The below photo of Bloomington's Center Street was taken in 1857. The streets were dirt and the sidewalks were wooden boards. Sarah Raymond, in her address to the Board of Education, described Bloomington in 1857 as a "straggling prairie town of six or seven thousand inhabitants. The people were poor, crops had failed for a year or two, and the great financial crash of 1857 had ruined its thousands."'
Courtesy of the McLean County Museum of History
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