Welcome (or welcome back) to campus! As part of the University Library’s “Discover the Collections” exhibit, the University Archives has an exhibit on view in the Main Library Gallery. In this exhibit, we invite you to explore the breadth of material found in the Archives. Archives are not just dusty boxes of old paper – although we have a lot of those! Our collections span the entire history of the University (1867-Present) and include almost any format you can think of.
The Archives holds hundreds of collections of faculty and alumni papers, organizational records, association archives, and more across its three locations.
Did something in the exhibit catch your eye? Learn more about the objects in the case below, or reach out to the Archives at illiarch@illinois.edu.
Football Player Cut-Outs – Sports Photographs, 28/5/6 box 2, folder: Cut-Outs – Football, 1929-1930
Esther Davenport Receipt (Recipe) Book – Eugene Davenport Papers, 8/1/21 box 19, folder: Receipt (Recipe) Book of Esther Sutton Davenport, ca. 1860-1900
Sketchbook – Trygve A. Rovelstad Papers, 12/7/20 box 1, folder: Diaries and Sketchbooks, England – Sketch and Memo Booklet, April 12 – Aug. 6, 1946
Postcards from China – Michael Ehrmann International Postcard Collection, 35/2/63 box 8, folders: Lingyin Temple/Pagoda of Six Harmonies and Jiangxi Province
Park Science CD – Randall J. Biallas Papers, 26/20/229 box 10, folder: Park Science: Integrating Research and Resource Management, Volume 1 – Volume 18, 1980-1998
Columbian Exposition Passes – William L. Abbott Papers, 1/20/9 box 1, folder: Columbian Exposition, 1892-93
Illinois Industrial University Catalog – William L. Abbott Papers, 1/20/9 box 1, folder: Illinois Industrial University Catalogs, 1884-85, 1887-88, 1889-90
Blueprint – Joseph W. Royer Architectural Drawings, 26/20/162 box 1, item: A High School Building for the Board of Education of Bloom Township High School District No. 206, G11
Blueprint – Joseph W. Royer Architectural Drawings, 26/20/162 box 5, item: Zeta Tau Alpha Chapter House, Urbana, IL, ca. 1927, sheet 6
Winged Victory Poster – World War I Poster Collection, 35/1/42 box 1, item: [No text. Image of winged republic/victory on deep blue background. Printer’s mark of “Visa 14.804”] (artist’s name not decipherable)
« Ne gaspiller le pain » Poster – World War I Poster Collection, 35/1/42 box 14, item: “Ne gaspiller le pain est notre devoir” Affiche composée par les enfants de France, S. Vincent
Botany Class Photo – Photographic Subject File, 39/2/20 box COL – 6, folder COL 6-4 LAS Botany 1869-1899; ID #0003943
Dragon Costume Photo – William F. Schaller Papers, 41/20/23, ID #0007378
Snowman Photo – N. C. Ricker Papers, 12/2/22 box 1, folder: Plans & Sketches; ID #0010949
How did you end up at the University of Illinois Archives? Tell us about your background.
In the summer of 2012, I held an internship at the National Music Museum in Vermillion, SD. This experience was a watershed moment for me, inspiring me to seek out as many archival experiences as I could. The following fall I enrolled in the musicology program at UIUC and in the summer of 2013, I took a course on Arrangement and Description. In the fall of 2013, I became a graduate assistant at the Sousa Archives and Center for American Music. Except for the 2018-2019 academic year, when I took a gap year to teach in the musicology department at Ball State University, I held this GA position until 2021. This was the year I earned my PhD in musicology. I explored many facets of archival work as a GA. I worked collaboratively with the other graduate assistants at Sousa, digitizing and writing metadata for the James Edward Myers WWI Sheet Music Collection, which can be seen in the digital library; processing faculty papers one summer; co-curating several exhibits on topics like campus protest music in 1970, SS Stewart banjos, Temperance-era sheet music, Bohumir Kryl’s Women’s Symphony Orchestra, and Hawaiian slide guitars; and assisting with programming for the One Community Together Soundstage and musical instrument “Petting Zoo” at the Urbana Sweetcorn Festival. My PhD research on concert life in Prairie Style architectural spaces was also influenced by the training I received as a GA, making use of materials found in more than thirty archives around the country.
After graduating with my PhD, I was offered a position as a lecturer in the musicology area here at UIUC. Fortunately, I was able to continue working at the Sousa Archives in a service-in-excess capacity until I earned this position earlier this year. Between 2021 and 2025, I have predominantly focused on exhibit curation and programming, working with Scott Schwartz to curate exhibits like the Imperfect Saxophone and Spaces Speak. During this time, I also worked as a consultant for the Old Town School of Folk Music, providing them with an assessment of their archives.
While this is a new position for me, the University of Illinois Archives has felt like my home for more than ten years.
What are your responsibilities?
Currently, I am responsible for processing our digital collections. The Sousa Archives hasn’t had a dedicated individual for digitized and digitally born materials for many years, so we have a bit of a backlog. I hope that I can process several of these collections over the summer and fall, providing online access to these collections within the Digital Library. In addition, we are performing a shelf-read this summer, confirming the locations of all our material at the Archives Research Center and barcoding all the collections there. After we finish this task, we will have exhibits and programming for American Music Month, the Uniting Pride Festival, and the Folk and Roots Festival to prepare. I’ll be working with Scott on programming for these events, plus a few more for the upcoming Semiquincentennial of the United States of America. As a “Center for American Music,” we’ll be preparing for this event soon. At some point I’ll need to tackle the stats for the summer, and we have three new collections that are in the queue, waiting to be processed.
I’m hitting the ground running!
What excites you most about your new role? What are some plans/ideas you have in mind?
I am most excited about potential programming and pedagogical opportunities. My goal is to develop pedagogical opportunities with local public schools and build upon my experience as a university educator to help guide course design at the University. One of the plans I have is establishing collaborative opportunities with courses on history within the College of FAA. The idea of an “imbedded archivist,” like an imbedded librarian, is really intriguing to me. Embedding archivists within specific courses would provide students with better access to our collections and would help demystify the act of archival research. Although my background is in musicology, I do not think this type of collaborative course design should only consider music history courses. Since I have active interests and contacts in art history, architectural history, landscape history, and media studies, I won’t preclude other history courses in the humanities when reaching out to potential instructors. My plan is to begin gauging potential interest among a few programs in FAA at the beginning of August, when instructors are planning their syllabi.
In terms of public-school programming, I hope to establish working relationships with local school music programs and history departments. For instance, I think we could make a compelling case for adding a class on Music Research and Museums during the 2026 Illinois Summer Youth Music schedule. This is a program that predominantly serves junior and high school students. I think Sousa does a great job already reaching some of these junior and high school groups, but we could do more, especially with non-music students. It has also been a long time since we have regularly worked with the local elementary schools. As a father of a soon-to-be third grader and soon-to-be kindergartener, building relationships with the elementary schools in the surrounding area is especially important to me.
Although I am not teaching courses at the moment, I am hopeful that I can teach an occasional class that makes use of the collections at the Sousa Archives. Last semester I taught a class on exhibit curation and last summer I taught a summer MME class on the music of Illinois. Both of these classes spent several weeks at the archives, exploring the collections and developing unique projects based on the students’ findings. My Curating Communities class last semester designed a traveling exhibit on the Robert E. Brown Center for World Music that we took to Northern Illinois University’s Teaching World Music Symposium. The exhibit is currently on display in the Harding Band Building. My goal is to continue developing courses that make use of the materials at the Sousa Archives.
What are the most interesting/challenging/fun aspects of the job so far?
The thing I find most interesting or fun about working in the archives is that I get to learn new things every day. Last week, I was working on an alumni’s papers and found material relating to the UIUC Stunt Show in the 1960s. This event was new to me. On one of the Stunt Show programs, I learned that incidental music was provided by LeJaren Hiller (a chemist and composer that composed the first piece of computer-derived music). This event also included Bernard Goodman (Violinist with the Walden String Quartet), Stanley Fletcher (Professor emeritus in the Piano Faculty), and Jack McKenzie (Dean Emeritus of the College of FAA and Former Director of the UIUC Percussion Ensemble). After communicating with the donor, I learned quite a bit about this event and his involvement in the productions. I find that learning this type of information while processing collections can really help when working with patrons. The more you know the more you can help others.
How did you end up at the University of Illinois Archives? Tell us about your background.
I’ve had a varied work history, but the short version is that I fell in love with all things paper while working at an auction house as a cataloger, writing catalog descriptions for rare books, ephemera, maps, and art. I decided to go to library school as a way to help preserve our shared history and knew that I wanted to work in higher education. Graduating in 2020 at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic led me to a job as a reference librarian, since special collections jobs were even harder to find than usual, but I’m happy to now be where I wanted to end up.
What are your responsibilities?
As with everyone in the department, I have a mix of responsibilities, but I will primarily be focused on processing and accessions. Like all archives, we have a backlog, and our goal right now is to reduce that backlog—or at least keep it stable while taking in new accessions.
What excites you most about your new role? What are some plans/ideas you have in mind?
I’m excited to be tackling challenges on a larger scale. I’ve already completed an inventory of our unprocessed collections in two of our locations, and I’m looking forward to creating a plan for processing these materials and making them accessible to researchers.
What are the most interesting/challenging/fun aspects of the job so far?
Most of my work history has been in small businesses or smaller libraries, so it’s been challenging to adjust to the (often slow) pace of change in a large institution and the high level of inter-departmental collaboration that is required. It’s been fun to learn more about the history of the University. Even though I attended graduate school here, I am learning new fun facts every week.
Following the 2024 discovery of time capsules in the cornerstones of the Main Library and McKinley Health Center, we have wondered whether there might be more “copper boxes” hidden throughout campus. Upon further investigation, it appears that these cornerstone boxes may be more common than we imagined.
Early 20th century newspaper articles indicate that it was a common practice – not only on campus, but around the world – to include such a “copper box” in new building cornerstones. In those days, as now, it was common to hold a cornerstone laying ceremony to lay the cornerstone for new buildings. Over 265 (digitized) articles from Illinois newspapers, including 30 articles from the Daily Illini, suggest that a core purpose of this ceremony was to fill and encapsulate these boxes within the cornerstone. On May 9, 1924, in anticipation of the cornerstone laying ceremony for McKinley Hospital (now McKinley Health Center), the Daily Illini states this clearly: “The big box that dominates every cornerstone laying is being filled with the numerous articles today…”
Programs and photos from these ceremonies, which were held for many new campus buildings, can be found in the Archives in record series 2/0/808 Building and Statue Dedication Programs and 39/2/20 Photographic Subject File, respectively. Many photographs from these ceremonies actually depict the copper box being enclosed within the cornerstone, such as the two from the McKinley Hospital ceremonies linked below.
Campus news sources covered the deposit of some boxes, but not all of them. Although the Champaign News Gazette published a list of the contents of the capsule in the Main Library’s cornerstone, The Daily Illini published nothing on the box. Conversely, The Daily Illini published many details about the copper boxes in McKinley Hospital and the Architecture Building’s cornerstones.
A full list of university buildings which are known (as of June 2025) to contain a copper box can be found below. It is possible that more will be discovered as additional sources are identified, and that more undocumented cornerstone boxes will come to light as buildings reach the end of their life on campus.
(Note that university buildings on the Chicago campus and local Champaign-Urbana buildings have been omitted from this list, but many of these buildings do contain copper boxes confirmed in the source below; notably the Champaign and Urbana City Buildings.)
[A copy of this blog post can be found in the Archives’ ready reference file on “Buildings, University.”]
University of Illinois Buildings Which Contain Time Capsules
All buildings with known or suspected time capsules are listed below, in chronological order of their cornerstone laying.
Four main sources were used to confirm the presence of time capsules/copper boxes in the following list:
The sources which confirm the presence of each box are included beneath the building name, with the digitized source linked where possible.
Legend
(Current building name [if different from original name])
[x] Building no longer exists
* Time capsule has already been retrieved
^ Indicates a time capsule that has been or will be replaced
[?] Suspected time capsule (not confirmed)
1871
University Hall [x]*
[x] Building demolished in 1938.
*Time capsule retrieved in 1938 and placed into the Gregory Hall cornerstone in 1939.
University YMCA (later Illini Hall) (1907) [x]*
[x] Building demolished in February 2023.
*Time capsule retrieved February 14, 2023 and opened on September 30, 2023 during 150th Anniversary celebration.
Lincoln Hall^
^To commemorate the renovation of Lincoln Hall, a new time capsule was installed on August 16, 2013, with the intention of being opened in 2063 on the 150th anniversary of the building’s dedication.
Commerce Building (Old)
[Note that The Daily Illini refers to this as the “New” Commerce Building, but this is 12 years before construction of the “New” New Commerce Building, which was dedicated on the same day as the “New” Library and “New” Gymnasium in 1924.]
Tina Weedon Smith Memorial Building (Smith Hall) [?]
[?] Suspected to have a time capsule containing phonographic discs of the University Band due to mention of recordings made for this purpose in 1909 DI
The University Archives at Illinois houses a collection of approximately 150 life-sized paintings of fruit. Created between 1903 and 1907, these paintings depict over 100 different varieties of apples and plums from multiple separate projects. One of these projects was a seven-month-long UIUC study on the effects of refrigeration on the longevity of fruit (Farm Home, 1904). In this study, the artist of the Agronomy Department at UIUC, Flora M. Sims appears to have painted a portrait of each fruit monitored by the scientists; in figures 1 and 2 below, the first depicts one of the study’s apples stored at 31° for 247 days, and the second depicts one stored at 35° for 231 days. The results demonstrated to local farming communities that refrigeration between 31° and 37° preserves fruit remarkably well.
Figure 1: Winesap Study 1, Fruit Paintings, 1904Figure 2: Winesap Study 2, Fruit Paintings, 1904
This scientific study of fruit preservation occurred during the final decade of the second American Industrial Revolution, a time throughout which scientists were incentivized to develop technology that would improve industrial production. In July of 1902, Willis Carrier invented the “first modern cooling unit” (US Dept. of Energy, 2015). With this invention, departments across the U of I became increasingly involved in studies concerning cold storage preservation of produce. In December of 1902, the Horticulture Convention at UIUC featured a lecture titled “Results from Cool and Cold Storage Experiments” (Daily Illini, 1902). Farmers recognized that advancements in preservation technology would increase the shelf life of their produce and therefore extend its marketability far beyond harvesting season. With this in mind, many students joined in studies exploring aspects of refrigeration; research included finding the optimum conditions of cold storage, determining the efficacy of insulation materials, and similarly related topics (Daily Illini, 1904).
Artist, Scientist & Social Reformer: Flora E. Morris Sims
Flora E. Morris Sims was born on the 9th of March 1868, in Oakland, IL, to Reverend Nathan S. Morris and his wife, Matilda A. Morris (nee Patton). As a child, Flora attended Urbana High School where she pursued geometry, advanced English literature, history, composition and rhetoric, free hand drawing, zoology, botany, physiology, physics, and three years of Latin.
On the 16th of July 1889, Flora E. Morris changed her last name to Sims upon marrying Charles Blackburn Sims (Find a Grave, 2018). The couple had a son, Charles Blackburn Sims Jr., on April 26, 1892. This marriage was brief, however, and the couple divorced before Charles went on to marry Claire Sims Sims in 1898. Throughout the rest of her life, Flora retained her ex-husband’s last name.
Figure 3: Mrs. Flora Sims, Illio ‘01, 1901, p.77.
During the summer of 1897, when Flora was 28 years old, she enrolled for the upcoming Fall Term at UIUC. Her student records indicate that between 1897 and 1899, she primarily studied Art and Design under the college of Liberal Arts and Science. To diversify her coursework, she participated in two courses in the Animal Husbandry Department during the Fall of 1899. Although her official student records list her as having left UIUC in 1900, she is listed in multiple sources as a member of the class of 1901. It is possible that she completed her course work in the fall term of 1900 but participated in the following spring convocation.
In the Alumni Record files at the University Archive at UIUC, a couple of newspaper clippings that describe Flora’s time at the university were found. A clipping from May of 1900 describes her as having spent the “past year” “studying stock judging at the University of Illinois.” In an article from September 8, 1948, the day after her passing, a colleague shared that Flora “studied art on the campus for three years” and “specialized in the painting of horses, in which she won recognition of art critics” (News Gazette, 1948). During her time as a student, she assisted professors Davenport and Holden by creating large agricultural illustrations for their projects. A 1900 article from The Illini reports that for these two professors, Flora made one 6’x8’ illustration of corn cultures and one 4’x6’ illustration of a “horse in motion” (The Illini, 1900).
From 1891 to 1898, Flora worked at UIUC as an Art and Design instructor (University of Illinois, 1897). After this period, in 1902 she became the official artist of the university’s Agronomy Department, retaining this title until 1914. For this department, she created soil survey maps that were the first of their kind in Illinois. She also created “Animal Charts” for the Dominion Department of Agriculture at Ottawa and for the Provincial Department of Agriculture at Halifax (The Illini, 1900). Throughout her career, she was often invited to give lectures and “chalk talks” across the Midwest by the Literary and Scientific circle of the Chautauqua and Lyceum Bureau (News Gazette, 1948; Urbana Daily Courier, 1910).
Outside of work, Flora kept herself busy with many projects related to the civil rights movement and her church. She dedicated much of her time to her church, the First Methodist Episcopal Church in Urbana, and was highly involved in their chapter of the Woman’s Home Missionary Society. She often filled positions on the chapter’s executive board and directed the group in playlets. Flora also frequently filled the role of Sunday school teacher. Later in life she became an honorary trustee of the church. Aside from churchwork, Flora served a term as the State Chairman of the Illinois Federation of Women’s Clubs and volunteered as a member of Cunningham Children’s home board.
On September 7, 1948, after an 11-month long battle with illness, Flora passed away at 80 years old. She was survived by her sister and son and interred in Mount Hope Cemetery.
Flora E. Morris Sims is remembered through her contributions to the Agronomy Department and her late-life efforts assisting Urbana’s Half Century Club as their secretary, during which she researched the history of Urbana and published a club brochure in 1947. Her work for the university is best recorded through the many newspaper articles from the Courier and Daily Illini that admire her work and through a series of paintings housed at the University Archives of UIUC. Series 8/12/16, “Fruit Paintings, 1903-1907,” contains life-sized paintings of plums, cherries, and apples that she illustrated alongside an unnamed individual, who signed their art only as “CNB.” It appears the paintings depict fruits at various stages of decay and were part of an agricultural study regarding the longevity of fruit.
Although a Courier article from September 8, 1948, found in the University Archive’s holdings cites her as an artist best known for her paintings of animals and sculptures, none of these artifacts are housed at the University Archives. If any of these pieces still survive, their locations are unknown.
Figure 4: Chas. Downing study, Fruit Paintings, 1904
The Unidentified Artist
While the vast majority of these works were painted by Flora Morris Sims, approximately 5% of them were painted by an unidentified artist who only signed their work with what appears to say “CNB,” as depicted in this close-up scan of an illustrated Charles Downing plum (fig. 4). Furthermore, while it appears that Flora labeled the back of each piece in pencil, marked with her signature S’s and D’s, approximately 20% of all the paintings are unsigned. This leaves an estimated 25% of the collection attributed to anonymous artists.
