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As late as the 1950s, when Bloomington residents talked about heading to O’Neil’s on the city’s far west side for some good times, they usually meant not the city park by that name but rather the private “showground” and pavilion adjoining the public park on its south.
Beginning in the 1920s and into the postwar years, the private grounds and dance hall were known on occasion to offer local residents and country folk risqué entertainment (and illicit libations during Prohibition) not available just anywhere. This was so because O’Neil’s was just outside the city limits and thus immune to mettlesome ordinances and other trappings of municipal government.
This advertisement promotes a privately owned pavilion and “showground” that adjoined O’Neil Park on Bloomington’s west side and provided a variety of entertainment from the 1920s to the 1950s.
To its immediate north was the quieter, 12-acre city-owned park, extending northwest of Hinshaw and Walnut streets to White Oak Road. Established in 1904, the park was named for Daniel M. O’Neil, west-side grocer and alderman from the Irish-dominated Fifth Ward.
For O’Neil’s (the private grounds, not the city park), the wildest and woolliest years began around 1922 when Michael J. O’Neil, Jr. erected a wooden dance platform in the family’s former dairy pasture. (It’s not known how the Daniel and Michael O’Neil families were related, though it’s likely they were cousins, distant or otherwise, going back to Ireland.) With jazz dance bands known as orchestras all the rage, within a year or two a roof and foldout walls were added to the open-air platform.
This venue was always jumping with the syncopated, pre-swing jazz of the 1920s favored by Bloomington’s own George C. Goforth and Harry Ryan of Lincoln, two of the area’s more popular bandleaders.
The McLean County Museum of History, 200 N. Main St. in Bloomington, is a treasure trove of local history, from agriculture and civil rights to life at home and on the job. Here are a few things that caught our attention at the museum.
Over the years, O’Neil’s caused Bloomington officials numerous headaches. In the summer of 1922, for instance, neighborhood residents petitioned the city council to cut off water and sewer connections to the grounds due to complaints involving the mixing of jazz, alcohol and unmarried couples.
“We can’t get to sleep until midnight,” said one particularly vocal resident. “Even our children are becoming contaminated.”
The O’Neil family tract became a favorite stop for traveling carnivals and circuses, so much so that for a while it was known as O’Neil’s Park Circus Grounds. In July 1946, Mayor Mark B. Hayes took flak for not shutting down a circus of doubtful propriety, especially given the recent city council order forbidding commercial amusements at O’Neil Park. But the embattled mayor rightly pointed out that the circus was on O’Neil family land outside the city limits and thus not within his jurisdiction.
That’s not to say O’Neil’s strictly limited itself to the racier, more adult amusements of the day. After all, Illinois Wesleyan University sorority dances, among other straight-laced affairs, were held at the pavilion over the years.
By the late 1940s, O’Neil’s was welcoming an array of second-tier shows, some more suspicious than others. In late May 1947, it was “Animal Oddities,” a ragtag menagerie of “earth’s rarest animals” that included a yak from “Thipet” (an anachronistic spelling of Tibet) and a “sacred ox” from India.
Yet there were still good times to be had at O’Neil’s Pavilion. On Wednesdays in the late 1940s, the local AM radio station WJBC broadcast from the pavilion, with local favorite Larry Lonney and his orchestra providing the tunes. And on Saturdays the WJBC Barn Dance, modeled after the famed WLS radio show of the same name, aired from O’Neil’s.
In June 1949, O’Neil’s showground was once more in the news for the wrong reasons, this time for accusations of rife gambling during the most recent visit by the Dodson Shows carnival. This time around, McLean County State’s Attorney Clifford Coolidge announced he would now refuse permits to traveling carnivals at O’Neil’s, and the board of supervisors (the predecessor to the county board) instructed Sheriff Curtis Gilberts to put an end to all carnival-related gambling in the county.
Radio’s popularity played a major role in the decline of O’Neil’s Pavilion and others like it, a sad trend hastened by television. Even so, into the 1950s O’Neil’s still welcomed local and national musicians, if only but once a week.
The end came in the early 1970s, when Bloomington doubled the size of the city-owned O’Neil Park by acquiring 12-plus acres, most of that the old O’Neil family tract. Unhappily, the expansion led to the razing of the pavilion in October 1972. (It stood on the site of today’s tennis courts.)
After expansion, O’Neil Park became one of the busiest places on the west side, thanks in part to the opening of city’s second public pool in 1975. It was also a longtime home for American Legion baseball, and once hotbed for men’s major fastpitch softball.
Alas, O’Neil Park is a much quieter place today.
15 urban legends of McLean County
Williams Hall was once home to ISU’s library, and the building is supposedly haunted by the school’s first librarian, Angeline Vernon “Ange” Milner.
She was decidedly not the inspiration for the opening scene in the 1982 blockbuster motion picture comedy “Ghostbusters.”
There are no coal mine tunnels under downtown Bloomington. The tunnels of the McLean County Coal Co., operating from 1867 to the late 1920s, generally run west of Morris Ave. between Washington and Market streets on the city’s west side.
There was a steam tunnel built in 1903 that went from the McLean County Courthouse (now the Museum) to the middle of Center Street, where it met up with a network of other steam tunnels.
These were not intended for people to walk in, other than the workers that maintained them.
Cook Hall on the ISU quad, popularly known as “The Castle,” is one of five “Altgeld’s castles” at Illinois universities—University of Illinois, Southern Illinois Carbondale, Eastern Illinois, and Northern Illinois are the other four.
They were constructed in the Gothic Revival style and said to be built at the “initiative or inspiration” of German-born Illinois Governor John Peter Altgeld. That much is true.
What is not true is the story that all five castles are designed to be “fitted” or pieced together to create, if only on paper, a much larger castle.
Towanda Meadows, also known as Duncan Manor, is located on a hill south of Towanda and visible from Interstate 55.
The home was said to be a stop on the Underground Railroad, even though it was erected in the mid-1870s.
Other oft-told (and incorrect) stories about this home include the existence of a secret treasure room under a second-floor bedroom. This “room” is actually a cistern for the main floor bathtub.
There was never an Old Federal Prison on Market Street, let alone anywhere else in Bloomington, as erroneously stated in several ghost sighting websites.
Perhaps there was some confusion with the old McLean County Jail, no longer standing, which was located a block south of Market St. at the corner of Madison and Monroe streets.
Pictured is the county’s fourth jail, which was in use in the late 1800s. It opened in 1857 and was replaced in 1882 by the one many longtime residents remember, which was located one block to the southwest. Both jails are no longer standing.
Center Street on the west side of the Courthouse Square was not the site for the first brick pavement in the United States, contrary to the historic marker at the corner of Center and Washington streets.
The “Bloomington System” for street paving was well known, but the City of Bloomington can make no claim of being “first.”
Pictured is a 1867 bird’s eye view of downtown Bloomington.
Many area residents mistakenly assume that the steel tower standing alone at the southwest end of Lake Bloomington is an abandoned fire watch platform erected by the U.S. Forest Service or some government agency.
In truth, the tower served as a platform for a U.S. Civil Aeronautics Authority (later Administration) rotating beacon to assist passing aircraft with navigation.
The CAA installed the beacon in October 1939. It was maintained until circa 1950 and removed and taken to the Bloomington Municipal Airport (now the Central Illinois Regional Airport) in 1951.
One year later, the City of Bloomington assumed ownership of the tower. Due to the costs involved in removing or relocating the tower, a decision was made to leave it as is.
Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas likely never debated or delivered speeches in the Dimmitt’s Grove neighborhood east of downtown Bloomington, despite the “Lincoln Oak” plaque indicating such.
The plaque is found along East Jackson Street behind the Vrooman Mansion at 701 East Taylor Street. In 1914, Carl Vrooman and Adlai Stevenson invited Vachel Lindsay, poet laureate of Illinois, to speak at the dedication of a plaque attached to a white oak tree behind the Scott-Vrooman residence.
Legend has it that Vrooman and Stevenson, both staunch Democrats, may have made up the Lincoln and Douglas story and placed the plaque, a memorial to Lincoln, a Republican, on the oak tree in Vrooman’s backyard in order to grab attention from Republicans in an election year.
In 1966, a 32-square foot section of ground behind the Scott-Vrooman house was deeded to the City of Bloomington.
The oak tree, known as the “Lincoln Oak,” died in 1976 and a copy of the original plaque is mounted near a replacement tree. Several affidavits from 1921 held in the McLean County Museum of History Archives indicate that there is no truth behind the “Lincoln Oak” story.
Among the affiants who attest that no Lincoln nor Douglas speeches were ever delivered in Dimmitt’s Grove were W.B. Carlock, W. W. Workman (who personally knew both Lincoln and Douglas), and James M. Fordice.
Bloomington was the final stop of the Abraham Lincoln Funeral Train, which traveled between April 21 and May 3 in 1865, before it arrived in Springfield.
The catafalque car carrying Lincoln’s body was built at the Military Railroad System shops in Alexandria, Virginia, and not at the Chicago & Alton (C&A) Shops in Bloomington, as a stubborn local legend goes.
The Paul F. Beich Co. and Beich chemist Justin J. Alikonis had no role in the development of Tang, the fruit-flavored drink formulated by General Foods Corporation and food scientist William A. Mitchell in 1957 and first marketed in powdered form in 1959.
A non-McLean County urban legend holds that Tang was developed for U.S. space flight. The confusion rests with the fact that sales of Tang were poor until NASA used it on John Glenn’s Mercury flight and subsequent Gemini missions.
Back in Bloomington, Beich and Alikonis were involved in developing candy for NASA, but not Tang. During the Oct. 3, 1962, Mercury spaceflight, astronaut Wally Schirra snacked on bite-sized nutrition bars coated with Alikonis’ patented glaze, and a Beich fudge bar was used by NASA during the Gemini program of the mid-1960s.
Pictured is a February 1999 photo of David Beich giving a tour of the Paul F. Beich candy factory.
In 1859, George Pullman and carpenter Leonard Seibert of the St. Louis, Alton and Chicago Railroad Shops on Bloomington’s west side converted two day coaches into Pullman sleeping car prototypes.
Bloomington-Normal is not less susceptible to tornadoes due to topographic or geologic quirks, such as the location of glacial moraines, the Mackinaw River, or some other spurious explanation.
While Bloomington-Normal has enjoyed relatively few close encounters with tornadoes, that fact can be explained by statistical chance and nothing more.
This photo, taken atop the Bloomington moraine, shows LeRoy four miles to the south.
There are also several legends surrounding the Veterans Parkway and Illinois 9/Empire Street interchange.
The most common story is that engineer was insane, or that the complexity of the project drove him to insanity.
Some area residents are also convinced that this interchange is the most complex in the entire world, or at least, the United States.
Also, many area residents have heard that Greek interns from the University of Illinois designed the interchange.
There are several legends surrounding Watterson Towers, an Illinois State University residence hall complex.
A common rumor claims that one or both of the towers are slowly sinking. Students have also heard that the architect became insane during or shortly after construction, completed in 1970.
Other legends claim that the architect committed suicide by jumping off the towers, or that the architect is buried under the towers. All are patently false.
Pieces From Our Past is a weekly column by the McLean County Museum of History. Bill Kemp is the librarian at the museum.
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