By Holly Westerfield
Historical societies began appearing in America in the late 19th and early 20th century by amateur historians who wanted to celebrate their community and the role their families had played in building it. They were often most interested in commemorating local heroes, preserving the legacies of their ancestors and saving historic architecture from being torn down in the name of progress. To this day, most historical societies are still run by ordinary people who are driven by their passion for their community. No two volunteers found their way to the Delaware County Historical Society the same way, but their work breathes life into it all the same.
The oldest house in Muncie, Indiana sits on the corner of Washington St. and Mulberry St. It is known as the Moore house, and it was built in the 1860s and passed down through three generations of women in the same family before being donated to the historical society in 1983. The two-story Greek Revival style home is one-half of the Delaware County Historical Society, the rest of which can be found in the squat building just next door.
The Moore house is rather unique, as far as historical buildings go.
Andrew Thieme, a Ball State student and regular volunteer at DCHS says that when the Moore family donated the house in 1983, they also donated all of the furniture and furnishings inside of the building. This means that the historical society has been able to keep the building period accurate with the original furniture, something that is fairly unique for a house of its age.
In fact, Thieme says the second floor, with the exception of a few items here and there, looks nearly identical to how would have looked in the 19th century.
The Delaware County Historical Society uses the Moore house to display a variety of exhibits that change every six months or so.
Their headquarters next door is where they spend most of their time. There, the walls are lined with filing cabinets full of official records, birth and death certificates shelves of binders, yearbooks, books and journals.
In their library they have at least one book covering the history of every county in the state. From the old ballot box on display, the first of its kind ever used in Muncie and collected the vote which changed them into a city, to the hundreds of letters ranging as far back as the Civil War, every object in that room played an important part in local history and the lives of the people who lived there.
Perhaps none more so than their collection of family bibles.
According to Karen Good, another volunteer at the DCHS, these books are not on display for the public to see for the book’s safety. She says that family bibles are unique and incredibly valuable historical records. People would carefully record births, deaths, and marriages in the pages of their family bibles for safe keeping. This was one of the only ways people were able to keep track of their family lineage, so each family bible is one of a kind.
Though the volunteers are united in their goal of preserving and teaching the history of Delaware County, they all got there differently. Some started as young as 8-years-old, others found their passion for history through hobbies or personal projects later in life. As they spent more time at the historical society each volunteer found themselves filling a unique role within the group.
Karen Good says she got started by looking into to her own ancestry. She eventually became the person to go to if someone was looking to recover a forgotten branch or two on their forgotten family trees. She enjoys the hunt; tracing the lives of missing and almost forgotten individuals through the various documents they leave behind. She says it’s like shes a crime scene investigator without the benefit of a crime scene.
Good says one of her most memorable finds came from an old pioneer cemetery. She discovered a row of gravestones, all with the same last name and all dated within a year of each other. Curious, Good says she did some research and discovered that this was the final resting place of a mother and her six children, who had all died of the same illness. There was only one survivor, the father, who eventually got remarried. Good was shocked to discover that his second wife was the widow of her own great-great-great-great grandfather. What started as a question about a row of graves in an old cemetery, ended up revealing a part of Good’s family history that she hadn’t been aware of.
On the other end of the spectrum is executive director Jim Waetcher, who fell in love with history as a child that he made his own museum when he was only 8-years-old. Today, Waetcher is a man made of stories and driven by a passion to share them. He seems to know a little bit about everything, but he relishes in making the little connections.
Waetcher says the most recent example happened on November 11, 2018, Armistice day and the 100 year anniversary of the end of World War I. A box of letters from World War I had recently been donated, and so Waetcher curiously picked a letter at random from the box. The letter was typed on a typewriter, and to Waetcher’s surprise and excitement, it was dated November 11th, 1918. The letter ended with a complaint about some sort of commotion outside and the author signing off so he could go investigate the excitement he was hearing in the streets. Below this, hastily added in pen with a shaking hand, the author exclaims that he cannot focus on writing this letter right now because he had just learned that the war was over.
Waetcher says it gave him chills to realize of all the letters to pull, that specific one had been written exactly 100 years before, almost to the hour.
Andrew Thieme was already a history major when he first came to the historical society, but his involvement in the DCHS has helped him found his own lecture series, Footlocker Stories. He uses artifacts to tell the personal stories of soldiers to help the public better understand the past. According to his website, Thieme speaks at schools and other events to try to make history feel more real.
Thieme is always on the lookout for a new story that needs telling, so he is currently working his way through a recently donated box of letters written by soldiers from the Civil War to Vietnam. The situations described in these letters seem to transcend time. From different wars and about different men, both letters home were written by commanding officers because the soldier had been injured in the line of duty. Both men were shot in the arm, both men made it to the hospital, but only one made it home.
The Delaware County Historical Society has a huge collection of historical artifacts and they frequently receive new donations. They save historic artifacts from rotting away in someone’s basement and put them on display so the public can see them and learn about the time period they are from. Below is a timeline of just a handful of the historic treasures in their collection.