The Archive and the Schoolyard: Where the County's Telling Was Filed

1956–1990 · the Indiana University Folklore Archives

The collection: the children's rhymes, the playground games, the jokes, the beliefs and the local legends of Indiana schoolyards were, for a generation, collected as scholarship down in Bloomington: the Indiana University Folklore Archives, established in 1956 by Richard M. Dorson of the IU Folklore Institute, built to some 40,000 field collections gathered by students across Indiana, Michigan, Ohio and Kentucky before it closed in 1990. Its own description of itself is the governing document for what it holds: manuscripts of field collections with paperwork and sound recordings, arranged by collector, with subject files and index cards under the folklorist's headings — beliefs, customs, games, jokes, legends among them — and its miscellaneous division, the archive's own catalogue note says, subdivided by county. St. Joseph County's telling entered that system the way every county's did: a student with a notebook, a grandmother or a playground for a source, a folder in Bloomington.

The honest limit: the archive's published guide states its scale and its system, and no St. Joseph County count — no number of this county's collections, no list of its items — stands in any published source this section could reach. The county's schoolyard stock is therefore printed at this size: the survey statement that it was collected, into a system whose own catalogue is organized to hold it by county, and the named gap where its measure would go. The Folklore Institute's related collections stand beside it in the same catalogue: the student papers of 1967–2000, and the Indiana Communities Folklore Project of 1980–82, which gathered the history of Indiana towns, residents and industries in the same era. The city's own tale-keeper is nearer and open: the St. Joseph County Public Library's Local & Family History room, whose staff writing corrected the Lerch legend for the Tribune's readers — the same room John Palmer serves, whom Notre Dame Magazine names among the keepers of the mushroom man's river. The folklore of South Bend, such as survives in custody, survives in those two places: a county file in Bloomington whose size no one has published, and a public library room in the city itself that answers questions.

Sources:

1. Indiana University Archives, Archives Online — “Folklore Archives records, 1956–1990,” Collection C645: established by Richard M. Dorson; some 40,000 field collections from Indiana, Michigan, Ohio and Kentucky; manuscripts with subject-file index cards (beliefs, customs, games, jokes, legends); closed 1990.
2. Indiana University Libraries, IU Archives Research Guide: Folklore — the archive's divisions, its miscellaneous division “subdivided into counties,” and the sibling collections: Folklore Institute student papers 1967–2000 (C627) and the Indiana Communities Folklore Project, 1980–82 (C608).
3. St. Joseph County Public Library, Local & Family History — the Lerch correction, and the room's standing as the city's local-history reference of record, as cited in this history's Unsolved Mysteries section.