Blackwell Museum raises $6,000,
honors Resource Bank, farm bureau

Friends of the Blackwell History of Education Museum at Northern Illinois University raised $6,000 in support of the on-campus Milan Township One-Room Schoolhouse at a June 11 banquet.

University and museum staff joined 117 guests in the Holmes Student Center at the $50-a-plate fundraiser, which also celebrated the educational achievements of Resource Bank and the DeKalb County Farm Bureau.

The bank's large photographs of one-room schools and the farm bureau's historic photographs filled the walls of the Regency Room. The country theme continued with loosestrife and daisies filling jars formerly used for canning fruits and vegetables.

The banquet also included a silent auction and music from pianist Dennis Vaupel.

"We plan to use the money to keep the reconstructed Milan Township School in good repair and to continue opening it to the public free of charge," said Lucy Townsend, curator of the museum, adding that other plans include more fully integrating the one-room school into NIU's teacher education programs and forming more partnerships with school and community organizations.

Townsend honored Resource Bank for its recently produced documentary, "One Room, One People." Mary Keys, the bank's director of marketing, accepted the award.

"This documentary is an artistically sensitive portrayal of a community with important values, such as caring for others and sharing resources in times of need," Townsend said. "It is obvious that Resource Bank personnel took great care in researching, producing and distributing this documentary. It is a wonderful gift to our community. I commend the Resource Bank for its extraordinary generosity in giving the documentary to local historians, museum staff, park districts, educators and many others interested in DeKalb County history."

Townsend called attention to the careful scholarship of bank personnel, as well as director and producer Michael Weckerly of Morning Star Media, who conducted interviews with more than 80 local people and researched a number of historical collections. All those in attendance at the banquet received DVD versions of the documentary and were urged to give theirs to their friends and relatives if they lacked the equipment to view the DVD themselves.

The DeKalb County Farm Bureau, meanwhile, received an award for 30 years of educational programming to bring agriculture into the schools.

Bureau manager Doug Dashner accepted the award in addition to praise for his organization's donations of books to local schools and a graduate level course designed to inform teachers about ways to include agriculture in their curriculum.

In the 2003-04 school year, the annual "Ag in the Classroom" program involved nearly 100 volunteers who taught 3,600 DeKalb County first- through fifth-graders lessons on agriculture. Townsend recognized 27 high school students and their agriculture teachers for participating in this program.

Each year, the Farm Bureau also challenges elementary children to submit designs illustrating agriculture in its "Food for Thought" Placement Design Contest. One thousand children submitted designs this year; the winning designs appear on placemats used in restaurants and community functions, including the Blackwell Museum banquet.

In other banquet business, Kay Phillips, director of alumni relations in the NIU College of Education, presented awards to two major supporters of the Blackwell Museum: Peter West, recently retired director of the Learning Center, and H.C. "Tex" Sherman.

Phillips commended both for raising funds for the reconstructed Milan Township One-room Schoolhouse and their many years of leadership in Phi Delta Kappa, an honorary education society with a chapter in the College of Education.

For more information on the Blackwell Museum or the One-Room Schoolhouse, call (815) 753-1236 or visit http://www.cedu.niu.edu/blackwell/ online.

6-28-04