Discover Wylie House Museum
Wylie House is a historic house museum administered by Indiana University Libraries. It is a public-facing museum with an academic mission.
The 1835 house was built by Andrew Wylie, first president of Indiana University. His family and subsequently the family of his younger cousin, Professor Theophilus Wylie, occupied the home until 1913. In addition to family members, Wylie House was home to Elizabeth Breckenridge, a Black woman who lived with and worked as a domestic servant for the second Wylie family. Temporary residents included student boarders and extended family.
Wylie House supports research, teaching, and learning. Classes from a wide variety of disciplines use the museum as an immersive learning space, research its collections, and study it from various perspectives. The museum also supports experiential learning through internships and part-time employment for IU students.
IU student employees and interns display their research, creativity, and skills through virtual exhibits, which provide depth and details to a variety of topics and people associated with Wylie House history. Exhibits also highlight the work of academic researchers and contemporary artists inspired by the museum and its collections.
The museum is furnished with original Wylie family objects and period-appropriate pieces. A virtual tour, with an AVT Accessible Virtual Tour mode, is available for remote visiting. An additional virtual tour provides access to a contemporary art exhibition held at Wylie House in 2020; entitled Call and Response, the show hosted original work by eight professional artists.
The family of Andrew's younger cousin, Professor Theophilus Wylie, occupied the house from 1859 to 1913. The museum's archival collections include materials related to both Wylie family members as well as many who were connected to them, including poet Elizabeth Bishop, IU students Sarah Parke Morrison and Harvey Young, and Elizabeth Breckenridge, an African-American woman who lived with and worked for the family.
IU classes from a wide variety of disciplines use the house as an immersive learning space, research its archival collections, and study it and its objects from various perspectives. The Morton C. Bradley, Jr. Education Center, named for the great-grandson of Theophilus Wylie, is a repurposed 19th-century barn which provides space for class meetings on the Wylie House grounds.