The History Museum — the move of 1994 and the institution today

Campus opened 1994 — renamed The History Museum, December 2014

The move: In 1994 the society left the old courthouse and opened a modern museum building on the Copshaholm grounds at the corner of West Washington and Chapin streets — a campus of some ten acres holding the museum building, the Oliver Mansion, the Worker's Home and the Oliver Gardens. Through the 1990s and the move the institution operated as the Northern Indiana Center for History. In December 2014 it took the operating name it carries now: The History Museum, the legal society of 1867 standing behind it. In 2005 the Studebaker National Museum opened in the connected building next door, and the two together form the campus the city knows as The Museums at Washington and Chapin.

The collection and the archive: The museum's own account puts its holdings at approximately 600,000 two- and three-dimensional materials — the accumulation of a century and a half of the valley's keeping: artifacts, photographs, manuscripts and the named collections of the region's families and firms. Its archives hold the Vincent Bendix Research Library's collections, read in the Bendix Reading Room, and such gatherings as the Jeanne Denham Collection of Michiana history and genealogy, the lifetime files of the county's unofficial historian, transferred after her death in 2012 and kept in eighty-one archival boxes. The museum's nonprofit filings report nearly 47,000 individuals visiting its exhibits, touring its historic houses and joining its programs in a recent year. In 2015 the museum achieved accreditation from the American Alliance of Museums — the same national recognition its two campus neighbors in this record, the Studebaker and art museums, hold from their own earlier dates.

Kidsfirst: Inside the museum building is a museum within the museum: the Kidsfirst Children's Museum, a hands-on children's gallery where the youngest visitors climb into a birchbark canoe and a Conestoga wagon and work the pretend storefronts. The museum's own notices record that Kidsfirst has been renovated and reopened in its present form. The year of its first opening does not stand in the sources reached for this section, and it is printed here as a gap rather than a guess; its place in the building, as the History Museum's children's arm, is not in doubt.

Sources:

1. The History Museum (historymuseumsb.org) — the campus and its parts, the archives of approximately 600,000 two- and three-dimensional materials, accreditation in 2015, and the Kidsfirst reopening notice.
2. The Nonprofits record of this history — the Northern Indiana Center for History name through the 1990s, and the operating name changed to The History Museum in December 2014.
3. South Bend Area Genealogical Society — the Jeanne Denham Collection index: her files transferred to the History Museum after her death on 27 July 2012, in 81 archival boxes.
4. The History Museum's nonprofit filings, as summarized in its charity profiles — nearly 47,000 individuals visiting exhibits, houses and programs in a recent filing year.
5. Clio and visitor accounts of the Center for History era — the Kidsfirst Children's Museum's canoe, wagon and hands-on galleries.