Don't Miss the Northern Indiana Center for History in South Bend, Indiana!

We recently made a special trip to South Bend, Indiana to see the Studebaker National Museum, and we found an unexpected bonus when we got there!

The car museum shares a building with the Northern Indiana Center for History, and you get a discount on museum admissions if you decide to go to both museums during the same visit to the Museums at Washington and Chapin campus.

We're both history buffs and we weren't on a rigid schedule, so the decision to include the Center for History into our plans wasn't difficult for us. We ended up spending pretty much the entire day touring both museums, and still didn't see everything!

Northern Indiana Center for History, South Bend, Indiana

The Center for History, first organized in 1867, is the second oldest historical society in the Hoosier state and showcases the history of the St. Joseph River Valley Region.

The Center for History's complex includes a 38-room mansion that belonged to South Bend industrialist J. D. Oliver and his family (which we missed seeing as there was a wedding going on there at the time of our visit) and a workers' home depicting the life of a Polish immigrant family of the 1930s.

There was still plenty to see at the museum during our visit, including a couple of changing exhibits that are still there right now.

One of those exhibits, "World War I: The War to End All Wars", showed life, battle and death during the War.

Visitors enter the exhibit through banks of burlap sandbags arranged to bring to mind the trenches created by soldiers during the war and lots of war-time posters and battlefield still and video images.

Visitor also walk through a general's tent like the many that served as "war rooms" in the battlefields, samples of WWI technology and a triage tent that gives viewers an idea of how primitive the medical facilities, considered advanced at the time of the war, really were.

The exhibit also showed how women played increasingly important roles in supporting the wartime effort at home, and even on the battlefields of the time.

The resident historian here (Tim) felt the exhibit was well done, and I think we both learned a lot about this war that neither one of us knew a lot about previously.

This exhibit opened February 15 and runs through December 31 of this year.

My favorite exhibit had to be "Polished in Public, Fierce on the Field: The All-American Girls Professional Baseball League".

Many professional baseball players became subject to the military draft during the 1940s because of World War II, and teams had trouble fielding enough healthy players for games.

Baseball executive Phillip Wrigley came up with the idea of creating an all-female professional baseball league in 1943 to fill the gap and keep pro baseball alive throughout the war and its shortage of male players.

The All-American Girls' league fielded teams in 14 mid-sized Midwestern towns. The South Bend Blue Sox was one of the first AAGPBL teams and one of two teams that remained active during the entire 12-year lifespan of the women's league.

Other teams in the league were the Rockford Peaches, Kenosha Comets, Racine Belles, Milwaukee Chicks, Minneapolis Millerettes, Grand Rapids Chicks, Fort Wayne Daisies, Muskegon Lassies, Peoria Redwings, Chicago Colleens, Springfield Sallies, Battle Creek Belles and Kalamazoo Lassies.

The players in the league were serious athletes, but team owners and league officials expected them to be beautiful and "lady-like" at all times when there were off of the playing field.

The league folded in 1954, but several former players remained in South Bend after their pro playing days were over and the Center for History is the repository of the league's archive and artifacts.

This exhibit opened on May 31, 2014 and runs through May 31, 2015.

We also caught a showing of "A Free Life" in the museum's Voyages Gallery, a 30-minute documentary film about the history of the African-American community in the St. Joseph River region from the 1840s through the 1920s.

This film, produced by the museum narrated by actor and South Bend native Michael Warren (perhaps best known for his long-running role in the 1980s "Hill Street Blues" television show), is definitely worth watching.

We found it especially fascinating as it contained a lot of information about the history of the Underground Railroad in northern Indiana and southwestern Michigan.

The Center for History opens 10 a.m. until 5 p.m. Monday through Saturday and noon until 5 p.m. on Sunday. It closes on New Years Day, Easter Sunday, Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.

Admission for just the Center for History is $8 for adults, $6.50 for seniors 60+, $5 for students ages 6 and up and free for children under 5.

Go ahead and live large by planning to make a day of it and purchase the package deal for admission to the Center for History and the Studebaker National Museum: $12 for adults, $10 for seniors, $7 for students and free for children 5 and younger.

The museum's Web site has a lot of great Indiana history resources online, plus you can connect with the Center for History on Facebook or view its Flickr stream online.

Want to learn more? Check out South Bend Indiana (Images of America) by Kay Marnon Danielson or South Bend in Vintage Postcards by John Palmer.

Also make sure to check out, The South Bend Blue Sox: A History of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League Team and Its Players, 1943-1954 by Jim Sargent, Women's Baseball by John M. Kovach and the 1992 movie, A League of Their Own. The movie, directed by Penny Marshall, tells the fictionalized story of the league and includes a few short clips of some of the original players during the movie's end credits.