Chicago History Museum - Chicago, IL - Wikipedia Entries on Waymarking.com

Wikipedia (visit link) informs us:

"Chicago History Museum (formerly known as the Chicago Historical Society) was founded in 1856 to study and interpret Chicago's history. It is located in Lincoln Park at 1601 North Clark Street at the intersection of North Avenue in the Old Town Triangle neighborhood. It was renamed the Chicago History Museum in September 2006.


History

Much of the early collection of the Chicago Historical Society was destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire in 1871, but like the city, the museum rose from the ashes. Among its many documents which were lost in the fire was a copy of the Emancipation Proclamation, hand-written by Abraham Lincoln.[2] After the fire, the Society began collecting new materials, which were stored in a building owned by J. Young Scammon, a prominent lawyer and member of the society. However, the building and new collection were again destroyed by fire in 1874. The Chicago Historical Society built a fireproof building on the site of its pre-1871 building at 632 North Dearborn Street. The replacement building opened in 1896 and, after housing the collection for thirty-six years, was used for several purposes and remained vacant for periods until being transformed into a nightclub in 1985. This impressively massive Richardsonian Romanesque building remained a nightclub for years until closing in 2014, and was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1978."

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Date Logged Log User Rating   06/24/2011 Metro2 visited it