VC HISTORY, EPISODE 3 with Mark Denman

DACC Executive Director of Public Relations and VC History host, Lara Conkin sits down and talks with Mark Denman.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Welcome to BC History, a program celebrating the 200th birthday of Vermilion County, Illinois. I'm your host, Laura Conklin, and I'm indulging my love of history by uncovering some of the lesser-known stories about Vermilion County in its formative years. My guest today is Mr. Mark Denman. Mark is a Danville native, a graduate of Danville High School, an educator, retired from District 118, where he served as teacher, principal to multiple schools, and retired as superintendent after 40 years of service. He serves as the board president of both the I'm gonna get this wrong, Illinois Genealogic and Historical Society.

SPEAKER_02 0:45

Close, Ileana.

SPEAKER_00 0:46

Ileana, okay, Ileana Genealogic and Historical Society, and the Vermillion County Museum Society, where I'm also a member. And Mark has a Danville School named for him, and a large bronze plaque at the Bowman Street McDonald's. So I'm in the presence of greatness. Welcome, Mark. Let's talk about your love of history.

SPEAKER_02 1:07

Well, thank you.

SPEAKER_00 1:08

So when did you were what what did you teach? What subject were you a teacher of?

SPEAKER_02 1:14

I taught seventh grade. Um at the beginning I taught English and language arts, and towards the end of my teaching career, I taught um all subjects.

SPEAKER_00 1:22

Okay, so not specifically a history teacher.

SPEAKER_02 1:27

No, I was it was departmentalized when I first became a seventh grade teacher, but the last three or four years um it was middle school, so I taught history, science, social studies, uh, and math along with reading in English.

SPEAKER_00 1:42

So where did the love of history come from?

SPEAKER_02 1:45

You know, I really don't know. I was always interested in um what came before. I spent a lot of time uh with my older grandmother going through a hat box of pictures. Uh I enjoyed stories about Abraham Lincoln, and uh and I enjoyed uh history as a subject in school. So I was always very interested then, as a coincidence, I was in the 100th graduating class of Danville High School, and uh the principal asked me to uh co-head up um the centennial edition of our school newspaper. So uh I did a lot of work on that, and uh and I've just uh always been interested in local history.

SPEAKER_00 2:26

So all of the history that that you have been interested in, I know that you participated in the Dan Valeri Community College video about Mary Miller, the documentary that we did. Um what are what is what is like the one most interesting story that you have come across? I mean, we know about Joe Tanner, we know about Uncle Joe Cannon, we know about Abraham Lincoln. What is what is a really interesting story that you have come across?

SPEAKER_02 3:01

Well, there's so many it's hard to choose, but um one that comes to mind speaking of Danville High School, uh you look at that big building and uh big student body, it's been there a long time, but uh very few people realize that Danville High School started with just 16 students, uh five uh boys and eleven girls, uh, in the storeroom on the second floor of a hardware store located in the parking lot where the uh old National Bank is, next to the Civic Center.

unknown 3:30

Oh wow.

SPEAKER_02 3:31

But um in those days high school was like college, and that was in 1870. And uh the school district still has uh all the bound volumes of the names of the students and the grades that they earned. Um the coursework they took, they were like in 15 classes at once. Uh things like physiology, um economy of wealth, uh Latin, Greek. Um it's really amazing uh to look upon it.

SPEAKER_00 4:02

So did they have the same sort of eight-hour school day that we have now? Or I mean 15 subjects, that's a that's a lot to do.

SPEAKER_02 4:12

I don't know if they did them every day.

SPEAKER_00 4:14

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 4:15

Uh they only had two teachers.

SPEAKER_00 4:17

Oh my goodness.

SPEAKER_02 4:18

So they shared. I imagine the times would be somewhat similar. Uh I think the students also went home for lunch. Of course, when Danville High School started, uh Danville was a village. Right. Uh probably didn't go much further than Fairchild Street or even uh Williams Street. Uh probably just between a thousand and two thousand people in the city.

SPEAKER_00 4:42

But those students would have walked. Oh yeah. If you think a horse. Or rode a horse from Fairchild, William Street, that area. Um so when when did the building when did the high school grow to be what we know now as Danville High School?

SPEAKER_02 5:01

Well, like it's I said, it started in a second-story storeroom of a of the yeoman and shed Lesur Hardware Store. And it grew in numbers, so maybe in 1872 or three, it moved to the top floor of uh the largest grade school, which was where Old Washington School was. It wasn't the Washington School that people still alive know, but the one that preceded it in the same location. And Danville High School was uh there until about 1890 when there were so many students uh they had to uh build a new high school. And it was right north of the old Washington School, and about where the um Great Lakes, I think it's Great Lakes Credit Union is. Okay. It used to be um uh the top part of that, the north part of that block. And that first high school building was about the size of a grade school, and it only had about you know 300 students. And uh in those days, like I said, very few uh students went that far. Uh sixth through eighth grade was the norm. Um, it wasn't expected, uh sorry to say, uh, for girls to go very far. Right. And uh they would help at home, and then even the boys, many of them when they turned 14 or 15, got jobs. But with the advent of the child labor laws and people wanting more education, uh, Danville decided to build a new high school in the early 1920s. And um the first site they chose is where St. James Church is, that block. And those days you had to have a referendum uh to buy a new property, and it was defeated. And luckily it was because the block that St. James is on would not have held uh the student body that we soon had. And um we chose the present location of the high school uh at the corner of Fairchild and Jackson Street that used to be called Williams Pasture, uh, named after the family that owned it, the Amos Williams family, one of the pioneer families of Danville. And it was a site of circuses, revivals, tent revivals, um, all sorts of uh community activities. Uh the family did not want to sell it, but the school district went to Eminent Domain and purchased the property about $20,000. And the school board decided to overbuild. They wanted to build a school that would last for a very long time. And so when Danville High School was opened in 1924, it was probably the most expensive high school in this section of the nation. It cost a million dollars back when a million dollars was a great deal of money. In fact, um, until the World War II, if you said million dollar high school, people knew you were talking about Danville High School because that was its nickname.

SPEAKER_00 8:12

Oh wow.

SPEAKER_02 8:13

And uh and the building was built very well. Um it's been in service for 102 years, and it looks in great shape. Right. Um, of course they've added additions, but the bulk of the building, uh the the auditorium, which uh you just don't see auditoriums like that anymore.

SPEAKER_00 8:30

Right, the the Dick Van Dyke Auditorium.

SPEAKER_02 8:32

The white halls, the tall ceilings. Um it was built to last, and I think it'll last for many more years to come.

SPEAKER_00 8:39

So how did they know? I mean, there's as I I I'm from Indiana, so you know I've I've come to Danville as an adult. Um, but there's a railroad crossing just right there, right? There's a bridge um that goes over Fairchild Street that's just right on the edge of the road.

SPEAKER_02 8:57

It crosses Jackson, too, and yes, that was part of the design. Uh in 1924, buildings were heated by coal. Uh Danville High School, I'm not quite sure the exact number, 300,000, 400,000 square feet. Uh in fact, the heating plant was in a building apart from the high school, about maybe uh half a football length away. That's where the industrial arts classes were, and underneath uh in the lower level was the big boiler. Um and the trains would stop early every morning and shoots would come out to put the coal into the basement of that building. And we in the old days we had three custodians called firemen. That's all they did the entire shift in the winter would be to stoke the boiler to keep that building warm.

SPEAKER_00 9:46

Oh my goodness. So good thing the train stopped there.

SPEAKER_02 9:50

Now you mentioned uh we're out at at DAC. Um, of course, Mary Miller, the founder of DAC, um, really DAC was a very small part of her career. She spent um 36 years at Danville High School, and she wasn't there when they started the school. Uh, but her father was a road contractor, he lived in Lebanon, Indiana, and he was building the road between Covington and Danville, and he saw the new high school, of course, it was just a marvel, and he went home and told his uh young daughter who had just graduated from U of I with a master's degree, you need to apply to work there. I think it'd be a good place for you.

SPEAKER_00 10:31

Wow.

SPEAKER_02 10:32

And she did, and uh the rest is history.

SPEAKER_00 10:35

So, how unusual would it have been for a woman of her age and and the time that she grew up in to graduate from the U of I with a master's degree?

SPEAKER_02 10:47

Um, almost uh I would say in 1926 when she came to Denville High School, there was just there was just a handful of people, men or women, that had a master's degree. Uh, even at the high school, maybe that big staff, maybe two or three people. Um in those days, your elementary teachers, most of them just had they would um graduate from high school and then go to um like a teacher, more than a workshop, but maybe several weeks of teaching instruction. Um bachelor's degrees were required to teach at Danville High School, but very few teachers had master's degrees uh that early.

SPEAKER_00 11:27

So I've heard um different um I used to I used to laugh. I would hear about a normal school. And a normal school was a teacher school, correct? Okay, so is that what the what most teachers would do? Did a normal school give a bachelor's degree or well Illinois State was uh the normal school in Illinois.

SPEAKER_02 11:52

In fact, it used to be called Illinois State Normal. Okay, and uh you went there if you wanted a degree, but uh at our old Washington school, right south of the previous high school, um, like the little villages around Danville, it was common back then for farmers uh that wanted their kids to go to high school. Uh they would buy a house in Danville so their kids could go to school here. Uh many times in the villages in the early 1900s, the schools just went to maybe 10th grade.

SPEAKER_00 12:25

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 12:26

Now, by the 20s and 30s, they had high schools. Now, until the 20s and 30s, there would be like um a teacher preparation. It wasn't a full year, it was maybe several weeks, a month, were um primarily uh young women unmarried because you couldn't teach if you were married back then, if you were a woman. Uh they would enroll um usually in the summer uh at Washington School and the Danville Schools, and there would be teachers that would prepare them with methodologies and uh how to teach reading and mathematics, handwriting, how to discipline students effectively. Um I don't know if those were called normal schools, but certainly um there were normal college and universities, which Illinois State was one.

SPEAKER_00 13:14

Okay. So why couldn't you be a teacher and also be a married woman?

SPEAKER_02 13:21

You know, that's just the way it was. Uh uh of course a man could be married. Sure. Um I assume that they felt that uh it just wasn't appropriate. Uh it's hard to uh I've not done a lot of study on that, but I must you've also seen you've seen these uh contracts that teachers would sign in the late 1800s, early 1900s. Um it was even frowned upon for women to socialize with the opposite sex. But you know, if well they didn't want her to get married and have to get a new teacher. And until World War II, um the women faculty at Naval High School could not, I mean, if they were married, uh they lost their job.

SPEAKER_00 14:06

Oh wow. Now and I remember so um with Mary Miller, wasn't there also a required retirement age? Because I feel like she had to retire at 70. Or 65 and 65, okay.

SPEAKER_02 14:22

For district 118, I assume it was this way for the school district as well, you could work you could you could not work past, you could not work until you were 66. So in the year you turned 65, it was during the school year, you could finish the year. But that was the 65-year retirement age. And it was lucky that at that time Daniel Airy Committee Colleges uh separated. Uh, you know, the the junior college started at Danville High School in 1946. Right. When the veterans returned, the U of I asked the high school to have a junior college because they couldn't handle all the veterans with the GI Bill. The U of I uh ran it. Well, they were involved for two or three years, and then they pulled out because things had gotten back to normal. And Mary Miller, who had a full load as the English teacher, head of the English department, she talked the school district into keeping it. And so from 1946 to about 1965, Danville High School, the present Danville High School, had its four years of students, plus um, you know, freshmen and sophomores at the college. And she had extracurriculars and athletic teams and plays and dances. And uh she was born in 1900, so she could not have worked past 1965, 66. And luckily, um the college was getting so big that the kids had to come at night, there weren't teachers had to travel. And um she through former students she had in school that were involved in politics, and she was connected. The VA was um looking, they were uh this they were sort of not using some of the old dormitories, and they offered her some, and they had to get people in Washington to sign off on that. And uh she became she had been the dean of the college as long as part of District 118. In 1965, she became president, and I think she was the first female junior college president of the state, one of the few in the nation.

SPEAKER_00 16:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 16:37

And she so she was 65 when she started as president, and that was her way.

SPEAKER_00 16:42

In addition to saving the school, she also saved her job. So I know you said something about pioneer families, and I know one of the things that we've been doing with the 200th anniversary committee and also IGHS are these pioneer certificates.

SPEAKER_02 17:02

That's right. Um the museum uh director, uh Sue Richter, is co-chair of the 200th anniversary committee, along with our treasurer on the board, Todd Lee. They ask uh the Ileana Genealogical and Historical Society, which we call IGHS, if we'd like to be a part. And we looked into it and we're sponsoring with the committee. It's called the Pioneer Families Project. And Vermine County was founded in 1826, but there were a few pioneers before that because we were part of Edgar County. But we have a program that other societies have done that, if you can prove that you had a direct ancestor, that means a great-grandparent, great-great-grandparent, or so forth, and not an uncle or an aunt, but a direct ancestor who was here before 1875, we will provide the committee provides a beautiful certificate on behalf of the committee and IGHS. Now you have to do your family tree, but we only ask for documentation and proof for the ancestor who was here before 1875. We have three categories: trailblazers for the pioneers who are here before 1826, before we were a county. And then from 1826 to 1850, early pioneers, and then from 1851 to 1876, old settlers. And we've had almost 200 um do that, and we're still taking those. Uh, the form is on our website for IGHS, and it's also in our magazine, or you can pick up a copy um at IGHS, and we're in uh what used to be the uh Pape um funeral home, right? Funeral home, but for that was uh the Burhalder funeral home. We're right west, an old mansion, right west of the first Presbyterian church on North Street. And uh the fee is $10 to handle postage and handling costs, but um we'll be glad to help people do that too. We have we're open Tuesday through Saturdays, and our volunteers will help uh person uh fill out the form if need be.

SPEAKER_00 19:21

And I know I I saw on Facebook, and uh this you know this will live on in perpetuity, but you have an open house at IGHS coming up, correct? About your library?

SPEAKER_02 19:31

We do. We've been very lucky. Um we uh have been growing. We started uh just uh without a place. In 1964, a teacher at Danville High School called Lowell Vocale, he got a group of like-minded individuals who were interested in family history to form IGHS. There was only a handful of people, and they met and in his classroom at Danville High School after dinner uh one night a month, and the library was in a couple extra shelves in his bookcase in the back of his classroom. Um it took off, and the library has grown through the years. Um, we moved into the Danville Public Library until it got our collection got so big that uh they told us that um that we had they needed the space. So we got a storefront uh down on North Street, um across the street from the new restaurant, Breezy Tower, and down a bit. And uh we were renting it, and um Bob Pape, uh who was consolidating his Pape Burrholder funeral home with his larger funeral home, was looking to sell uh the former Berholder home. And uh he had approached the museum, the hospital, other groups, and it just didn't work out for them. Uh he approached us and uh it worked out for us, and so we moved in. And that was uh in the late uh 1990s, but since that time our collections have grown, and we were really out of space, especially for programming, and we were very fortunate uh there was a large double garage in the back of our library, right next to it, and um very dark and dank, uh two stories tall. It's where the ambulances and hearses used to be because in the old days uh the um ambulances were run by the funeral homes. Sure. Uh, and they were there. Um we approached the Julius W. Hagler II Foundation and asked for a grant to transform this space into additional library space, and they agreed, and they paid for almost the entire cost. And the work has just been completed, and there'll be an open house on Sunday, April 26th. At IGHS. We're going to show off the room, but first we're going to kick it off with a talk about the 200th anniversary. The co-chairs, Sue Richter and Todd Lee, will uh speak. We're going to have a lot of refreshments and then give people tours of the new facility. And anyone's welcome. You don't need to be a member. We just ask you to call or email us to RFCP so we know how many refreshments to prepare.

SPEAKER_00 22:28

Sure. So what's in the library?

SPEAKER_02 22:30

Well, we have books relating to Ileana. And the definition of Illeana is the vermil the counties and the western central edge of Linois, and the counties on the eastern edge of Illinois, Vermilion, Iroquois, Champagne and Edgar, and then the western Lanois, Indiana counties such as Fountain, Vermilion, and Warren. And it started with a few books of county histories, but over the years we have thousands of books. Many of them are county histories, some are church histories, school histories. A number of people have written genealogies on their family history. We have those not just for this area but for the entire country. We have well over a thousand. We have things on microfilm. We have all the wills in Vermillion County from the beginning to the 1950s. We have many of the estates, the hard copies from maybe the early 1900s to the 1940s in a storeroom. We have all the estates on microfilm. We have all the marriage records. We have a number of other county records. It's amazing. In fact, I've been volunteering there since 2015. When I retired, as I was retiring, uh it is sort of a funny story. I got a typed envelope from IGHS one day, and I was a member, but I rarely went down there because I didn't have time. And the type letter stated that they saw I was retiring and they nominated me to be treasurer of IGHS. And I'd be installed on a week from Sunday at their annual meeting if I agreed to serve. At first I thought, well, that's sort of uh a nervy. But the more I thought about it is I thought, well, I'll have the time and I like history and I've been there ever since.

SPEAKER_00 24:34

I mean just I've I've heard of people being asked to be a board member. I've never heard of anyone being asked to be an officer with your first the first time you're on the board. That's that is pretty nervy.

SPEAKER_02 24:48

Uh the budget was a lot smarter, IGHS, from the hundred million at district 118 to maybe a 25,000 are your budget.

SPEAKER_00 24:56

They figured you could be trusted. I'll tell you what, Mark, I enjoy talking to you. You know more probably about education in this community than anybody. Um and the IGHS, I think, is so can anybody um would you do you have volunteers who would help somebody work on their family tree if they thought, oh, I I think I'm one of those pioneer families, but I don't, I can't prove it.

SPEAKER_02 25:22

People come in like that all the time, and our volunteers are very gracious and willing to help. Now we're open Tuesday through Fridays from 10 to 3, and on Saturdays from 10 to 1. Um, an annual membership is $40. You get to use the library for free, and you get our magazine, but you don't have to be a member to use the library. We ask for a three-dollar donation for non-members to come. And uh, and we have extra books for sale. It's just uh it's amazing what we have. Our volunteers over the years, probably from the 1970s upwards, and then selected ones further, uh, they index they have thousands of vituaries that have been indexed. Okay. And on a catalog card. Um, there's just so much there.

SPEAKER_00 26:10

Well, I remember that um Bob Pape had an online directory of um And that's still death records.

SPEAKER_02 26:19

It's called the Pape uh Genealogical Database. Yes, and the Kruger Funeral Home has continued that.

SPEAKER_00 26:25

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 26:25

And I found out about that when I was principal at Danville High School. Bob Pape came by one day. His son was going there at the time, and he was asking, he goes, uh, could you post this? We'd like uh some high school kids to work there at the for the summer. And I said, I'll post it. I said, I'm not sure uh if all of our parents would want their kids working at a funeral. Not with the funeral side. And I said, What'd they do? He goes, Well, this is um, I want uh very studious students to go to the library and go through the microfilms. I am indexing every obituary in the commercial news uh from the beginning to current. That's amazing, and uh so we had several computer uh geeks that were very interested in that job. Uh very air-conditioned comfort at the library.

SPEAKER_00 27:13

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 27:13

And it is an amazing resource.

SPEAKER_00 27:16

I've used it myself several times. Um, I know I used it to find out um I was looking for my grandfather's ranks when they were in World War II, and that's listed in their obituary. So that was that was very helpful. Um, I want to thank you so much for coming and talking to me today. This is this is a passion project for me because I also love history and you know we serve together on the museum board. I am on the 200th anniversary committee, and I just love this is not my home state, it is my adopted state, but I just love hearing these historical stories, and you are full of them. Thank you. Well, thank you very much, and thank you for joining us. I hope you visit us again on VC History.