Local History Room
The Buchanan District Library’s Local History Room endeavors to collect, preserve, and make accessible resources for the study of the history of the Buchanan area. Our holdings include governmental and organizational records, personal manuscript collections, and a variety of books, newspapers, maps, photographs, artifacts, clippings, ephemera, and vertical files.
Visitors can request to see LHR materials listed in the Library Catalog any time the Library is open. Research questions and requests to see other materials, however, require special assistance and guidance. Our Archivist is a volunteer and works varied hours. Scheduled hours are usually Thursdays 10:00am to 2:00pm and Saturdays 11:30am to 3:00pm, but please call the library at 269-695-3681 to check if the Archivist will be in before making a special trip; better yet, email the Archivist ahead of time to set up an appointment. With enough notice, the Archivist can be available at almost any time that the Library is open. For assistance or to schedule an appointment, please send an email to localhistory@buchananlibrary.org.
We invite you to not only to make use of our resources, but also consider donating family letters, emails, photographs, artifacts, and ephemera or your organizations' records to help build our collections. Please help us preserve our community’s history!
The library is digitizing our historical newspaper collection. Almost every issue we hold between 1864 and 1985 has been scanned, converted into machine-readable format (OCR’d), and made available on the internet. We are currently working on the issues for 1986-1994.
It is easy to access individual newspaper issues on the web, but there is no efficient way to do an online search of the entire newspaper collection. However, our in-house public computers allow users to perform simple or sophisticated searches for the years 1869-1935, and soon to be the entire newspaper collection, using built-in Adobe software. Depending on your needs, it may be worth the trip.
A traditional, back of the book style index to select Buchanan-related content in the Berrien County Record, 1869-1882, is available online (see file below). It emphasizes businesses, industry, infrastructure, homes, schools, and churches but excludes personal (genealogical) notices.
Index of the (Buchanan, MI) BERRIEN COUNTY RECORD, 1869-1934 (bulk 1869-1882)A card catalog available in the Library provides a traditional index to vital records (births, deaths, weddings and real estate transfers) reported in the Berrien County Record for 1870-1883, 1895-1907, 1933-1935, and scattered years in between. Email the Archivist at localhistory@buchananlibrary.org to schedule an appointment to access the card catalog.
Local history researcher Robert D. Brown has written a guide to The Connector, 1997-2000, which includes a list of articles that relate to local history.
The Connector Guide 1997-2000In 2005, Friends of Oak Ridge Cemetery published an alphabetic listing of burials in Buchanan’s Oak Ridge Cemetery. The listing was compiled by Russ and Mary Chadderdon. Since then, periodic updates have been issued and a guide to about 75 burials in small cemeteries in the Buchanan area added.
After compiling the most recent update in 2018, the Friends donated their work to the Buchanan District Library with the intention of seeing it published on the internet. That 2018 update, OAK RIDGE CEMETERY, Buchanan, Michigan: Readings of Grave Stone Inscriptions Supplemented by the Sexton’s Records for burials made through December 31, 2017, forms the basis for the online guide and index available below. The Library has modified the arrangement of the previous work and made some formatting and editorial changes, but the content remains the same.
Introduction to the 2018 edition of OAK RIDGE CEMETERY… Alphabetic List of Burials and Gravestones through December 31, 2017 Section/Lot List of Burials and Gravestones through December 31, 2017 1990 Plat Map of Oak Ridge Cemetery 2003 Plat Map of Additions (Sections I-J-K) Plat Map of Addition to Section 8 (~2003)We have finding aids for just a handful of our collections. A finding aid provides a summary description of a collection as well as an inventory of its contents. Finding aids help researchers understand collections and get an idea of what can be found in them.
The 30 Club Records, 1897-2015 Boyce Maternity Home Records Buchanan College Club Records General Collection: Newspapers Redding-Hamilton Civil War Letters Collection, 1855, 1863-1865 Swartz Family Textbook Collection Wallquist's "Old Photos from the Local Area" Digital Album