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…
MONMOUTH, Ill. — When the news of Sept. 11, 2001, reached Monmouth College one would imagine the College’s president calling an immediate cabinet meeting to plan strategy. But life is never that predictable.
Instead, then-President Richard Giese was on Interstate 80, driving to a meeting of Associated Colleges of the…
MONMOUTH, Ill. — People love a good ghost story and are seemingly always eager to embrace tales of legendary local hauntings, regardless of corroborating evidence.
Every year — particularly around Halloween — I receive inquiries about a site near Monmouth that is legendary in local lore for alleged supernatural occurrences…
Monmouth College alumnus built nation’s second-largest Presbyterian church from scratch
MONMOUTH, Ill. — In 1965, when the Rev. Robert Meneilly ’45 delivered several sermons calling for the integration of largely white suburbs around Kansas City, Kan., it made front-page news and raised a firestorm of controversy. …
MONMOUTH, Ill. — It seems improbable that a humble farm boy from Berwick, Ill., would become one of the world’s leading economists, help the Allies defeat Hitler and be awarded the Medal of Freedom, but those are only a handful of the accomplishments of Calvin Bryce Hoover.
Born to a…
MONMOUTH, Ill. — Beginning in 1906, the interurban electric railway allowed Monmouth residents to travel conveniently and inexpensively between nearby cities. Even after automobiles became more numerous during the 1910s, the interurban remained popular because paved roads remained scarce.
That would change by the 1920s, when the Good Roads Movement…
MONMOUTH, Ill. — I have written previously about Maj. Robert Wilson McClaughry, the pioneer prison reformer who graduated from Monmouth College in 1861 and for a time lived in Monmouth. …
MONMOUTH, Ill — Growing up in Monmouth during the 1970s, one of the interesting landmarks I recall was a circular brick fountain in front of the National Bank of Monmouth’s Colonial Drive-In on East Broadway. …
MONMOUTH, Ill. — As long ago as the early 1960s, downtown Monmouth merchants were worried about the encroachment of shopping centers and discount stores on traditional retail establishments. We know now that they had good reason to worry.
One of those merchants was about as traditional as you could find…
