Digging For Local History

Mooresville Public Library has a History Diggers group.  Patrons in grades K-6 learn how to make historical research fun.  On December 3, 2012, our History Diggers will make their own state or town flag designs and will uncover answers to many popular local history questions.  You, too, can play along! We have a list of questions (click images below to enlarge) for our history diggers. Mooresville mysteries to be solved!

My Library has several local history resources:

MPL Website

• Famous Mooresvillians page
• Indiana Room/Genealogy page

MPL Blog

• MPL Indiana Room Treasure Trove

If you're reading this, you're already here!

The key to using the blog as a local historical research tool is your command of the search line.  In the upper left-hand corner of the blog, there is a search line.  Our handy red arrow illustrates.

Click Image to Bigify

If you're looking for specific information about a particular place, person, or thing (nouns, in a word), type in your search word(s).  For example, if you want to learn about any dry goods stores that operated in downtown Mooresville, say, a century ago, try out dry goods downtown in the search line.  If you'd like to dig out the history about songs written in praise of Mooresville (or the people who settled around there nearly 200 years ago), try Mooresville song.  Interested in the history of hospitals in Mooresville? Search for Mooresville hospital.  You will find answers!  See how much fun digging for local history can be?

MPL YouTube Channel

• Local history "treasure trove" videos.  Our playlist is below. Click it, and the videos play!  Amazing thing, technology.  (Click the "next" button on the player below to jump to the next video in the playlist.)

Suppose, for instance, you'd like to know more about the history of the Mooresville Sanitarium.  Click the next button on the player above until you reach the video that talks about it.  Easy as pie!  But you'd have to talk to Miss Meg and Miss Rachel about that.

2022 UPDATE:  The History Diggers group has been discontinued at the library.

Updated "Treasure Troves" on New MPL Website (2012)

UPDATE:  Mooresville (Indiana) Public Library (MPL) revamped its website several times over the years.  This blog post refers to the 2012 upgrade.  The links have been updated to reflect the current version (as of February, 2025) of the library's website.

In August, 2012, MPL launched its new website.  Recently, the Indiana Room and Local History web pages were updated and expanded. Click the images below to go directly to those web pages.

 Click image to go to the MPL Indiana Room web page

Click image to go to the MPL Local History Resources launch page

MPL has an extensive collection of old photographs from Mooresville and the surrounding area in its Indiana Room.  Our promo trailer below gives a glimpse.  Click the play button (in the center of the image below) to start the video.

The library's YouTube channel has many local history videos.  Click the following link to see the local history video playlist.

2012 Banned Books Week

The Library has just made a promo trailer for 2012 Banned Books Week, which is September 30 through October 6, and which this year features a virtual read-out of banned books.  It is the 30th anniversary of BBW, and this year's theme celebrates "30 years of liberating literature."  For more information, visit the American Library Association (ALA) website.

We have a banned book trailer playlist on the MPL YouTube Channel.  Fight censorship.  Read a banned book.

Hers Was a Light That Shone Brightly

In June, 2011, the Library helped celebrate Indiana Room Librarian Emeritus Wanda Potts' 90th birthday.  Wanda passed over this week (Wednesday, July 25, 2012).  Aside from a few years' stay on the far west side of Indianapolis, she was a lifelong resident of Mooresville, Indiana.

Wanda Potts attended the Library's 100th Anniversary

celebration on Saturday, May 12, 2012

Wanda Potts' Obituary
Mooresville-Decatur Times, July 29, 2012

Wanda Rusie was born on June 16, 1921.  Her father's cousin was baseball hall of famer (and Mooresville native) Amos W. Rusie (1871-1942), known as "the Hoosier Thunderbolt," who played professionally for Indianapolis, the New York Giants, and the Cincinnati Reds (1889-early 1900s).  Wanda's talents were more cerebral, although she was rightly proud (who wouldn't be?) of having the fastest pitcher in major league baseball (at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries) in her family.

Growing up, Wanda was passionate about the cinema.  She loved movies and worked for several years in the town's then-only movie theater, the Ritz, located on East Main Street downtown in the Mooresville Times building (as it has been known for the past 40 years). Her school chums, teachers, and co-workers would have been amazed had they known (back in the 1930s and 1940s) that one day Wanda would appear in a major motion picture--Hoosiers (1986), in which she played an extra (she still had a 1950s wardrobe in her closets at home, she said, so why not?)--although, ultimately, her scenes ended on the cutting room floor.  Still, appearing in a real, live movie counts as a brush with stardom, and I'm certain that she was thrilled to appear, even briefly, alongside movie stars like those she saw at the Ritz as a teenager and young married lady (following her nuptials to Carl Richard Potts).

In 1966 Wanda Potts became the MPL Indiana Room Librarian and Assistant Librarian, which was the title (at that time) for the Assistant Director of the Library.  She held this post until she retired in 2002.  Wanda was passionate about local, county, and state history, and it was her life's work to preserve as much information as possible about Mooresville and the surrounding area, as well as historical documentation about Indianapolis and central Indiana.  She cared deeply about family histories, too--especially among hometown residents--so she assembled extensive genealogical data for the community's families.

Wanda was known for decades as the town historian.  Nobody knew more about Mooresville's colorful history than she.  The vast treasure trove of historical collections in the MPL Indiana Room was significantly created, augmented, and entirely maintained by her for nearly four decades, with the help of trusted and valued library colleagues and volunteers she had known for many years.   You would not now be reading this blog if she had not safeguarded and assembled the knowledge necessary to sketch Mooresville's historical canvas.

I would invite you to reprise my earlier blog postings containing Wanda's historical newspaper columns.  There are many such postings, so please browse them at your leisure.  You will learn more about local history than you ever thought possible.

A town’s history is like a lighthouse, shining a community’s collective memories to guide all those sailing the seas of everyday living. Wanda Potts was the lighthouse keeper, whose mastery of Mooresville history was unsurpassed, and who cherished and preserved the knowledge of nearly two centuries of community life here. Hers was the light that shone brightly. Thanks to Wanda’s labors at Mooresville Public Library, that history shines on, assuring modern residents a better understanding of the hometown she loved.

Still Your Source For Mooresville, Indiana History

Click Image to Enlarge

Soon MPL will be launching its new website.  Perhaps you've seen the "teaser" banner on our current website.  You may have also seen a "teaser" screenshot of the new website on my colleague Cauli Le Chat's blog.  If not, I can reproduce it here.

Pretty Cool Looking Web Interface

What does this mean for the Library's many blogs?  Well, they will all be posted directly through the new website rather than externally, using web hosts such as Blogger.  This will result in all of our Blogger-based blogs, including the one you're reading now, being discontinued.  Fortunately, all of our previously posted material will remain online, so it will continue to be available for readers' access.  Just  browse the archive menu on the right-hand side of this blog, or use the search tool in the upper left-hand corner.

Thanks for reading.  I hope you have found the blog interesting and informative.