What does a taxidermized Kodiak bear named Monroe, a log cabin from the 1830s and a statuette of the Radio Corporation of America mascot have in common? They’re all housed at the Monroe County History Center, located at 202 E. Sixth St. in Bloomington.
Fittingly, the History Center building itself has a lot of, well, history. Bloomington’s Colored School sat on the Sixth Street lot until 1915, when a library, funded partially by philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, took its place. The library moved to another site in 1970, and the Monroe County Historical Society and Museum refitted the building for its own use in 1980.
The MCHC has a series of permanent and rotating exhibits that visitors can walk through during museum hours, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday.
Permanent exhibits
On the second floor of the museum, visitors are met with Monroe, a stuffed Kodiak bear that operations manager Justin Robertson said was shot in Alaska in 1948 by a Bloomington business owner who later brought Monroe to Indiana. If you touch a section of pelt on the display in front of Monroe, a recorded growl fills the air.
Also on the second floor, the Cook Gallery hosts an 1880s one-room schoolhouse, a log cabin from the 1830s and a gallery tracing the 1975-1976 IU men's championship basketball season. The log cabin was built in Greene County, Indiana, by Edmund Bingham, a settler from Virginia. It was disassembled and then reassembled inside the museum in 1987.
Additional exhibits located at the history center tell the story of the Seward iron foundry, the Radio Corporation of America factory and the beginnings of Cook Incorporated, a Bloomington-based medical manufacturing company.
Finally, there’s an exhibit on transportation across the years in Monroe County, including farm wagons, the arrival of the Monon railroad and the county airport. To travel there, turn right out of the entrance to the second floor.
Rotating exhibits
As visitors walk up the stairs to the museum’s main exhibit spaces, they pass the Curtis Stairwell Gallery, which currently focuses on the story of Violeta McKee, a woman who immigrated from the Philippines to the U.S. by herself, eventually ending up in Bloomington. The exhibit includes clothing, photographs and art.
On the second floor, to the left of Monroe the bear, the Rechter Gallery currently features the “Start at the Source: Showers Brother Co.” interactive exhibit, which allows visitors to emulate museum curators creating an exhibit. Visitors can choose the information they want to learn about the Showers family and business and create their own interpretive sign, like the kind you’d find in a museum.
Robertson said that starting March 3, a new exhibit about Revolutionary War veterans who are buried in Monroe County will be on display. Though rotating galleries typically stay up for three to four months, Robertson said the Revolutionary War exhibit will likely be up longer due to the upcoming American semiquincentennial, or 250th anniversary.
The Monroe County History Center covers the stories of this area from prehistory — Robertson said the oldest artifact in the museum is a mastodon tooth — to recent events, and it’s definitely worth a walk-through on your next visit to Bloomington.
This story was originally published in the Indiana Daily Student's spring 2026 Source Campus Visitor's Guide.
