Have you gotten the Belleville Historical Society calendar? If not, you might want to.

The annual Belleville Historical Society calendar has become a yearly highlight for me and a lot of other people.

The 2020 calendar, “Shopping Small in Belleville,” is on sale at several local businesses for $10. It makes a good stocking stuffer, although I guess you would have to roll it up for that and that wouldn’t be good.

Anyway, the calendar is 12 months of historical photos from Belleville’s past. It is loaded with information about the old businesses and features pictures of what their buildings look like today, or at least information about where the buildings would be if they weren’t demolished somewhere along the way.

The cover photo is Joseph Hausmann and a couple of his clerks inside his grocery store at 110 S. Illinois St., which now is a parking lot for the Belleville News-Democrat. Hausmann bought the store in 1898 from the Merz family who had owned it for three decades.

Hausmann died in 1907 but his family ran the store until 1940. It became a tire store and then an annex of the newspaper until it was leveled for the parking lot.

Joan Braswell, who helped sell advertising for the calendar, said last year’s edition, “Shopping Small on Main Street,” was so popular they decided to feature more businesses while continuing the shopping small theme.

“People seemed to love that,” she said.

Local historian Robert Brunkow supplied much of the history and the Belleville Museum of Labor and Industry photo archive held most of the old pictures.

In the new calendar the year progresses from Dietz the Tailor and Klock the Jeweler in January to Nold Pharmacy on North Illinois Street in December. Along the way are several food establishments including groceries and meat markets. Back in the late 1800s Belleville had around 60 neighborhood grocery stores so no one had far to go to shop.

Now, the modern cubist Mathis, Marifian, and Richter building sits where once Louia Hoerr had her millinery shop at 13 E. Main St. in the Penn Building. She opened her business to survive in 1886 after her husband, Jacob, died. She was there for 35 years, retiring in 1927.

A more modern building, the Medical Arts Building at 200 N. Illinois St., was built in 1955. It featured many glass block windows and emphasized horizontal and vertical lines and eliminated a lot of detail. It housed six physicians and some FBI agents. It now is a parking lot but lives in spirit as close kin to the old Schaufler Pharmacy building at 300 E. Main St.

Where can people purchase the calendar?

The calendars are available at Circa Boutique, Eckert’s Country Store, Eckert Florist, Keil’s Antiques and Gifts, Local Lucy’s and Peace by Piece Boutique. You also can order online by PayPal at www.bellevillehistoricalsociety.org.