The DuPage County Historical Museum, formerly the Adams Memorial Library, is a museum designed by Charles Sumner Frost

Charles Sumner Frost

Charles Sumner Frost was an American architect.Born in Lewiston, Maine, Frost was first a draftsman in Boston, and a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. While working in Boston he worked for the firm of Peabody and Stearns. He moved to Chicago in 1 882. There he began a...

 in Wheaton

Wheaton, Illinois

Wheaton is an affluent community located in DuPage County, Illinois, approximately west of Chicago and Lake Michigan. Wheaton is the county seat of DuPage County...

, Illinois

Illinois

Illinois is the fifth-most populous state of the United States of America, and is often noted for being a microcosm of the entire country. With Chicago in the northeast, small industrial cities and great agricultural productivity in central and northern Illinois, and natural resources like coal,...

. It was the first public library in Wheaton, donated by John Quincey Adams. Adams was a real estate investor and miller who moved to Wheaton in 1876. The endowment from Adams completely supported the facility until 1923, when Wheaton provided additional funds. The library classified books with the Dewey decimal system, becoming one of the first in Illinois to use this system. Adams Memorial was the main library in the region until a new library was constructed in 1965. The DuPage County Historical Society purchased the Adams Memorial building that year and transferred ownership to the county.