Regional registry
Illinois
3 documented locations. Others may exist; funding to check ran out.
Museum of Reassigned Office Doors
Limited Saturdays appear to be the intended public schedule for the Museum of Reassigned Office Doors, which on the frontage road outside Gannett Shade occupies a former insurance training annex with low windows and an unusually deep vestibule and preserves interior doors removed from schools, clinics, banks, and municipal buildings and later reused somewhere else. A painted roadside sign attributes maintenance to the Gannett Shade Adaptive Materials Society, though the county tourism rack card still credits the Reuse Corridor Steering Committee. The hook, according to the handwritten gallery map posted near the entrance, is that every door is displayed with both its original room title and the title it bore after reassignment: PRINCIPAL became RECORDS, X-RAY became BREAK ROOM, and one frosted-glass ACCOUNTING door allegedly served eight years as CHOIR ROBES. The museum appears open on limited Saturdays, but several correspondents note that the parking lot chain is sometimes left up even when the porch light is on.
The Duplicate Key Monument
Four oversized brass-colored keys stand upright in a diamond on a concrete pad beside the former Prentice Grove Civic Center annex, each cut to the same old municipal master profile and each labeled for a different building that no longer uses that system. A small aluminum sign attributes upkeep to the Prentice Grove Facilities Harmonization Committee, which appears also to be responsible for the shrub ring and for replacing the laminated explanation sheet when it fades. The reported reason for the monument is unusually specific: sometime in the late 1980s, after a school, library, township hall, and parks garage were all re-keyed in separate capital projects, a retiring locksmith donated the obsolete pattern books and urged the town to mark what local minutes reportedly called "the end of universal access by convenience." One hook detail needing confirmation is that one of the four keys may have been recut in 1996 after residents complained the original teeth were for the wrong garage.
The Shoulder Sample Median
The Shoulder Sample Median is a fenced roadside display of 27 preserved highway shoulder cross-sections, maintained in a narrow former maintenance parcel by the Marden Flat Township Road District and signed from the frontage road as an educational turnout. Each sample shows a different approved edge treatment, gravel composition, and drainage profile once used on county and state roads between 1958 and 1996. It appears to have been assembled after a resurfacing grant left the district with a surplus interpretive allowance that could not be reclassified before the fiscal year closed. The most discussed feature is Sample 14, which is labeled "experimental wedge shoulder, discontinued" and has been repainted at least twice. Parking is present but striped in a way that suggests somebody expected buses and then reconsidered.