Bruce Beasley steps into the small room, the soles of his shoes echoing as they hit the hard wood floor, and the smell of Indiana’s history fills the air.

“This is Jefferson Academy,” he says proudly, gesturing to a long wooden table, lined with small children’s school books, some more than 200 years old. “Built in 1801, it was the first public school in Indiana.”

He’s a teacher, a historian, and he’s in his element, the confidence in his voice makes that much very clear. He wants everyone to know, to appreciate, the little building’s history and what it’s meant to the community.

That’s what makes the last part of his story so very special.

“Gov. William Henry Harrison, when he gets here in 1806,” Beasley finishes with a gleam in his eye, “he renames it Vincennes University.”

“The keepers of history,” that’s what Beasley and the rest of the staff at Vincennes’ State Historic Sites call themselves, connectors of the past to the present. Knowing that Vincennes University got its start in a tiny school house with a Catholic priest as its teacher is the key to appreciating its current grandeur, they believe.

“We keep the history,” Beasley, the west region manager for State Historic Sites, said from behind a desk at the site’s Log Cabin Visitors Center. “We are public historians who try to bring these ideas to as many people as we can. After all, people who take pride in their communities take care of them.”

In trouble or not?

Upon entering the visitor’s center, a large guest book immediately draws the eye. Hundreds of names fill its pages, some from as far away as Canada and even Alaska.

“And a lot of people don’t sign the book,” Beasley said as he thumbed through the pages. “We’re fortunate. A lot of people have visitors in town and they bring their visitors here. We appreciate that very much.”

But Vincennes is actually one of the two least visited sites in the state, tied with New Albany’s Culbertson Mansion. Each average about 10,000 visitors a year, according to the state Department of Natural Resources.

Recently, DNR made the decision to close the Ernie Pyle State Historic Site in Dana because it had, on average, only 1,500 visitors a year.

Its closing means Vincennes and New Albany are now near the bottom of the list list.

However, Joellen Bye, site manager for the Culbertson Mansion, said 2009 was a strong year as 14,688 visitors toured New Albany’s historic structure. And the mansion is only open from April 1 to mid-December.

“We’re not open a full year,” she said. “We are usually the busiest in the spring and fall. We have a lot of school tours in the spring and a lot of events going on in the fall. We were definitely up last year.”

The Culbertson Mansion continues to receive an overall facelift. The outside of the home was painted last year and the front walk was repaired. The first floor is completely renovated and half of the second floor has been completed.

“We were hoping to be open the entire year in 2009 but budget cuts didn’t allow us to do that,” Bye said.

The Vincennes sites, Beasley said, actually draws several more than 10,000 people a year, a feature that was reported by DNR when it was announced the state would close the Ernie Pyle site. It’s much closer, he said, to 15,000 when you add in the thousands of fourth-grade students that pass through the sites each year. Fourth grade is when Indiana school children begin learning about the state’s history. That history, of course, often leads teachers to Vincennes, Indiana’s oldest city.

Those school trips aren’t, as many might believe, free. School children are charged $1.50 apiece to tour the sites. Sometimes the parents pay it; sometimes the school does, Beasley said.

The general public is charged $3.50, he said, less for seniors and children.

But visitors aren’t the sites’ only source of revenue. Beasley and his team have worked in previous years to expand not only programs offered to school-age children but also to the adult public.

For instance, last year the sites held a Victorian Christmas celebration at the Old State Bank, and each year they also hold a candlelight tour of the sites — Jefferson Academy, the Indiana Territorial Capital and Elihu Stout’s print shop — along side the annual Spirit of Vincennes Rendezvous Grand Ball. They also sponsor, among many other events, the annual Muster on the Wabash at Fort Knox, also a part of the local State Historic Sites. All of these have a cost associated with them, money that goes right back to the local sites, Beasley said.

Beasley and his staff also have developed after-school programs and summer day camp events to reach not just fourth-grade children. The camps and programs try to expand beyond history and into science, language arts and even math. Currently, the sites are hosting an after-school program wherein children can learn about science through the inventions of the country’s founding fathers, including Thomas Jefferson, George Washington and Benjamin Franklin.

“The money from those (programs) doesn’t go into some huge general fund somewhere,” Beasley said. “It all stays right here, to help us fund other programs.”

No state funds, which are used strictly for the sites’ maintenance, are used to support any of the programs.

And it’s these programs, Beasley said, that could save Vincennes’ sites from the chopping block. Without the sites — and the effort its employees put into educating the public — Beasley and his staff wonder if the area’s history will be lost forever. If our historians aren’t around to remind us just where we came from, who will?

“Hoosiers have a very special, a very unique history,” he said. “And we need to be proud of that history.”



Tribune Region Editor Chris Morris contributed to this story