Bureau County Supports the war effort

The Norman Rockwell Museum states, “In May 1943, representatives from the Post and the U.S. Department of the Treasury announced a joint campaign to sell war bonds and stamps. They would send the Four Freedoms paintings along with 1,000 original cartoons and paintings by other illustrators and original manuscripts from The Saturday Evening Post on a national tour.”

The four posters would travel to sixteen cities and would be seen by more than one million Americans who would go on to purchase over $133 million in war bonds and stamps.

In fact, as noted in the video below with Princeton Public Library Curator Margaret Martinkus, the library was one of twenty in the State of Illinois to receive an original Norman Rockwell war bond poster of one of The Four Freedoms.

Princeton and Bureau County, IL would play their own part in buying bonds as well, contributing millions of dollars to the war effort as these ads and articles from the Bureau County Tribune in 1942 and 1943 indicate. We would like to thank one of our partners, The Bureau County Historical Society, for graciously working with us on the local history for this project, and for the use of their Research Library, and to Margaret Martinkus and the Princeton Public Library for participating in this interview.