John D. Buggeln, Ph.D., Master Instructor of the Humanities at the Culver Academies, brought his Humanities and Global Citizenship Honors students to the Museum on Thursday, October 25, for an introduction to some of the resources for research available here. Museum Committee Chair the Very Rev. John Wm. Houghton, Ph.D., showed the students samples of various parts of the Museum collection:
- from the Culver Citizen archives, front-page coverage of the 1933 bank robbery, and the immediate local response–remembered as heroic in the town, but classified as a classic case of vigilante justice in a recent scholarly study [Paul Musgrave, “‘A Primitive Method of Enforcing the Law’: Vigilantism as a Response to Bank Crimes in Indiana, 1925–1933,” Indiana Magazine of History, Vol. 102, No. 3 (Sep., 2006), pp. 187-219]
- from the family and individual history files, Dr. Oliver Rea’s discharge paper from the Union Army after the War of the Rebellion (Rea had been captured by Rebels at Gettysburg, but escaped, made his way back to Union lines, and served out the war: he came to Culver from Knox as a physician in 1880, and was also for many years the Culver Military Academy surgeon)
- from the scrapbook collection, the 1930s photo collection of his great-aunt Ethel Houghton Hoffman, including her photo of the father of one her friends, Leonora: Titanic survivor August “Leo” Wennerstrom (born August Edvard Andersson)
- road tax records, plat books, and abstracts of title, as means for tracing the history of the ownership of a piece of local property
