 18 min read
Giving Tuesday: Support CCHM & CCNDI
The Champaign County Newspaper Digitization Initiative at the Champaign County History Museum is within $2,500 of the goal to scan the St. Joseph Record from 1940 to 1962 and convert it to a researchable digital format. Once it is converted, it will be available free of charge on the Illinois Digital Newspaper Collection through the University of Illinois Library. https://idnc.library.illinois.edu/ Starting in December 1941, just after Pearl Harbor, Charles W. Dale, the edito
Will Best
Dec 2, 20252 min read
An Introduction to the EI League
By Janey Schmidt Fig 1: EI Game Photo America’s Favorite Pastime Baseball has long been known as America’s favorite pastime. The Eastern Illinois Baseball League began as the Champaign County League in 1933, just four years into the Great Depression.(1) With unemployment rates and morale at an all-time low, many Americans jumped at any chance they had to have a little bit of fun. After a meeting at the Bailey & Himes Sporting Goods Shop at 606 East Green Street, nine man
Janey Schmidt
Nov 23, 20256 min read
A New Digital Exhibition!
Willie Nelson / Photographed by Dennis Garrel Forty years ago, on September 22nd, 1985, Champaign County hosted its largest concert at Memorial Stadium. Following the success of the Live Aid concert, Farm Aid sought to elevate the struggles of small family-owned farms, which were at the time competing with an expansive, increasingly corporate agricultural economy, and extensive droughts. Over 78,000 people gathered at Memorial Stadium to attend hte 14-hour-long concert featur
Will Best
Sep 22, 20251 min read
Voices from the Past - Cliff Delong
By Rachel Mulick Cliff Delong on October 3rd, 1951 from the UIUC archives Cliff Delong, born in 1903, spent 1977 sharing stories of his childhood with the historians of Champaign County. Not only did he participate in a series of interviews with the Champaign County History Museum, he was also a part of the Champaign County Memory Bank project, which collected oral histories and newspaper interviews about life during the turn of the century. The result is a rich story of Delo
champaigncohistory
Aug 1, 20254 min read
A Tale of Two Cities-of-the-Dead
By Gabriel Foster This is Part 2 of the history of Mount Hope Cemetery. If you haven't read the first part make sure you go back and read...
Gabriel Foster
Jun 1, 202512 min read
A Garden for the Dead in the Big Grove
By Gabriel Foster Winner of the 2025 Adele Mazurek Suslick Award for Excellence in Research Early burials and the Old Urbana Cemetery...
Gabriel Foster
May 1, 20258 min read
