The Digger

There is a beloved restaurant in Urbana called the Courier Cafe. A history of the building/restaurant reveals that the land where the cafe now stands used to belong to Alvin T. Burrows, owner of the Courier Newspaper. Burrows bought the land in 1916 and ran the newspaper out of the two-room log cabin that had been built there in 1837. In the 1950s, the building was almost lost to a fire but it was saved and rebuilt. According to the website, there are places where charred timbers are still visible. In 1979, having been plagued with problems for years, the Courier Newspaper closed up shop. On July 7, 1980 new owners took over the building and began remodeling it, taking care to preserve as many of the original characteristics as possible. On November 10, 1980, the building opened up again as the Courier Cafe.

Antiques abound in the cafe, and the back of the menu has little snippets about each of them. My favorite is the one you see here: The Digger. It's an antique gumball machine. You insert a quarter, and the scoop moves down and "digs" into the gumballs. With any luck, it will pull one out and drop it down the shoot for you. But not always. The Digger is pretty ornate, and you can tell it's old--the menu snippet says it's from 1925. I like to think that machines like it could be found at the the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago and the menu confirms that world's fairs did have machines like The Digger on display. I wish I could have been around to see them in their glory days, but for now I'll just have to settle for this little piece of history.