Bloomington, Ill., creates a bend in U.S. 66, midway on the long, straight run across the dark prairie from St. Louis to Chicago. A traveler notices the sign —POPULATION 41,500—and wonders why the place resonates slightly in the mind. Is this the Bloomington of the movie Breaking Away? No, that Bloomington is in Indiana. Ah! Memory serves. This Bloomington is the place where Adlai Stevenson II grew up a renegade (i.e., a Democrat) and now lies buried with his ancestors, men of substance in the town since the very beginning; men who had urged a Republican circuit lawyer named Abraham Lincoln to run for President.
The traveler, a Middle Westerner turned self-made Eastern snob, assumes nothing else interesting has ever happened in Bloomington. The traveler is wrong. Bloomington, Ill., is the county seat of McLean County. If you are talking corn and soybeans, McLean County is the capital of the world. If you are talking heartland, you are standing on it: topsoil two, three, five feet deep, divided on the plot map into square-mile sections still owned by descendants of German and Scotch-Irish immigrants who cleared and settled their way across Pennsylvania, Kentucky and Indiana, out onto the prairie. If you are talking history in McLean County, you are talking about a place that has achieved its destiny, and now has time for a backward look. The traveler discovers the pathos of the conquest of the prairie sod, and romance in the development of hybrid corn by the Funk Brothers Seed Co.
Such stories are regional legacies, essential to understanding of time and place. All over the U.S. they now are being reclaimed from attics, dusty files and the memories of the old timers by the phenomenal burgeoning of local historical societies.
Over the past 20 years or so, for example, the McLean County Historical Society has been keeping an eye on an object in its care known as the McNulta time capsule. The McNulta in question, a Bloomington man, was a Civil War general in the 94th Illinois Volunteers. The time capsule was an etched glass bottle, seven inches high and sealed with a broken stopper, containing several mysterious thin packages wrapped in cloth. A notification tucked into its base read: "Souvenirs of the meeting of the Society of the Army of Tennessee. Held at Chicago November 1879. To be kept unopened for 100 years."
McNulta went upstate to Chicago in 1895, and died in 1900 at the age of 62. In 1858 he had started moving west from New York City, working as a horse dealer and "race rider." He sold tobacco in Bloomington, enlisted in the Army in 1861 and made brigadier general in four years. But in 1874 he was defeated for reelection to the U.S. Congress by Adlai Stevenson (Adlai Stevenson the first, people stress in McLean County, meaning the one who went on to become Vice President under Grover Cleveland from 1893 to 1897). McNulta read law, as was the go-getter's custom, and almost certainly profited by his duties as appointed receiver for an extraordinary number of bankrupt railroads. He was a man of his time and place, and he thought in terms of securing the future.