Jasper-Dubois County library adds historic collections to Indiana Memory
Thousands of Dubois County photos and George R. Wilson’s notes are now searchable at home, filling gaps left by the 1839 courthouse fire.
The Jasper-Dubois County Public Library has put two major local history collections within reach of anyone with a computer or phone, opening up thousands of old photographs and decades of George R. Wilson’s notes through Indiana Memory.
The addition matters in Dubois County, where fragile early records make preservation especially urgent. Dubois County was created in 1818 from Pike County, with Jasper as the county seat, and the courthouse fire in 1839 destroyed almost all records from before that date. By moving more material into Indiana Memory, the library gave residents a way to search around those losses instead of running into them.
Indiana Memory is Indiana’s free digital gateway to history and culture, with more than 700,000 items from over 170 partners and, on another collections page, 752 collections. That larger statewide platform now holds Dubois County material alongside documents, manuscripts, photographs, newspapers, maps, films and oral histories from across Indiana.
The strongest visual window into local life is Photographs of Dubois County, a collection of 1,764 records that was made available by local residents and supported by a grant through the Indiana State Library and Indiana Memory. The archive includes images tied to Birdseye, Ferdinand, Huntingburg and Jasper, along with scenes that trace pioneer life, land records and civic development. For families trying to identify a farm, a storefront or a face in an old picture, those labels can turn a mystery into a named place.
The Wilson Historical Notes on Dubois County collection carries a deeper paper trail. Indiana University Archives describes the Wilson, G.R. manuscript collection as 40 bound volumes, including 23 volumes of Historical Notes on Dubois County compiled from 1924 to 1941, five volumes of indexes, four volumes of addresses, essays and poems, two volumes of Wilson’s Compendium and five volumes of Commonplace Books. Indiana Memory already shows specific volume dates for the series, including 1925, 1926, 1930, 1936 and 1938, underscoring how much of the county’s written memory is now searchable from home.
The library’s metadata work made the collections far more usable, with better searchability for names, dates and local landmarks. That should help genealogists tracing family lines, students building school projects and residents researching property histories or church connections. It also fits the library’s broader genealogy holdings, which total more than 1,400 volumes, including 765 Indiana books and 385 focused on Dubois County, its cities, churches and cemeteries.
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