MONMOUTH, Ill. — Many farmers from this area are familiar with the monthly agricultural publication Wallaces Farmer, which began in 1895 as Wallaces’ Farm and Dairy, but few are aware of its founder’s Monmouth roots. The original editor, who founded the Iowa-based weekly paper with his sons Henry C. and…

MONMOUTH, Ill. — Folk artist Grandma Moses became world famous late in life for her primitive paintings portraying the simplicity of rural life. …

MONMOUTH, Ill. — Many famous celebrities hail from small towns, but few retain their hometown ties once they go on to fame and fortune. One exception would be Will Nicol, who made Monmouth his permanent residence when not touring the world as the Great Nicola. …

MONMOUTH, Ill. — “You’ll send me to the poorhouse!” is a complaint that parents have voiced to their children for ages, but it wasn’t so long ago that a future in the poorhouse was literally a possibility for unfortunate Warren County residents. Caring for the indigent has been a concern…

MONMOUTH, Ill. — On September 10, 1902, Monmouth stonecutter Henry T. Wells received a message that no parent would want to hear — that his son Willie had been arrested by Chicago police. The widowed father of six had enough problems on his hands, especially dealing with Willie, who went…

MONMOUTH, Ill. — The career of one of America’s greatest playwrights might have taken a completely different path had his father listened to a Monmouth attorney. Eugene O’Neill, Nobel laureate and author of The Iceman Cometh and Long Day’s Journey into Night, was born in 1888 near the New York…

MONMOUTH, Ill. — The name David Alexander Wallace is legendary at Monmouth College, in no small part because its flagship building — now 112 years old — was dedicated in his honor. Many Monmouth graduates retain a visual image of the College’s first president from the formal oil painting commissioned…

MONMOUTH, Ill. — In Meredith Willson’s The Music Man, Professor Harold Hill recounts to the people of River City the “electric thrill” he enjoyed when W. C. Handy, John Philip Sousa and four other legendary band leaders brought “the cream of every famous band” together on the same historic day.

MONMOUTH, Ill. — If the internet had existed in 1890, Oscar Zimmerman likely would have started the first shave club for men. Born in 1855 in Chicago to a Prussian-born liquor merchant, the talented tonsorial artist had come to Monmouth as a young man, where he apprenticed under Morris Scheibel…