Chicago History Museum

Chicago History Museum (formerly known as the Chicago Historical Society) was founded in 1856 to study and interpret Chicago's history. It is located in Lincoln Park in a building at 1601 North Clark Street at the intersection of North Avenue in the Old Town Triangle neighborhood of Lincoln Park in Chicago. It was renamed the Chicago History Museum in September, 2006. Founded in 1856, (about 25 years after Chicago's founding) much of the early collection amassed by the museum was destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire in 1871, but like the city, the museum rose from the ashes. Among its many documents which were lost in the fire was a copy of the Emancipation Proclamation, hand-written by Abraham Lincoln. After the fire, the Society began collecting new materials, which were stored in the a building owned by J. Young Scammon, a prominent lawyer and member of the Chicago Historical Society. However, the building and new collection were again destroyed by fire in 1874. The Chicago Historical Society built a fireproof building on the site of its pre-1871 building. The replacement building opened in 1896 and, after housing the collection for thirty-six years, was used for many purposes and often remained vacant until being transformed into a nightclub in 1985. This impressively massive Romanesque building is currently the home of the Excalibur nightclub. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1978.