City has share of obscure history

By Steve Arney
and Michael Freimann
Pantagraph staff

Obscured history

• A 'Hill' of a man • City has share of obscure history

The Pantagraph ends its series, "Sesqui: Remembering Our City's Past," with some stories and facts about Bloomington that have been obscured by time -- or are just plain obscure.

Home of ill repute

This modest, predominantly Christian city does have a sordid past. In fact, it experimented with what was in essence legalized prostitution by allowing a small red-light district to operate south of downtown.

It was called The Line and comprised four addresses on Moulton and Wright streets in the 1940s and 1950s. News coverage and editorials at the time decried a philosophy at Bloomington City Hall that vice could not be stopped and, therefore, should be contained and permitted.

Officially, The Line was "closed" by the mayor and police chief in 1942. The action was forced by an embarrassing public push from Rantoul's Chanute Air Force Base, which made the entire city of Bloomington off limits because its servicemen were contracting venereal disease in the vice district.

But the district survived covertly, as evidenced by local lore and by newspaper stories of raids and prostitution arrests at the familiar addresses. The city rid itself of The Line for good in the 1960s through federal urban renewal money that bought blocks of property and razed the neighborhood, described in The Pantagraph as having decayed into a ghetto. In place of the neighborhood came the YMCA and the Wood Hill public housing projects.

A Normal beginning

The Pantagraph/MAUREEN O'CONNOR

A monument on the corner of East and Front streets in Bloomington marks the site of Major's Hall. The building held a place in Bloomington history as the location of Abraham Lincoln's "Lost Speech," but also was the first home of Illinois State University.

Most students and residents know that the town of Normal, founded by Jesse Fell, takes its name from the university that calls it home and that started as a teacher's college called Illinois State Normal University.

A normal school was the name given to schools that specialized in teaching teachers.

What most students don't know is that the first classes conducted by the university, which the state created in 1857, were taught in Major's Hall in downtown Bloomington.

The building -- which also was the site of Abraham Lincoln's "Lost Speech" and believed to be the birthplace of the Republican Party in Illinois -- no longer stands, but a brick marker next to the Abraham Lincoln Parking Garage at East and Front streets marks the spot of ISNU's first home.

The university later moved to a campus Fell laid out in North Bloomington, which was incorporated in 1865 as the town of Normal.

The face of bigotry

When Eugene Covington moved to the city at the start of the 20th century, a prospective landlord was leery of renting to a black man, according to the book, "A History of African-Americans in McLean County, Illinois 1835-1975." He told Covington he didn't want "craps being shot in the alley."

Covington wasn't a craps player, however. He was a Northwestern-educated physician who tended to the medical needs of black and white patients for three decades. Although his practice crossed racial barriers, the city did not. His wife felt so demeaned by segregated theaters that she refused to go to the shows and insisted on a move to the country, author John Muirhead wrote.

Also segregated were Miller Park's beach and many places of accommodation. During Prohibition, the city had a speakeasy for blacks on the second floor of what is now the Lucca Grill. In 1955, internationally known actor William Warfield was served in a whites-only restaurant only after a screen was placed around him and his party.

Muirhead's book also documents that one famous local black woman, Lucinda Miller, was offered a job at Eureka Williams in the 1920s, but only if she lied on her application and said she was Indian or Mexican. She refused and went on to become a distinguished Brokaw Hospital administrator.

Caribel Washington and other black leaders credit General Electric for opening employment doors to blacks in the city starting in 1955. Ruth Waddell helped initiate the open hiring at GE by staging a one-person protest at the plant until the company relented and hired her.

An innovative plea

On Oct. 19, 1855, Isaac Wyant, who had a long-standing dispute with Anson Rusk over some property, followed Rusk into the DeWitt County Courthouse in Clinton and shot him to death as he warmed himself by the fire.

Because the dispute was so well-known in DeWitt County, the case was moved to McLean County, where Wyant was defended by Bloomington attorney Leonard Swett and his law partner, Abraham Lincoln.

Swett and Lincoln did not dispute that Wyant killed Rusk, but claimed their client was "not guilty by reason of insanity," contending that Wyant had been driven mad from losing his arm after having been shot by Rusk in an earlier dispute.

They lost the case, but introduced the insanity plea into American law.

Upholding, fighting hatred

Bloomington was the birthplace of one of the nation's most vehement anti-Semites, American Nazi Party founder George Lincoln Rockwell, who born in 1918 while his parents were traveling through town with a show troupe.

Rockwell never established roots here, and Pantagraph records include only one high-profile visit from the famous fascist. During that 1966 trip, Rockwell suggested that the locals build a monument to him in town as they did for Adlai Stevenson. Rockwell was shot to death in 1967 by one of his own men.

Bloomington also was the hometown to one of America's most famous anti-Nazis, Sigmund Livingston, founder of the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith. He came to Bloomington at age 9 with his German-immigrant parents. In 1913, he formed the ADL, which went on to become a key opponent of bigotry and a defender of Israel.

Livingston moved to Chicago in 1926 to practice law, and the league moved with him. He headed the group until his death in 1946.

Set in stone

The city of Bloomington is planning to bury a time capsule as part of this weekend's sesquicentennial celebration, but the city's oldest time capsule, if it still exists, predates the city's charter.

According to a 1902 article in The Pantagraph, demolition at the Isaac Livingston & Sons building at Main and Washington streets unearthed a time capsule first set there in 1848.

The metal box was set in the cornerstone of the building, which was built in 1856 to replace a structure destroyed in the city's first big downtown fire in 1855. Inside the box was a letter dated 1848 detailing the vital statistics of Bloomington. A second letter, signed by Richard P. Morgan Jr. in 1856, and copies of several newspapers, including The Pantagraph, Bloomington National Flag and the Chicago Tribune, also were in the capsule.

Livingston was said to have been considering two options: either turn the contents over to the McLean County Historical Society or put them back in the cornerstone of his new building, where Elroy's now is located.

According to Greg Koos, executive director of the McLean County Historical Society, there are no such documents at the museum, so "it's probably still in there."

A wild pitcher, bartender

Hall of Fame baseball pitcher Charles "Hoss" Radbourne, a Bloomington resident, still holds the record for most wins in a season -- 60 in 1884. He also goes down as one of the sport's wildest, most controversial players.

The Providence Grays once suspended him for allegedly beaning his own catcher on purpose. In one of the few photographs of him in uniform, he appears to making an obscene gesture with his finger. American Heritage magazine counts him as perhaps the first person photographed doing so.

After Radbourne retired, he ran a bar downtown Bloomington and by all accounts led a riotous life. He died in 1897 at the age of 42.

Bloomington at sea

In 1919, a ship named "Evergreen City" was completed by the Merchant Shipbuilders Corp. of Bristol, Pa.

The ship, commissioned in conjunction with the United States' entry into World War I, originally was supposed to be called "Bloomington" until it was discovered there already was a ship by that name.

Instead, the ship was christened under Bloomington's longstanding nickname, which it earned for its abundance of trees.

The city was awarded a namesake ship for its generous efforts in raising money during the government's "Victory Loan" drive.

Bet you didn't know

Here are some other notable Bloomington people:

• Bloomington's greatest inventors include Charles Keeran (1883-1948), who invented the EverSharp pencil, a mechanical pencil. He also invented the Mason jar lid.
  
  

• During the early part of the 20th century, George Hoagland, Bloomington resident and son of a Kentucky slave, began selling a furniture and floor polish called Oil of Gladness. The cleaning product was distributed in numerous states and Great Britain. Hoagland also was a preacher at Third Christian Church and gave church members no-interest loans to build their homes.
  
  

• Leonard "Baby" Bliss (1865-1912) was an internationally known "fat man" at 565 pounds. He toured Europe on a bicycle for an advertising campaign.
  
  

• Frederic Goudy (1866-1948) gained worldwide fame for his design of printing typefaces, creating 120 during his lifetime.
  
  

• Dr. E.P. Sloan (1878-1935) was a nationally known goiter surgeon.
  
  

• William Darnborough of Bloomington is credited in lore and in a song as being "the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo" with a 12-day gambling binge. Details are sketchy but narrow the streak to sometime in 1906, and the winnings are counted at $250,000 to $550,000. His lucky roulette number was 29. He invested the money and moved to London, never returning to Monte Carlo.