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July 7, 2008
What to save, what to throw
We face the question daily: How much junk do we keep for historical reasons? How much old stuff do we keep around just because it is old?
In one’s household, the pack rat impulse fights with the desire to clean house, fill the dumpster with junk and start from scratch. How can I throw this moth eaten quilt when I used it all through college?
In our communities, we fight over whether to save old hardware stores, city halls, water towers, dance halls, cottonwoods and other old things that get in the way.
The question is compounded in areas of the country with a long history. In Boston, where I took a history tour a couple of weeks ago, the argument over what to keep and what to throw can get nasty.
It is one thing to save the Adams family home. It is another to decide how to preserve it. Do you furnish it like it was when John and Abigail first moved in, or do you make it look like it did when grandson Charles Francis Adams died over 100 years later?
Do you let tourists ramble through the house and wear it out? Do you let them take pictures, or do you say no pictures and then try to sell them picture books at the end of the tour?
For prairie dwellers, the impressive forests of the East Coast immediately stand out. Such huge trees! They must be saved!
However, by the time of the Revolutionary War, the King’s government had long before stripped the coastal forests of timber to build ships for the Royal Navy.
The land was farmed but wore out quickly and was soon allowed to grow back up in to forest.
So, what part of history do you want to preserve? Battlefields of the Revolution were open fields at the time, but now they are deep forests.
Do you cut the trees down to make the battlefield scene more realistic?
The environmentalists and the historians fight it out tree by tree.
One East Coast neighborhood had a beautiful old diner car from the early 1950s that happened to be on a battlefield. Historians wanted to move the dilapidated diner to make way for a historical park.
“No way!” cried the older residents of the neighborhood. The diner car held more memories for them than did the battlefield. They started a historic preservation group to restore the diner car to serve burgers, fries and shakes just like it had when they were kids!
Those of us farther to the west with a meager history of barely more than 100 years have an easier task. We have lots of space and we have very few old buildings left.
Last week, I took my ninety-six year old great Aunt Olive out for a drive. We got a bit lost, and we drove by an old, closed country church I had never seen before.
Offhand, Olive said she had attended her first funeral at that church. It was for a classmate who had died in the flu epidemic of 1918. Olive was six years old.
The old church came alive to me as I imagined the scene in 1918. Horses, buggies, long skirts, starched collars, immaculate top hats, a stern Norwegian minister, a wooden box for a casket––none of those mental pictures would have been as vivid if the building wasn’t still standing.
Buildings have ghosts, there is no denying it. Creeping through an old building, whether it has been preserved or left to decay, lets those ghosts talk.
We are scared of ghosts in this country, and I think I know why. Facing the past spooks us. We prefer to look forward.
Instead, we might embrace our ghosts like they do in England where people consider ghosts to be friends.
If ghosts are our friends, we might consider leaving some old buildings for them to haunt.
When old buildings go down, those useful old ghosts––the fleeting, humbling, eerie memories of the people who built and used those old buildings––are finished off for good. Something precious is lost.
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