What are the secrets of yesteryear? Join me in tracking the clues
Like many people living in the 20th and early 21st century, I’ve spent much of my life in the fast lane – whether I wanted to or not. I was born into an age where mind-blowing advancements are always around the corner, and we seem to find ourselves hurtling toward them day after day. Yet I’ve always been more fascinated by where we’ve been than where we’re going. So now that it’s time for me to give up full-time employment, I hope to spend a lot more time poking along in the past lane – and that’s what this website is about.
As a former news reporter, I often took the opportunity to research and write about local historic buildings and roads in the communities I covered. For almost every local history story I wrote, I’d ask the experts I interviewed the same question: Why should we care about history? They usually responded with some iteration of the famous Winston Churchill quote: “Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” This might be a good reason for exploring macro-level history (with the key part of that quote being that we must learn from history). But this explanation doesn’t apply so well to the local history stories revealed through the relics of bygone days.
Fascinating ways that history repeats itself
For example, what difference does it make that there used to be a general store where the Starbucks coffee house is, and that the more primitive retail establishment had the community’s only telephone for many miles around? Did that old-time hub of neighborly communication and essential food staples simply morph into a more modern version that includes free Wi-Fi and expensive gourmet treats? Is fulfilling that role a matter of destiny for this patch of earth? Or did its former use simply forever plant the idea in land developers’ minds that it’s the perfect spot to attract customers who want to buy food and drink while carrying on conversations with far-off parties? Perhaps this is a harmless case of history repeating itself, but I’m not sure it would matter to anyone if the Starbucks were built somewhere else.
For me, the question to be answered by exploring local history might be “How did we get here?” How did the people who walked before contribute to the landscape and lifestyle of the present? What role did they play in shaping us? Was it good? Was it bad? While understanding this might help us revise our own situation and thus “learn” from history, I think it’s more likely that revisiting the past simply satisfies the uniquely human need to know.
Discovering what we can and cannot know
Having said that, I feel I must also share an insight from my years of reporting history stories: The truth about the past can be just as elusive as accurate forecasts of the future. In many cases, there’s little recorded about old landmarks, and even when there is, the people who have firsthand knowledge of places and events don’t always remember them the same way.
Even so, I think it’s worthwhile to tell their stories. If you think so too, feel free to share my pilgrimage to the past through the stories on this website.