Word: mclean
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...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...
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...
...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...
...that the McLean Historical Society chose to declare McNulta's hundred years officially up was a sunny Sunday in November. The ceremony, observed at Bloomington's Miller Park Pavilion, proved a great occasion. Civil War songs were played and sung. Uniforms were displayed. Mrs. Emma Hoffman, 96, was there. Her father George Ulmer served in McNulta's regiment, and she remembers going to reunions and hearing her father sing When Johnny Comes Marching Home when he worked alone in the fields. Mrs. Kathryn McNulta, 94, the general's daughter-in-law, flew in from Charleston...
...history of McLean County during this century is mostly a story of dreams richly come true. The seed the Funk brothers developed yields 150 to 160 bushels of corn an acre. The Funk Prairie Home, once center of a 25,000-acre farm, is now a museum, and the seed company is a division of Ciba-Geigy. Land that McNulta bought for $150 an acre now hovers around $4,000 an acre, too much for anyone ever to start out farming there now, but not a bad price for to day's farmer/investor to use as a tax write...