Chapter 13: Connecting Old and New in Marshall

Much as the Old School Museum does in Winchester, Marshall Public Library serves as a hub of cultural activity within its community and seeks to make the Marshall area’s history a source of guidance for those shaping its future.

The opening of Crossroads at Marshall Public Library coincided with the grand reopening of the building after a major renovation.

Located along one of Marshall’s main downtown streets, the library occupies a late-nineteenth-century storefront building that originally housed a farm implement dealership. In the four months preceding the exhibition’s arrival, the library undertook substantial modifications aimed at making the facility an even more vibrant cultural and technological hub for the community. These included the construction of a vestibule accessible to patrons with disabilities, an updated computer lab, a new collaborative workspace and study area, an updated teen area, a new staff workroom, a relocated circulation desk, increased seating, and rearranged shelving.^[1]

Of the $235,000 cost of the renovation, the library itself contributed $100,000 from its own savings, and an Illinois State Library “Live and Learn” construction grant provided $35,000. The remaining $100,000 was a donation from the estate of Edwin “Sonny” Daly, a Marshall native who became an author and educator.

Daly was one of the few local residents who studied at the Handy Writers’ Colony, which operated from 1950 to 1964 on the outskirts of Marshall. Known for its unorthodox teaching methods, its countercultural ethos, and its association with James Jones, a native of nearby Robinson and author of the renowned novel From Here to Eternity (1951), the colony was something of an anomaly within Clark County’s cultural milieu, and relatively few of its patrons were residents of the immediate area. Two novels by Daly, Some Must Watch (1956) and A Legacy of Love (1958), were published by Scribner’s. He later became a school headmaster.^[2]

The influence of the Handy Writers’ Colony within the region and upon American literature is just one of many topics addressed in Marshall Public Library’s extensive and still expanding local oral-history collection. The collection originated from interviews with World War II veterans conducted in 1994 by Dan Crews, a volunteer with the Illinois State Historical Society. Around the same time, the Friends of Marshall Public Library began interviewing area residents in conjunction with various programs and projects. Marshall High School students conducted oral-history interviews as a class project in 1998 and subsequently in association with The Way We Worked, another Museum on Main Street exhibition hosted by the library in 2011.

In the mid-2010s, the library staff decided to digitize the recordings that had been compiled, many of which were on cassette tape, in order to preserve them. Additionally, recognizing that people who lived through the major socioeconomic transformations of the early to mid-twentieth century were now in their senior years, the Friends of Marshall Public Library set a goal of recording one hundred interviews with elder residents of the area in conjunction with the library’s centennial in 2016. The organization succeeded in documenting approximately 150.

As of March 2021, 245 digitized oral-history interviews are archived on the library’s website. The audio recordings are available for listening on YouTube, and many have been transcribed. The Illinois Heartland Library System has awarded a grant to Marshall Public Library to commission the Illinois State Library to transcribe all of the interviews and make them searchable by keyword. The transcriptions will then be uploaded to the Illinois Digital Archives website.^[3]

In May 2018, Marshall Public Library and Illinois Humanities co-hosted a workshop about documentation of rural American culture. The event featured presentations by photographer and oral historian Ben Halpern of Champaign-Urbana and Kay Rippelmeyer-Tippy of Illinois Humanities about their research and documentation methods; folklorist and educator Sue Eleuterio of Chicago also explained the Library of Congress’s Veterans History Project. The workshop also included a discussion of the library’s oral-history program and a demonstration of its interviewing practices, which yielded the conversations with area farmers Don Guinnip and Bob Miller from which the library derived much of the content of its Crossroads companion exhibition.