Editor’s note: This guest essay, part of the Times’ Black History Month coverage, was written by Bryan Thompson, Town of DeKalb historian. Among his awards is 2009 Winner of the
Adams County was home to at least two historians of national eminence. One was Allan Nevins of Columbia University. Nevins was a Camp Point, Ill., native who twice won the Pulitzer Prize and wrote a multi-volume history of the Civil War and its prologue.
The other was Marshall Smelser, a graduate of Quincy High School and Quincy College. He earned his Ph.D. at Harvard under the direction of Samuel Eliot Morison, a Pulitzer Prize historian of maritime and American history. Smelser taught at the University of Notre Dame for almost three decades.
Smelser belonged to the Quincy family known for its photography studio. His parents, Albert and Gladys Alma Smelser, established their business in 1923 in the 600 block of Hampshire Street where, The Herald-Whig reported on April 4, 1954, it was still operated by his brother, Howard. Marshall married Anna Padberg of Quincy and was an assistant field director for the Red Cross during World War II. By 1947, The Herald-Whig reported on Sept. 21