Eureka Pumpkin Festival

This month at the IDHH we’re looking back at how agriculture and industry shaped civic life in small-town Illinois. We’re looking especially at how agriculture and industry created senses of local identity that could be celebrated. It’s now fall, and Illinois’ legacy of harvest festivals, and celebrating the busy growing season as a community is close to our heart. Looking back through our contributor’s collections we found “Pumpkins, Parades, and Pies– Eureka’s Pumpkin Festival Past 1939-1961” from our partner the Eureka Public Library District.

Souvenir booklet for the 1951 Eureka Pumpkin Festival. Permission To display provided by Eureka Public Library District.

Between 1939 and 1961 the third weekend of September saw the Eureka Pumpkin Festival in Eureka IL. It was first organized by the Eureka Community Association to bolster the local economy after the Great Depression. Its first year, the festival brought 10,000 visitors over the course of the weekend to the small town of 1,700 people. The Eureka Public Library District has gathered over 300 photographs, scans of pamphlets, recipe books, and souvenir ephemera that document the festival. Eureka’s connection with pumpkins began 35 years earlier when Dickinson and Company first canned pumpkin, relying heavily on local farms with their success. Dickinson and Company was bought by Chicago-based Libby, McNeil, and Libby Company in 1929, and with it the recipe for “pumpkin custard”. With Libby’s nationwide distribution network, canned pumpkin became an autumn staple in homes across the country.

Above: Libby’s “custard pumpkin pie” label used in conjunction with Eureka Pumpkin festival c.1946. A Libby’s Pumpkin Can Signed by actor Ronald Reagan c. 1947. Eureka College Ronald Reagan Museum. Permission to display images provided by the Eureka Public Library District.

The festival continued annually for the first three years, but was interrupted and discontinued with the United States’ involvement in World War II after the 1941 festival. Global politics and community life was reflected in the parade’s floats, where both themes of peace, agricultural heritage and social clubs, and anticipating the United States’ entrance in WWII, canning’s contribution to war preparedness.

“The Pumpkin Center of the World”. 1946 Pumpkin Festival grand prize winning float built by Robert Faubel and Robert Schertz. Featuring pumpkin made of flowers and a float lined with cornstalks. Faubels’ son stands on top.
Permission to display was provided by the Eureka Public Library District.

After WWII, the festivals ballooned to 50,00 people attending. In 1947, then-film star and Eureka College alumnus Ronald Reagan and Governor Dwight H. Green were invited to Eureka to crown Joan Snyder the Pumpkin Queen. The Pumpkin Queen and her attendants were a large part of the parade, in so many ways the face of the other hundreds of coordinators and volunteers who made the festival possible.  Photographs of the Queen and her attendants in the collection show an interesting and idiosyncratic spin on mid-century pageants.  The promotional material generated for the souvenir booklet (of which all the post-World War II festival’s have been fully scanned as part of the collection) show the Queen and her attendants in a local pumpkin field in full pageant-wear.

 In 1959, the centennial celebration included a beard-growing and period-wear contest in addition to the traditional pageant. 

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Men in their centenary beards, 1959.Permission to display was provided by the Eureka Public Library District.

The last Eureka Pumpkin Festival was held in September 1961. The November prior, Libby’s closed the Eureka canning factory and moved its operations to the Morton plant.  For more on the pumpkin and mid-century american life be sure to visit Eureka Public Library District’s collection. Happy Autumn.

Mrs. Robert Johann of the Junior Women’s Club and four children marvel over a pumpkin pie. Permission to display was provided by the Eureka Public Library District.

 

Welcome To Our Newest Contributor, Illinois State University!

Editors Note 03/2021: Voices of Extremism is no longer a collection in IDHH.

Illinois State University (ISU) is our newest contributor, with 13 exciting collections including Voices of Extremism, circus films, and the letters of Buffalo Bill. ISU is now the second largest contributor to the Illinois Digital Heritage Hub, contributing the metadata for nearly 20,000 objects.

One of these collections is the Passion for Circus collection of circus images, a collection of over 9400 photographs of the circus taken between the 1930s and the 1950s. The images come from the special collection of Sverre “Bex” and Faye Braathen, which came to the Milner Library in the mid-1970s after the Braathens passed away.

The Passion for Circus collection includes gorgeous color photographs of all things circus that Sverre shot on an Eastman Kodak Ektra F 1.9 camera using Kodachrome film. The photographs show the exciting and vibrant world of circus life and the spectators that flocked to these events. The images show the flashy costumes worn by the performers, the circus wagons used to transport the travelers and their animals around the country, and daring acts of acrobatics and contortionism.

Here is a sneak peak of some of the images from the collection.

Color image of two elephants pulling green circus cage wagon. Men in red outfits sit atop one elephant and the cage wagon.
Cage Wagon and Elephants. 1943. Illinois State University. Permission to display was given by Milner Library, Illinois State University.
Four people in image, from left to right: a clown with white and black face paint in a yellow and red outfit, one aerialist in a yellow and black outfit, a woman in blue holding two baby gorillas, and a man in background looking at the gorillas.
Circus personnel with gorilla. 1954. Illinois State University. Permission to display was given by Milner Library, Illinois State University.
Image of a woman wearing a large star headdress and green and white outfit, extending her arm and sitting on top of a horse.
Performer on a horse. 1956. Illinois State University.  Permission to display was given by Milner Library, Illinois State University
Woman in blue outfit and a rose in her hair. She is standing on her hands and her feet are on her shoulders
Performer doing contortions. 1950. Illinois State University. Permission to display was given by Milner Library, Illinois State University.
Woman and chimpanzees are sitting on grass, all are wearing light blue and silver outfits with tutus and headpieces.
Performer and chimpanzees. 1956. Illinois State University. Permission to display was given by Milner Library, Illinois State University.

For more on this collection, visit the Illinois State University Milner Library digital collections on their home site.

You can also access all these images through the IDHH.

Welcome University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

This month the IDHH welcomes the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) into the hub. UIUC is no stranger to DPLA, and has been a contributing content hub to DPLA since 2013, so we are pleased to welcome a DPLA veteran aboard. UIUC comes to the IDHH with 19 collections ranging in subject from historical maps of Africa to theater and costume design, Irish political cartoons, and much more.

As part of the many collections that the University of Illinois is making available, the Sousa Archives and Center for American Music’s Music Instrument Digital Image and 3D Model Collection boasts 231 images of historical instruments (1810-1972) and includes both the familiar and the unfamiliar. The instruments chronicle the evolution of many of the instruments that we recognize today, as well as many instruments that are a product of their time and did not continue to be produced.

Check out this sneak peek of some of the instruments in this collection.

Frontal view of bugle against black background.
Bugle from the Carl Busch Papers and Music Instrument Collection, ca. 1833-1924 (series 12/9/91), Sousa Archives and Center for American Music, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Rectangular experimental guitar made of wood. Right side has 10 levers, there are 12 strings in the center, and a metal plate at the bottom.
Experimental Guitar, Elbern H. “Eddie” Alkire Personal Papers and Music Instrument Collection, 1926-1997 (series 12/9/91), Sousa Archives and Center for American Music, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Image of a heckelphone. Double-reed instrument made of a reddish wood with metal keys.
Heckelphone from the University Bands Collection, ca. 1840-1997 (series 12/9/93), Sousa Archives and Center for American Music

Wood and ivory instrument with finger holes. In the bagpipe family.
Musette from the Carl Busch Papers and Music Instrument Collection, ca. 1833-1924 (series 12/9/93), Sousa Archives and Center for American Music, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Silver instrument with keys, similar to saxophone, but with bell facing upwards.
Sarussophone from the Carl Busch Papers and Music Instrument Collection, ca. 1833-1924 (series 12/9/93), Sousa Archives and Center for American Music, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

To see more of the images in the collection, please click here.

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has many other collections as part of the IDHH here.

 

Welcome DePaul University

This month we welcomed DePaul University into the IDHH. DePaul University has shared the Deborah Bright Photographs collection, which includes 96 black and white photographs taken by the photographer, Deborah Bright, in 1985.

The  images in the collection capture an eerily quiet side of Chicago in the Lincoln Park neighborhood, sparsely populated by people. Bright took these photographs as part of the Lincoln Park Study Group, which was a project directed by Dr. Charles Suchar, and involved many DePaul faculty in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. As part of this, a group was formed to conduct a historical and cultural study of Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood, where DePaul is located. Bright’s photographs document the neighborhood as it was at the time, in a process of gentrification.

The collection was donated to DePaul by Bright in 2015 as thirty-seven strips of negatives, with ninety-six exposures, and thirteen 8″x10″ contact sheets containing ninety-eight photos in total.

Here is a sneak peek from the collection.

Two children are walking down the sidewalk between two new buildings.
Deborah Bright, Courtyard of apartment building in Lincoln Park, Chicago, 1985. Deborah Bright Photographs, Special Collections and Archives, DePaul University, Chicago, Illinois.

An alley with a telephone pole that is surrounded by a metal garbage bin, and pieces of wood on the ground.
Deborah Bright. Alley in Lincoln Park, Chicago. 1985. Deborah Bright Photographs, Special Collections and Archives, DePaul University, Chicago, Illinois.

Three buildings side-by-side on a sunny day, one buildings has a Coca-Cola sign out front, two buildings appear to be residential buildings.
Deborah Bright. Residential and commercial buildings along W. Webster Ave., Chicago. 1985. Deborah Bright Photographs, Special Collections and Archives, DePaul University, Chicago, Illinois.

A fence separates two urban gardens. There are residential buildings in the background.
Deborah Bright. Garden in a residential lot in Lincoln Park, Chicago. 1985. Deborah Bright Photographs, Special Collections and Archives, DePaul University, Chicago, Illinois.

Newer homes are surrounded by chain-link fence. There is a boat on a trailer in the middle ground.
Deborah Bright. House exterior in Lincoln Park, Chicago. 1985. Deborah Bright Photographs, Special Collections and Archives, DePaul University, Chicago, Illinois.

Permission to display here is granted by DePaul University Special Collections and Archives.

To see the full collection, please visit the collection here.

There are other many great collections in Illinois that document various aspects of the Lincoln Park neighborhood of Chicago, check them out in the IDHH!

 

Celebrating Pumpkins at the Eureka Pumpkin Festival

Autumn is a beautiful time of year in Illinois when the leaves on the trees change from green to a wild display of colors, the crops in the fields are completing their lifecycle and are ready for harvest, and wildflowers such as goldenrod are putting out their final, golden blooms.
To celebrate this wonderful time of year,  in 1939, the Eureka Community Association, of Eureka, Illinois organized the first Eureka Pumpkin Festival. Originally billed as a way to boost the local economy after the Great Depression, the Eureka Pumpkin Festival was a successful community festival that celebrated pumpkins and the people of Eureka, IL, and lasted from that first festival in 1939 to 1961.
The Eureka Public Library District has nearly 300 photographs and scans of pamphlets and recipe books that document the festival over the years.

PPP107001_Front_Cover.jpg
Dickinson & Company, Eureka, Illinois. Dick’s Kitchen About Custard Pumpkin: How Manufactured How Used In Cooking. 1922. Eureka Public Library. Permission to display was given by Dr. Junius Rodriguez.

Continue reading “Celebrating Pumpkins at the Eureka Pumpkin Festival”

Welcome to IDHH Highlights!

This new blog will highlight digital collections that have been contributed to the Illinois Digital Heritage Hub and will be updated biweekly.  These collections come from the rich and diverse group of institutions that contribute their metadata to the IDHH.  Contributors are made up of libraries, archives, museums, historical societies, and many other great institutions from around the state of Illinois.

In these collections you will find diaries chronicling the first hand experience of residents of Illinois, photographs documenting the changing cities and towns, and newspapers that give a glimpse into everyday life of years gone by.   All of these and more can be found through the Illinois Digital Heritage Hub, as well as highlighted here on the IDHH Highlights blog.  Explore the rich cultural heritage of Illinois with us!