The Sangamon County Historical Society has been sharing the stories of Springfield and Sangamon County since its founding in 1961. President Linda Schneider and Mike Kienzler, a researcher for the society’s online historical resource SangamonLink, join Community Voices to talk about the organization’s work, upcoming programs, and the importance of preserving local history.
The society hosts free monthly programs exploring different aspects of local history, with many of its upcoming programs taking place at historic sites and locations throughout Springfield. The upcoming schedule includes:
- Tuesday, Nov. 17, 2026, at 5:30 p.m. – Betsy Dollar, executive director of the Springfield Art Association, shares her memories of Marshall Field’s in Chicago at Christmas. The program takes place at Lincoln Library, 326 S. Seventh St., in Springfield.
- Wednesday, Dec. 9, 2026 – The society’s annual holiday party will be held at the Pasfield House. This event is for members only.
- Tuesday, Jan. 19, 2027, at 5:30 p.m. – Karen Conn, owner of the Inn at 835, discusses Bell Miller, the Springfield businesswoman who built the historic building. The program takes place at the Inn at 835, 835 S. Second St.
- Tuesday, Feb. 16, 2027, at 5:30 p.m. – A program and visit to the Springfield and Central Illinois African American History Museum, 1440 Monument Ave.
- Tuesday, March 16, 2027, at 5:30 p.m. – A tour of the new Springfield High School and a history of the school presented by Mr. Lightfoot.
- Tuesday, April 20, 2027, at 5:30 p.m. – A visit to the Lawrence School Library, 101 E. Laurel St., home to a library designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.
- Tuesday, May 18, 2027, at 5:30 p.m. – Bud Farrar discusses the history and renovation of the Condell House, built in 1842. The program takes place in the Carnegie Room at Lincoln Library. Following the presentation, attendees can visit the Condell House at 605 S. Fourth St. for an optional tour.
- Tuesday, June 15, 2027, at 5:30 p.m. – The society’s annual meeting will be held at Clayville Historic Site near Pleasant Plains. The meeting includes the introduction of the new board, recognition of retiring board members, and the presentation of grants to local organizations working on historic projects.
Membership starts at $30 annually for a regular membership, with additional membership levels available. Members also receive the society’s newsletter, which includes information about upcoming programs and historical articles. Those interested in joining can visit sancohis.org and select the membership link.
The society also supports local history and preservation projects through its annual grants program. Grants of up to $1,000 are available to local organizations working on historic projects. Applications are available through the society’s website and are generally due between mid-April and May 1, with awards announced and presented at the annual meeting in June. Past recipients have included local churches, museums, and community organizations working on historical restoration and digitization projects.
Kienzler discusses SangamonLink, a free online encyclopedia of Sangamon County history launched in 2013. The resource covers everything from local businesses and notable residents to coal mining, organized crime and lesser-known stories connected to the community. Kienzler also explains how community members contribute photographs, research, and family stories that help expand the historical record.
Both guests emphasize that Springfield and Sangamon County have a rich history that extends far beyond Abraham Lincoln. Through its programs, research, and community involvement, the Sangamon County Historical Society works to make sure the people, places, and stories that shaped the area are not forgotten.
Learn more about the Sangamon County Historical Society at sancohis.org and explore SangamonLink at sangamoncountyhistory.org.
Melissa Snider:
Welcome to Community Voices, a production of NPR Illinois. I'm your co-host, Melissa Snider. Joining me today are members of the Sangamon County Historical Society, Linda Schneider, the president, and Mike Kienzler, a researcher for the SangamonLink, which is a historical resource provided by the Historical Society. We're going to get to know the Historical Society and some of the things they do, including their upcoming programs. Linda, Mike, thank you so much for joining me today.
Mike Kienzler:
Howdy
Linda Schneider:
Thank you.
Melissa Snider:
So Linda, let's start with you as the president. For people who might not be familiar with the Historical Society, can you tell us a little bit about the organization and what its mission is?
Linda Schneider:
Sangamon County Historical Society was founded in 1961. The mission of the Sangamon County Historical Society is to perpetuate and create interest in the history of Springfield and Sangamon County and promote education and literary purposes. We have a monthly program. It's held on the third Tuesday of the month from 5.30 to 6.30. It's free and open to the public. We have a variety of different topics. It's traditionally held in the Carnegie Room at Lincoln Library, but actually this year we are going off-site for most of our programming. So we're going to be visiting different sites in Springfield.
Melissa Snider:
Oh, that's fun. Take a little field trip.
Linda Schneider:
Yes.
Melissa Snider:
So this takes place on the third Tuesday of every month, you said?
Linda Schneider:
Yes. We don't have a program in October because we had the Cemetery Walk. We consider that our monthly program, which is always the first Sunday in October.
Melissa Snider:
That was the Echoes of Yesteryear: A Walk Through Oak Ridge Cemetery. Actors portrayed historical figures that have been buried there, and I spoke with Susan Helm. She's the chair of the Cemetery Walk, and I also attended the event. So for those of you who missed the event, you can listen to it and my conversation with Susan at nprillinois.org, head over to our Community Voices page. So for your November monthly event, is there a speaker or what is that event?
Linda Schneider:
It is going to be held at Lincoln Library on November 17th, 5:30. Betsy Dollar, the executive director of the Springfield Art Association is going to be sharing her memories of Marshall Fields in Chicago at Christmas time. That's a big department store in downtown Chicago. Not really about Sangamon County per se, but probably a lot of residents from Springfield in the area would go up to Chicago to see the windows at Marshall Fields and to shop at the Christmas time. Betsy is from that area and actually worked at Marshall Fields as did some of her family, so she's going to be sharing her remembrances of that.
Melissa Snider:
That's so cool. Then you have a holiday party in December?
Linda Schneider:
Right. It's Wednesday, December 9th, and it's going to be at the Pasfield House. That is going to be for members only, though it's very easy to become a member.
Melissa Snider:
How would one go about becoming a member?
Linda Schneider:
Well, you can go on our website and click on the membership link. Our yearly fee is only $30 for regular membership, or you can give a little bit more. I think the Pioneer level is 100, and it goes up from there. It helps us be able to do these monthly programs, to do our annual cemetery walk, which we are probably most famous for, supporting SagamonLink, and then also for our grants program that we're able to do every year. One of the benefits of membership is we have a monthly newsletter that goes out, so it also has information about all our upcoming events, and then from Mike, usually there's an article from SangamonLink that's in the newsletter. So, you know, it's a very nice historical little piece.
Melissa Snider:
Definitely. I love that. You also have a few events January through May, right?
Linda Schneider:
That's correct. So in January, it's January 19th, we're going to be meeting at the Inn at 835. Karen Conn, who owns the Inn at 835, is going to be talking about the woman who actually had that building built. Her name was Bell Miller. She was a florist and actually had greenhouses all the way from 2nd Street over to 1st Street, I believe, and Canedy to Lawrence. So all that area there were greenhouses. And this was like the first sort of transient apartment building, I think, built in Springfield around the early 1900s. Mike, if you know more about this, you can interrupt me if I'm getting this wrong.
Mike Kienzler:
Bell Miller was a pretty remarkable businesswoman. She went from arranging flowers to running this first luxury apartment building, certainly.. in Springfield. It's still kind of a luxury apartment building today. Legislators and so forth, a lot of them live there, I believe.
Melissa Snider:
So where is this located at?
Linda Schneider:
835 South Second. So that's in January. Then in February, we're going to be meeting at the Springfield and Central Illinois African American History Museum. That's at 1440 Monument Avenue in Springfield. That is on Tuesday, February 16th at 5:30. It's also African American History Month, and so they're sharing their museum with us and giving us a program there. Then in March, there's a lot of interest in this already. We're going to be meeting at Springfield High School, touring the new high school, and hearing a history of the high school by Mr. Lightfoot there. That's on Tuesday, March 16th, 5:30. Then in April, Tuesday, April 20th, we're going to be at the Lawrence School Library. That address is 101 East Laurel Street in Springfield and that's where the Frank Lloyd Wright designed library is. Then on Tuesday, May 18th, we're actually going to be back at the Carnegie Room at Lincoln Library at 5:30 that night. Bud Farrar will be doing a program on the Condell House. It was built in 1842. It's right across from the Executive Mansion, and the address is 605 South 4th Street. It's a new house that he--or it's not a new house-- a very old house, but he's done the renovation on that. So Bud is actually going to be talking about doing that renovation and then the history of that house. Then after the program, if folks want to, you can go over to the site and he will do tours of the house.
Melissa Snider:
Well, that's super cool.
Linda Schneider:
Yeah, and then the last thing on Tuesday, June 15th at 5:30, we'll have our annual meeting. This year we're going to hold that out at Clayville by Pleasant Plains.
Melissa Snider:
What does your annual meeting entail?
Linda Schneider:
Usually we introduce our new board and thank the retiring board that's going out. And we also have a grants program. We usually give a grant up to $1,000 to different local organizations that are doing historic projects. So we usually give the awards and the checks that night. Things that we did in the past, it's like the St. Paul's Episcopal Church, they have a lot of memorabilia regarding Abraham Lincoln and they wanted to build a cabinet. So they were able to get the money to have the materials to do that. The village of Divernon—they were restoring their old railroad station and needed some help with that. Money has gone to Clayville in the past to kind of help out with that restoration. Also for digitizing, I think we gave a grant this past year to the African American Museum to help with digitizing some of their materials that they have.
Melissa Snider:
How does an organization go about applying for one of those grants?
Linda Schneider:
Again, they can go on our website. There is a tab about grants. Usually the grant applications are due mid-April to the 1st of May, and then those are awarded in June.
Melissa Snider:
Awesome. So you rely on donations really for those grants, right?
Linda Schneider:
That is correct. It's through our membership dues, and then people are very generous and help us with donations and stuff, but we always can use more.
Melissa Snider:
For sure. So if somebody does want to donate, how can they do that?
Linda Schneider:
Well, they can go to our website, www.sancohis.org, or they can send it the old-fashioned way through the post office. Our address is post office box 9744 in Springfield, Illinois 62791.
Melissa Snider:
So Mike, you are a researcher for SangamonLink, which is a historical resource provided by the Historical Society. Can you give us a little background on what SangamonLink is?
Mike Kienzler:
SangamonLink is another free service of the Historical Society. It's the online encyclopedia of Sangamon County history. It covers all sorts of topics, relatively few of them involving Abraham Lincoln. It's 24-7, absolutely free to read, and people who are interested in local history, a surprising number of them, will contact me with ideas or in some cases with entire articles. The very last post I did was about some really cool photographs that were taken in 1923 of the Tuxhorn coal mine, which was out toward Mechanicsburg, I guess. It gave people a chance to see the warts and all atmosphere around a working coal mine in the 1920s. Even for people who had coal mine jobs in those days, it was a tough life. It was a hardscrabble life. That came from a gentleman who lives on what is the former mine site, was interested in the history of his own house, and just more or less by chance ran across these photos and provided them to SangamonLink. It's that sort of cool thing that was one of the reasons we set up SangamonLink in the first place back in 2013.
Melissa Snider:
That's super cool. I love seeing old photographs and just the experiences that people had.
Mike Kienzler:
These were great photographs too, which you often don't get. I use a lot of newspaper material, and that's pretty degraded, but these were original photographs of the mine site. They were in much better detail than SangamonLink could reproduce them on our website.
Melissa Snider:
That's awesome. And you did a lot of the research for the cemetery walk?
Mike Kienzler:
I do some of the research, a lot of the research, for the cemetery walk. The Oak Ridge Cemetery Foundation, where I have a second side gig calls Oak Ridge Cemetery a “museum of people,” and it really is. There are 70,000 and some burials out there, and there's a story behind everyone. Putting those together is really fascinating.
Melissa Snider:
Yeah, oh I bet.
Mike Kienzler:
That's one of the resources that we're able to do with SangamonLink is spread the word out. We get people visiting from all over the place. We have some perennial favorites when it comes to SangamonLink entries. Franklin Life, people whose parents had insurance companies at Franklin Life or Sangamo Electric. There are a lot of Sangamo Electric meters still out there kicking, and people want to know information about them. There's a former Sangamo engineer who monitors the site and answers their questions. It's great. You know, and then local mobsters, they get a lot of hits year after year after year, and so does Abraham Lincoln's dog.
Melissa Snider:
So you can see how many times people visit each one of these pages or topics.
Mike Kienzler:
And the site overall. We get about 250 to 300 hits a day, 8,000 to 10,000 a month. Facebook posts generate some. Google generates some. The Historical Society's homepage generates a lot, but that's the sort of thing we try to do. We're telling people about the history of Sangamon County that really they wouldn't otherwise know about, I think, in many cases.
Melissa Snider:
Where else do you find all that information?
Mike Kienzler:
You simply can't, unless you're doing it all the time like I am. You don't run across it. That's right.
Melissa Snider:
Oh, you probably know all kinds of cool things.
Mike Kienzler:
One of the surprises I found out was that when Frank Zito, the local quote unquote mafia godfather, the only time he went to prison was in 1931, and one of the prosecution witnesses was my grandfather.
Melissa Snider:
Really? That's awesome.
Mike Kienzler:
I didn't know that until I started looking up Frank.
Melissa Snider:
That was your grandfather, you said?
Mike Kienzler:
Yeah, he was a trucker. He hauled sugar for the bootleggers.
Melissa Snider:
That's really cool.
Mike Kienzler:
This kind of shows how SangamonLink works sometimes. The Historical Society back in 2015, got an inquiry from some people who wanted to know something about their grandfather, John Hickey. They knew basically nothing about him except that he had grown up in Springfield, and so I started looking him up. Turns out John Hickey is in the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum because he was one of the first 600 pilots anywhere in the United States. The reason they cut it off at 600 is because that's when World War I started and they started training pilots. So Mr. Hickey is in the Space Museum. His grandchildren did not know it. What is even weirder is that a couple of his grandsons were pilots themselves. They were fascinated by air flight. Lord only knows how that works. There were two sets of grandchildren because he had two wives, and I got information from both sides that added to it. So, not only does SangamonLink post stuff, but we benefit from what we learn from other people as well.
Melissa Snider:
So if somebody wants to contribute or put in some of what they know, how can they go about doing that?
Mike Kienzler:
My email address is on the site, and that's the simplest way just to contact me through email.
Melissa Snider:
How do you confirm information?
Mike Kienzler:
Well, then you start going into things like old newspapers. Newspapers started to become searchable online. Old State Journal Registers are wealth of information right up until the last 10 years, I'm afraid. So newspapers, genealogy sites, archives, old history books, there is a lot of material. It's a golden age for amateur historians like me.
Melissa Snider:
I love it. What do you hope people take away from learning more about local history?
Mike Kienzler:
It's so difficult to know how your community developed if you have no sense of the people who were here before and the stories and the developments that happened before. You see old buildings, or you have a bad fire, and you wonder what used to be in that, who built that building, and why was it there? You can go back. If you have a resource like the Historical Society, you can go back and do that. There are just so many great people that have lived here that we lose track of in the shadow of Abraham Lincoln. There's much more to Springfield than Lincoln. He was a big deal, and I'm glad he was around because it meant a lot of people studied Springfield, and I can steal from them. There's so much more to Springfield, Sangamon County in general.
Melissa Snider:
Yeah, we got to keep all the people alive, all the history alive.
Mike Kienzler:
Exactly. There's an old line, you really die twice. Once when you stop breathing, and the second time when no one knows your name. Well, this helps extend some of those names.
Melissa Snider:
It's a great way to honor people. And then what about you, Linda?
Linda Schneider:
Well, I became involved with the Sangamon County Historical Society as an actress with the annual cemetery walk. My husband Don and I have done that for many, many, many years. I portrayed many fascinating people over the years. One of them I remember was a woman. I can't remember her last name. Her first name was Henrietta, and she had a farm near where Springfield High School is now. And you know, there's a Henrietta Street there.
Melissa Snider:
I used to live there.
Mike Kienzler:
It's Henrietta Ulrich.
Linda Schneider:
Thank you. I couldn't remember her last name, but it was a fascinating story to tell her story, for any of us that have lived or driven by Henrietta Street to know who it was named for.
Mike Kienzler:
She came from German Russian, not quite nobility, but very prominent family in Russia, and she had to leave. The story that's probably not true, but it's too good not to mention is that she sold her fabulous pearl necklace to buy the west side of Springfield.
Melissa Snider:
Once again, your website is..
Linda Schneider:
www.sancohis.org.
Mike Kienzler:
sancohis.org.
Melissa Snider:
You can find all the upcoming programs there, your monthly programs, and SangamonLink--Is there a link to that?
Mike Kienzler:
There's links from sancohis.org to SangamonLink and there are links the other direction too.
Linda Schneider:
We encourage folks to come and enjoy our monthly programs and maybe think about becoming a member. It's very easy.
Melissa Snider:
Thank you two so much for being here with me today.
Mike Kienzler:
Thanks, Melissa.
Linda Schneider:
It was fun.
Melissa Snider:
Once again, you're listening to Community Voices. I'm your co-host, Melissa Snider in the studio with Linda Schneider and Mike Kienzler with the Sangamon County Historical Society.
Dialogue transcribed by Microsoft Speech Service, an AI feature of Microsoft Word. Reviewed by humans for readability and accuracy.
