‘Nelle’s Archives Room’ - that title from a Courier editorial written on Nelle Carpenter’s retirement in 1976 pays appropriate homage to her role as founder and leader of The Urbana Free Library’s Historical Room, later to be known as the Champaign County Historical Archives.
Even though the noted local history and Lincoln enthusiast always referred to Abraham Lincoln by his full name and never Abe, I think for this blog post, we can dispense with formalities and call Nelle Carpenter simply Nelle. It seems fitting for a woman who knew and was known by all in Urbana during her lifetime to be still so familiarly embraced by her home library.
Nelle Eickler (January 1, 1901-December 11, 1978) was born and raised in Urbana. Except for ten years when she and her husband, Dode J. Carpenter, lived in Findlay, Ohio, she resided in Urbana. She was born in a house on Oregon Street between Vine and Race Streets, and her last residence was 204 W. High Street. She attended Leal School like her mother did before her and her son Duane after her.
Nelle worked at The Urbana Free Library as a page during high school. She went on to become the children’s librarian, overlapping with head librarian Ida B. Haines, another woman deeply entwined with The Urbana Free Library’s history. Nelle left the Library in 1927 with the birth of her son Duane. She returned to Urbana in 1946 after the death of her husband and once again began working at The Urbana Free Library as a library assistant and then cataloger.
It is during this second tenure that Nelle starts collecting Champaign County history materials, storing those materials in a four-drawer filing cabinet in the director’s office. In 1959, the Historical Room was established in a Library remodel. Housed in the new Historical Room were Nelle’s collected items, the Library’s collection of Illinois historical works, and Judge Joseph Oscar Cunningham’s book collection, which had been donated to the Library upon his death in 1917.
All the newspaper profiles on Nelle regale her as a natural storyteller able to bring history to life for both adults and children. One article called her “... a fountain of knowledge that never stops flowing. She can’t be interviewed in the traditional sense. She just starts reciting a history that is both factual and personal.” Some of her favorite subjects were Abraham Lincoln and his Urbana resident contemporary Joseph Oscar Cunningham, and the City of Urbana.
Nelle was proud of being from Urbana. A 1964 newspaper article describes Nelle as the only Urbana native on the Library staff. “This is my hometown, and I’m an enthusiastic hometowner,” she said in one article, and “I have every reason to love this town. I permit no ill talk about Urbana when I’m on deck,” in another article.
She retired from her cataloging position in the Library in 1968 but continued to spend two days a week in the Historical Room as its head archivist until her full retirement in 1976. Through her efforts, we have the basis for what the Champaign County Historical Archives is today – a research-level collection on the history and genealogy of Champaign County and its residents.
Some of Nelle’s favorite items in the collection are the American Hotel register signed by Abraham Lincoln and the bound original copies of the Urbana Union, Champaign County’s first newspaper. Nelle would have loved to see one 2014 donation: two journals kept by Joseph Oscar Cunningham returned to Champaign County from Kerrville, Texas.
As active in the community as she was in the Library, Nelle was also the co-founder of the Leal School library, past president of the Toastmistress Club, a member of the Busy Fifteen’s and the Half Century Club, and a charter member of Zonta. She died on December 11, 1978, at the age of 77.
-Sherrie Bowser
Archives Librarian