State award to Cornell College historian

MOUNT VERNON — For the popular tours he leads of the historic Cornell College campus, Charles Milhauser has been awarded a Certificate of Recognition in the Loren Horton Community History Award competition sponsored by the State Historical Society of Iowa.

The annual Horton award recognizes the best project that increases awareness and participation in Iowa history on a local level. The certificate recognizes an outstanding project related to an education activity. The honors will be presented in a ceremony Monday, May 10, in Des Moines to celebrate National Historic Preservation Week.

Milhauser, of Tequesta, Fla., is a Cornell classics professor and registrar emeritus. Over his 30 years at Cornell, he created a personal archives of Cornell history on thousands of notecards. In 1980 he began offering tours of the historic campus. At last count he had conducted 365 such tours.

For Cornell’s sesquicentennial in 2003, he and the college offered enhanced tours during homecoming last October that incorporated seven Cornell students and one alumnus reenacting legendary characters from Cornell’s past. Milhauser wrote the original historic tour script as well as the reenactment scripts. Several hundred alumni attended each of four tours, led by Milhauser and Dee Ann Rexroat, chair of Cornell’s sesquicentennial committee and director of college communications. Response was so positive that Cornell plans to offer the reenactments annually at homecoming.

Milhauser wrote “Cornell College: 150 Years From A to Z,” a coffee-table book published a year ago to mark the beginning of Cornell’s sesquicentennial celebration.