Our Story
The Downers Grove Museum is a community museum in the western suburbs of Chicago. Operated as a facility of the Downers Grove Park District, the musuem’s mission is to provide educational and leisure opportunities for the community by collecting, preserving, exhibiting and interpreting materials that explain and document the history of Downers Grove and its relationship to local, state, regional, national and global history.
The museum’s collection includes over 80,000 historical objects, furniture, clothing, textiles, documents, and photographs related to the history of Downers Grove. Some of the important artifacts in our collection include Downers Grove’s first motorized firetruck, objects owned by Downers Grove’s founder, documents signed by four U.S. Presidents, and original photographs that the Downers Grove Reporter newspaper published from the 1940s to 1990s.
The museum started in 1973, when the Downers Grove Park District and Downers Grove Historical Society began operating a museum in a house on Curtis Street. The Historical Society exhibited its collection of historical artifacts that it had started in 1967 and displayed in Village Hall. Three years later, the Park District purchased the historic 1892 Charles Blodgett House on Maple Avenue and moved the museum there. The Park District also hired Pauline Wandschendier, the founder of the Downers Grove Historical Society, as the museum’s first Curator and named the Blodgett house’s property Wandschneider Park in her honor.
The Downers Grove Museum has expanded beyond the Charles Blodgett House since then. In the late 1980s, the Park District replaced the property’s old homestead barn with a brand new exhibition and programming facility designed to look like a barn. In 2008, the DG Heritage Preservation Society raised funds to move the 1846 Israel Blodgett house on Randall Street to the museum’s property. However, it has not been opened to the public due to a long-term interior renovation project.