News Progress

•January 24, 2018•

By Eden Martin
NP Guest Columnist

Editor’s Note: Former Sullivan resident and author Eden Martin has compiled a history of theaters in Sullivan. This second installment starts with the opening of the Globe Theater.

On October 23, 1909, the Decatur Daily Review reported as follows: Sullivan is to have a new up-to-date moving picture show which will be absolutely fireproof and have a raised floor with opera chairs which is something better than has ever seen here before. S.T. Herman of Monticello is the manager, and it will be known as the Globe theater and will be ready for business Saturday night in the old post office building on the south side of the square.

The new Globe apparently got off to a great start. On November 8 the Decatur newspaper reported that it “had the largest crowd at the performance Saturday night that they have had since starting their moving picture show here. At the three performances there were people standing out in the street waiting to get on the inside. S.T. Herman, the manager and owner, has put in the nicest moving picture show which has ever been in the city and deserves a good crowd. He has a raised floor and opera chairs to add to the comfort of those visiting his theater.” Read More

•January 17, 2018•

By Eric Peterson
Of the Daily Herald

As the home of Sears since the late 19th century, Illinois is the birthplace of modern retail.

Even today’s colossus, Amazon, can trace the roots of its business model to Sears’ original mail-order business that popularized the notion of buying products at home without first seeing and touching them in person.

“There were some small mail-order companies before, but Sears became the largest, the most successful, the giant,” said Libby Mahoney, senior curator of the Chicago History Museum.

And if it seems strange that such a retailer could grow strong enough to make its headquarters the tallest building in the world as Sears did in Chicago in 1973, consider today’s intense competition among cities to house Amazon’s second headquarters, she said.

It was Chicago’s central position in the nation’s railroad and highway networks that made it a better place for Richard Sears to operate the mail-order watch company he’d started in Minneapolis the previous year, 1886. Read More

•January 10, 2018•

By Eden Martin
Guest Columnist

Editor’s Note: Former Sullivan resident and retired attorney Robert Eden Martin has written a series on movie theaters in Sullivan. The series will run consecutive weeks with this as the first installment.

For more than two thousand years people have been entertained or inspired by live recitations, songs and performances of plays by actors and musicians on stage. The transition from live theater to silent moving pictures, and then to movies with sound was not instantaneous. In Sullivan it began just before the First World War.

The Titus Opera House

The Titus Opera House was for almost 40 years the most prominent place in Sullivan where plays and musical productions were staged. The opera house, built in 1871, was located at the west end of the line of buildings on the north side of the square at the corner of Harrison and Main streets.

It was described in the 1885 Combined History of Shelby and Moultrie counties (p. 182) as “fashioned after Heley’s, of Chicago .... It has a parquet and gallery, nicely frescoed ceiling, a full set of scenery, side boxes, etc. The whole building is lighted with gas, and has all the conveniences usually found in cities. The house is far ahead of the town ....” Read More

•January 3, 2018•

By Jim Nowlan
NP Guest Columnist

When I was a youngster in days of yore, the sheriff and his wife lived above the 19th Century jail, and the better half served as the matron, preparing the same meals for the inmates downstairs as for her family.

Granted, it was a tiny county, but all jails were pretty much the same then—warehouses for detainees caught between law enforcement and their day in court, you might say.

I visited this past week with Brian Asbell, a 23-year veteran of the Peoria County Sheriff’s Office, who was recently moved up to the top job to fill a vacancy.

A county of about 200,000, Peoria has probably the biggest such operation south of I-80. Sure, the deputies patrol the rural areas and collaborate with city and state law enforcement. But the biggest job by far is operating the county jail of anywhere from 300-400 inmates on any given day. Read More

•December 27, 2017•

By Jim Nowlan
NP Guest Columnist

The Illinois Monument at the Kennesaw Mountain Civil War battlefield north of Atlanta is a rather nondescript vertical block of marble.

The monument stands atop Cheatham’s Hill, which the soldiers of the 85th and 125th Illinois Regiments almost but never quite reached on June 26, 1864. The marker commemorates the courage and cohesiveness of the men who came within 30 feet of the almost impregnable Confederate earthen parapets above the sharp rise.

Each holiday season I visit my sister’s family, who live near the park, outside Marietta, GA. And each year I am drawn back to Cheatham’s Hill.

I stand at the top of the hill, looking down from the dug earthen defenses, still evident. I wonder in awe how men could have marched in formation up the hill, sure to absorb a crippling fusillade from rifles stuck through the slits of space between the earth works and the braced logs atop.  Read More