Our Collections

Wylie House Museum is extremely fortunate to have many Wylie family artifacts in addition to other period antiques. The descendants of both Andrew and Theophilus Wylie have been generous in donating furniture, glassware, china, paintings, photographs, textiles, and literally thousands of family letters and documents. These materials help us to tell the story of the Wylie families and early Bloomington and IU history and add a special touch to the house. Below you will find a gallery of images of some Wylie artifacts.

The museum also has a rich textile collection that includes table linens, quilts, hand woven coverlets, clothing and accessories from the 19th century. Some of these are Wylie family artifacts and some were donated by others who support our work here. A second image gallery showcases some of our favorite textiles.

Housed in the Morton C. Bradley, Jr. Education Center is a large collection of books owned by Theophilus A. Wylie and his extended family. We have furnished one room on the second floor with these books and furniture that belonged to the family. While the books have been cataloged using our museum collection software, they are not yet in IU-Cat. Many of the books are in somewhat fragile condition, but we are slowly working toward having the needed conservation work performed on them so that interested researchers could use them on-site. Thanks to the Bradley bequest and another gift from a descendant of Andrew Wylie, we also have an amazing archival collection of family correspondence, photographs, and ephemera. The letters are being transcribed, finding aids are available, and some of the letters have been digitized and are available to view at Archives Online at Indiana University through the IU Digital Library Program.

IU student interns, graduate assistants, and volunteers, mostly from the School of Library and Information Science, have helped us catalog, document and house these collections and we are grateful for their eager and enthusiastic help. We encourage them and other IU students and faculty to study our collections and use them in their research projects and teaching. When IU classes visit the museum, we often pull out materials that are not otherwise on display which will help us speak to the special interests of a particular class. Faculty members interested in bringing their classes or selected students to the museum are invited to contact our Curator of Education, Bridget Edwards, for further information.