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Virginius H. Chase Special Collections Center
The Virginius H. Chase Special Collections Center and °®¶¹´«Ã½ÊÓƵ Archives holds both material owned by the university and items placed on deposit by area organizations. These materials must be used in a controlled environment.
Major Collections
The Association of Public Safety Communications Officers (APCO) is the world’s oldest and largest public safety radio user group. The Illinois Chapter is one of the most significant in the history of the organization and contributed a number of the early national officers. Their files and records are in the collection, along with Proceedings of the Annual Conferences from 1939 to 1955 and a complete run of the APCO Bulletin monthly magazine beginning with the inaugural issue in February, 1935, to the present. APCO members are drawn from law enforcement agencies, emergency medical services, fire departments, forestry services, transportation agencies, military units, and manufacturers. Decades of material from this collection has already been digitized and is searchable by author, title, keywords, and date on the web at
Contains archival and artifactual material pertaining to the history of the University and, by extension, to people, events, and activities of central Illinois for the past century. The collection includes a virtually complete runs of student newspapers, yearbooks, and catalogs as well as scrapbooks of contemporary materials from 1894-1916 along with a limited number of sound recordings, videos, and motion picture film of University events. While virtually all publications contain photographs, there are a number of original images in the collection dating primarily from the middle years of the twentieth century. Several published histories of the institution and specific departments are available as well as a biography of Lydia Moss °®¶¹´«Ã½ÊÓƵ.
Full Texts of Significant Work Online:
. The first decade, 1897-1907. Peoria, Ill. 1918.
Materials pertaining to Philander Chase (1775-1852), first Episcopal bishop of Illinois and founder of both Kenyon and Jubilee colleges. The heart of the collection is a group of 2,600 manuscript letters from and to the Bishop and his family. Also included are several hundred books, pamphlets, and images. Among these secondary materials are a first edition of Chase’s Reminiscences first published serially in Peoria in 1841; the 1835 Journal of the Primary Convention of the Diocese of Illinois, the earliest recorded Peoria imprint; the first (1839) published map of Peoria County; copies of the Motto, a magazine printed at Jubilee; and a series of pamphlets occasioned by the ecclesiastical trial, presided over by Chase, of the Bishop of New York.
The collection also documents the formation of the Citizens Committee, organized in 1971 to raise funds and lobby the state to restore the building. These efforts were ultimately successful and Jubilee College was opened in 1986 as a state historic site.
Full Texts of Significant Work Online:
- Smith, Laura (Chase), Mrs. The life of Philander Chase, first bishop of Ohio and Illinois, founder of Kenyon and Jubilee colleges. New York: E.P. Dutton & Company, 1903.
- Bishop Chase’s Reminiscences. 2nd edition. Boston : J.B. Dow, 1848.
- Chase, Samuel, Rev. Malignity exposed : or A vindication of Bishop Chase against the malicious accusations of an anonymous pamphlet, printed in Ann Street, New York. Peoria County, Ill. 1847.
- Chase, Dudley. A narrative of the events connected with the election of an Assistant Bishop for Illinois. Peoria Co., Ill.: Jubilee College, 1848.
Approximately 2,500 items relating to the 16th president of the United States and the Civil War including several original letters written in Lincoln’s hand and a notebook he kept while a candidate for the U. S. Senate in 1855. In addition, the collection holds a set of the War of the Rebellion Records along with atlases and several contemporary accounts of the war among which are a manuscript diary kept by an area resident who saw action on the Mississippi and a body of correspondence between another central Illinoisan and his fiancée while the young man fought in the western theater. The largest group of material is contained in the Martin L. Houser Collection which consists of approximately 1,000 books and 300 pamphlets. Houser was widely acknowledged as a leading authority on the books read by the self-educated Lincoln from his earliest childhood. Houser collected duplicates of every book Lincoln was known to have read, always in the same edition.
Full Texts of Significant Work Online:
- Nicolay, John G. and Hay, John. Complete Works of Abraham Lincoln. 11 vols. New York: Various publishers, 1894-1905.
- Herndon, William Henry and Jesse, William. Abraham Lincoln; the true story of a great life, New York:, D. Appleton, 1924.
- Bentley, W. H. History of the 77th Illinois volunteer infantry. Sept. 2, 1863-July 10, 1865. Peoria, Illinois: E. Hine, 1883.
One of °®¶¹´«Ã½ÊÓƵ’s original faculty and a pioneer in the Industrial Arts Education Movement, Charles Alpheus Bennett also founded the Manual Arts Press, now part of Glencoe-McGraw Hill. In the late 1930s, Bennett donated his personal library of some 1,000 books and 6,000 pamphlets. These items are grouped in four categories:
- materials acquired for research on Bennett’s two books (History of Manual and IndustrialEducation Up To 1870 and History of Manual and Industrial Education: 1870-1917 );
- ephemera gathered during forty years as editor of Industrial Education magazine;
- technical books and course outlines published during the early years of the Manual Training Movement in Sweden, England, France, Germany, and the United States; and
- books on art instruction published in the first half of the nineteenth century. Within these categories, the collection also provides a good deal of information about Bennett and his activities in the Peoria area.
Full Texts of Significant Work Online
- Bennett, Charles A. History of manual and industrial education, 1870 to 1917. Peoria, Ill.: The Manual Arts Press, 1937.
- Bennett, Charles A. The manual arts. Peoria, Ill.: The Manual Arts Press, 1917.
On deposit at the University since 1980, this collection contains more than ten thousand items pertaining to the history of Peoria and central Illinois. Among the holdings are: a nearly complete run of city directories beginning with 1844, most cross indexed by occupation, business, and street address; biographical dictionaries covering residents from 1880-1912; an index with abstracts for fifteen area newspapers published between 1834 and 1864; city and county maps including Sanborn Fire Insurance Atlases; and almost 275 linear feet of vertical files containing ephemera indexed by broad subjects such as family and street names and business and organization types. Holdings also include a library of publications by area authors, a reference collection of books on central Illinois history, and thousands of photographic images of early Peoria, a number of which can be viewed online at .
To search the holdings of the Peoria Historical Society, visit .
Full Texts of Significant Work Online
- Coles, Edward. Report of the Secretary of the Treasury, in conformity to the provisions of the act of fifteenth May, 1820, for the relief of the inhabitants of the village of Peoria, in the state of Illinois. Washington: Gales & Seaton, 1821.
- Ballance, Charles. The history of Peoria, Illinois. Peoria, Ill.: N.C. Nason, 1870.
- Rice, James Montgomery. Peoria city and county, Illinois; a record of settlement, organization, progress and achievement. Chicago: S.J. Clarke, 1912.
- Vol. 1.
- Vol. 2.
Jack °®¶¹´«Ã½ÊÓƵ developed his talent as a combat photographer during the Korean War where he earned a Bronze Star, three battle stars, and a Presidential Citation. After discharge he worked for a Peoria television station as their first newsreel photographer before joining the Journal Star newspaper in 1955. Over the next twenty five years, he attained a regional prominence few have ever equaled.
The collection contains over 2,200 images shot by °®¶¹´«Ã½ÊÓƵ from 1955 to 1977. Most are black and white, residing on prints and 35mm slides as well as on negatives in several formats up to 4×5. The majority of images were shot for Sunday feature pages and focus on human interest with subjects such as: small town life, architecture, sports and recreation, religion, cemeteries, politics, the homeless, the Illinois River, and country life.
The collection is being digitized and indexed; over 2,200 images are currently available online at
Featured Collections
Additional Resources
Items in Special Collections exist in a wide range of formats and media including: books, pamphlets, postcards, stereopticon views, letters, diaries, maps, atlases, magazines, newsletters, scrapbooks, photographic prints, glass plate negatives, nitrate base negatives, motion picture film, slides, and magnetic recordings. The nature of the materials and the diversity of formats and media have several important implications for the researcher.
Perhaps the most important of these is that logistical considerations as well as conservation concerns may prevent all items relevant to a particular topic from being grouped together. Anyone using the collection should, therefore, be prepared to repeat his/her investigations in different groupings of material and to recognize certain items may be more difficult to access or copy. Nitrate base negatives, for example, are refrigerated and require time to brought up to room temperature before they can be viewed; producing prints from these negatives is difficult and entails higher cost and longer lead time than printing from conventional negatives.
Another factor which may make resources in Special Collections seem less user-friendly than those in the rest of the Library is that much of the material is primary rather than secondary. Someone doing research on an area business, for example, might be presented with multiple boxes of original correspondence and records instead of a book or article on the history of the firm. In such a case, considerable effort will be required on the part of the visitor to interpret the material and to decide which, if any, items should be copied.
Similarly, even the basic question of whether a given topic is covered in a particular resource (and to what degree) may not be answerable without extensive investigation. A inquiry about nineteenth century brass foundries may first require reading decades of city directories to determine business names and locations, then review of vertical files and inventories of image collections by street addresses, and finally examination of prints and negatives to determine whether any of the structures depicted could be foundries. Images present a particular challenge in that each may contain an almost infinite number of subjects depending upon what the researcher is looking for. While no inventories may specifically list horse drawn vehicles, for example, an extensive review of negatives and prints listed by street or business may reveal a significant number of such vehicles even if they are not the central focus of the image.
Although the staff will provide assistance whenever possible, the diversity of the collections will cause the success of any given inquiry to depend largely on the time and energy the individual researcher is able to commit.
Hours for Special Collections
Please call or email the Special Collections Center to make an appointment:
Phone: (309) 677-2822
Email: [email protected]
For information regarding Peoria Historical Society Collections, please contact PHS directly at [email protected] or (309) 674-1921.
Additional Centers
Sports Communication Resource Center
The Sports Communication Resource Center focuses on the history of sports communication in America — featuring papers, recordings, media guides, and books about °®¶¹´«Ã½ÊÓƵ, Peoria, Central Illinois, and selected regional and national interests. It encompasses the °®¶¹´«Ã½ÊÓƵ Athletics deposit as well as the Robert Pille and Jim Obert collections.
Jim Obert Sportswriting Collection
Jim Obert worked as a sportswriter for the Peoria Journal Star, covering golf and bowling in the area. The collection includes newspaper clippings, photographs, magazine articles and reports from 1938 through 1994.
°®¶¹´«Ã½ÊÓƵ Athletics Deposit
The °®¶¹´«Ã½ÊÓƵ Athletics Deposit includes sports programs, photographs, correspondence, scorecards and other memorabilia from various °®¶¹´«Ã½ÊÓƵ men’s and women’s teams.
Robert Pille Collection
°®¶¹´«Ã½ÊÓƵ graduate Robert Pille ’50 began his career as a reporter for the Peoria Journal Star in 1943. He spent the last 22 years of his career covering Big Ten sports for the Chicago Sun-Times, retiring in 1988. The collection consists of his articles and a variety of sports programs, books and audio recordings.
Hours of Operation
| Summer Hours | By Appointment Only |
Call (309) 677-2822 or email [email protected] to make an appointment.