Past president Doris Leonard dies

Doris Parr Leonard, 1919-2001 Courtesy Illinois State Historical Library

Author and historian Doris J. Leonard, first woman president of the Illinois State Historical Society, died on Thursday, October 21, 2002, at Perry Memorial Hospital in Princeton. She was 83.

According to her obituary, printed in the Bureau County Republican, Mrs. Leonard was born May 30, 1919, in Princeton to Reverend Harold E. Parr and Ruth (Makutchan) Parr. She married Cliff Leonard on December 19, 1943, in San Francisco, California. He died in November 1994. They had no children.

"She was a 1937 graduate of Princeton High School and a home-maker," the Republican reported. "She retired from the Bureau County Credit Bureau after 20 years. She taught history at the junior college level and wrote several history books."

Bureau County Historical Society director Pamela Lange remembers Leonard as an assertive champion of local history whose commitment went above and beyond the call. "She served on the Bureau County Historical Society Museum board since the mid-1950s," Lange said. "She always did her best to come to the meetings so we eventually made her an honorary board member."

Leonard served as president of the Illinois State Historical Society from 1961-1962, the only woman president in the Society's first 80 years of business. "She was very proud of that," Lange observed.

Dan Holt, director of the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library in Abilene, Kansas, and former director of Field Services for the Illinois State Historical Society, worked with Leonard on a daily basis for nearly twenty years and called her "one of a kind."

"In a day when women were not normally elected to posts such as the president of the Illinois State Historical Society, her abilities, charm, and dedication to that organization left no choice in the minds of the board members that she was a leader," Holt told Illinois Heritage. "Doris was a past president when I arrived in Illinois so I did not work with her as president, but even as a past president, her leadership was always apparent, and she offered sage advice any time I sought her assistance.

"She was not only a promoter of local and state history but also a wonderful person who charmed even the most resistant," Holt added. "She, accompanied by her husband Cliff, were truly what volunteerism means in the best sense of the word."

Leonard's books, Big Bureau and Bright Prairies: A History of Bureau County (1968) and A Pioneer Tour of Bureau County (1954) are still considered seminal histories of the region. She taught Illinois history at Illinois Valley Community College in Oglesby and was a member of the Hampshire Colony Congregational Church. Burial was in Princeton's Oakland Cemetery. Those wishing to make memorial gifts are directed to the Hampshire Colony Congregational Church or the Bureau County Day Care Center.

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