What MacMurray College’s Norris Hospital Teaches Kids About Local History And Community Care
Last April, I herded 12 snorting, gummy-bear-stained 4th graders across the cracked parking lot of the old MacMurray College campus in Jacksonville, Illinois, when Mia, the quiet girl who always brings a folded bandana in her pocket, stopped short. She pulled a crumpled black and white photo out of her jacket and held it up to the big brick building ahead of us. “My great grandma went here,” she said. “To nursing school. She worked at Norris Hospital.”
None of the other kids had heard of Norris Hospital. Most of them only know MacMurray as the old campus their parents walk dogs on, where the community sets up the annual Christmas tree lot. The big brick building where we stood was always just “the old admin building” to most locals, ever since MacMurray closed its doors in 2020 after 174 years. The name “Norris Hospital” is carved into the stone steps, but it’s covered by 30 years of overgrown boxwoods, so you can’t see it from the road. My planned walking tour had us stopping here for 8 minutes just to talk about how MacMurray started as a women’s college in 1846, then moving on to the old auditorium. We ended up staying 25 minutes, and that stop changed how I think about teaching local history to kids.
Mia’s photo showed her great grandma, 19 years old, in a starched white uniform, holding a stiff linen nursing cap, right where we stood. She told us great grandma Betty had delivered 12 babies at Norris when she was a student in the 1950s. Back then, MacMurray ran Norris as a full community hospital, not just a clinic for students. It was the only place within 30 miles that let low-income families pay what they could for care, and the nursing students got hands-on training you couldn’t get from a textbook. Even after the hospital stopped delivering babies in the 1970s, it ran a free clinic for folks who didn’t have insurance for another 30 years.
I’ve volunteered with our elementary school’s after-school history club for three years, and before that day, I always stuck to the script. I used pre-written brochures from the historical society, stuck to the sites with official historic markers, checked all the boxes for what we were supposed to cover. But as the kids crowded around Mia’s photo, pushing each other gently to get a look, I realized I’d been missing the whole point. Most history curricula are full of big names and faraway events, and that’s fine, but kids don’t connect to that the way they connect to a story that happened right where they’re standing, to someone their grandma knew.
It doesn’t take much to add this kind of learning to your routine, whether you’re a parent or a teacher. I started doing three small things after that day, and they’ve made a huge difference with no extra budget or planning time needed. First, on every walking tour or even a casual family walk around town, I leave 15 minutes unplanned. If a kid points to an old building and asks what it was, we stop. No rushing to the next planned stop. Second, I ask all the kids to bring one small thing from home: a photo, an old receipt, a lapel pin, anything that ties a family member to a local place. We don’t do big presentations or graded projects; we just pull them out when we’re near that place and share the 1-2 sentence story that goes with it. Third, if there’s no historic marker, we just lean in. We pulled a few small, loose branches away from the Norris Hospital steps that day so the kids could see the carved name, and that was enough. We didn’t need a bronze plaque to make it matter.
People talk a lot about what’s lost when a small college like MacMurray closes. They talk about lost jobs, lost tax revenue, lost traditions for alumni. All that’s true. But the legacy of Norris Hospital isn’t in the college’s old endowment or the alumni reunions held at the country club now. It’s in the thousands of nurses who got their start there, who went on to work in hospitals and clinics all across the state. It’s in the hundreds of people who were born there, who still live in this town, who pass the story down to their grandkids.
A few weeks after that first stop, we got a small $500 grant from the local historical society to put up a temporary wooden marker by the steps. We printed Mia’s great grandma’s photo on it, added a 3-sentence history of the hospital, and put it up last month. While we were hammering it into the ground, a woman in a minivan pulled over, got out, and said she was born in Norris in 1952. She took a photo of the marker with her phone to send to her three siblings, who were also born there. None of them had a photo of the entrance, she said. That’s the kind of connection you can’t get from a worksheet.
Right now, the town is deciding what to do with the old Norris building. The most popular plan is to turn it into affordable senior housing, which this town needs badly. No one knows if that will go through, or if the building will be torn down for something new in 10 years. That’s okay. The kids in the history club already know what’s there. They know that this brick building wasn’t just a place where a college kept files. It was a place where people learned to take care of their neighbors, where hundreds of people started their lives, where help was available even when you didn’t have much money. I don’t have a neat wrap-up for this. Legacy isn’t something you preserve in a museum. It’s something you pass on, one crumpled photo, one 10-minute stop, one story at a time. Right now, that’s enough.
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