The Blackwell currently holds over 10,000 textbooks that were used in schools and in teacher preparation during the 18th 19th and 20th centuries. Several hundred books are considerably older, as much as 500 years. The museum also has numerous artifacts representative of American education including hornbooks, battledores, samplers, student work samples, and a variety of other documents.
The Blackwell Technology Collection and the Association of Educational Communications and Technology Archives contain artifacts and documents tracing the development and use of technology in classroom and teacher education
The Milan Township District #83 schoolhouse is a reconstructed one-room school containing original and replica artifacts depicting education in the late 19th and early 20th-century country schools. The schoolhouse is available for educational field trips by schools and other groups.
The Blackwell is also home to the Prairie School Oral History Project, a collection of interviews with men and women who either attended one-room schools or taught in them.