The Busey Family
Contributions made to the Development
of the City of Champaign Urbana
Patricia Plaut
Summer Fellowship 2009
To download this lesson in PDF format, click here.
Lesson 1:
Students will look at a Champaign Urbana map and focus on the street names of a
portion of Urbana. They will be asked to think why do streets get named as they
do. They will then look at a 1993 geographic census noting the top 20 most used
names for streets in the US.
Procedures:
á
Project Google
maps of Champaign Urbana onto a screen and zoom into the area in Urbana: North
of Springfield Ave., East of Lincoln Ave., West of Race Street, and South of
University Ave, or take a city map provided by the city of Champaign Urbana and
pass one out to groups of students.
Ask them to write down the names of the streets. Can they categorize them into group types?
á
Ask, what is
significant about these names? Busey, McCullough, Coler, Lincoln, Stoughton, Clark are named after
who/what? Why these names?
á
Ask, what are
the other names that are not people names: Main, Cedar, Orchard, Wood, Race, and
Birch. Specifically, what does the
word Main Street connote in terms of the beginning of
the city of Urbana.
á
Hand out StreetNameCensus and have them read the text on the left
side first and then look at the rankings. . There is a summary of this at: http://www.nlc.org/about_cities/cities_101/184.aspx.
á
Ask, what type
of streets names are used the most. Which is the top most? Why not main or 1st
street? Why would Washington be the first person named street on the list? Does
the area in Urbana they looked at follow the census findings?
Analysis of Local Primary Sources:
á
Google map of
Champaign Urbana, http://maps.google.com/.
á
OR, map of
Champaign Urbana
Ties to a National Primary Source:
á
Most common
street names found ranked in the US Census report of 1993, Geographic Division.
A summary was produced by The National
League of Cities and can be found at:
http://web.archive.org/web/20051027093314/http://www.nlc.org/about_cities/cities_101/184.cfm