In 1939, a teenager named Phylis Churchill began cutting stories of local interest out of newspapers. She became Phylis Allen in 1943 and continued clipping and pasting articles. In the process, she has compiled a collection of articles that describes many events in the recent history of the town of Washburn, Maine as reported in the newspapers. Not all of these articles are particularly significant, unless you are the person that the clipping is about. Then it may mark a milestone in your life. Many stories deal with the community and how all these people interacted with each other. More importantly, it shows what the town considered important enough to report and what Phylis felt was important enough a piece of history to save for the future.
Included are announcements of births, weddings and deaths, reports of business openings and business closings, school news, and just a lot of the day-to-day life of this rural community of about 1,900 people.
While compiling the archive I have seen thousands of black and white facts about the people of Washburn. But that's not nearly the complete picture. A fascinating personal history, as well as a robust community history, can be created if you, take a few minutes and fill in more of the personal details to go along with the stories. This is the color commentary that makes history a live, breathing thing.
I heard of an older woman in Southern Maine being interviewed for a biography who said, "My husband died in 1965, and I haven't done much since then." The rest of the story was that she was a young woman with four young children. The children grew up and were successful, and life went on for 30+ years for this lady. Of course she had a history to tell, just not the kind of "History" that we generally think of that is recorded in books. History, with a capital "H," is about people who had a little influence on a lot of people. History with a lower case "h" is about people who had a lot of influence on a few people, like personal or family history. This woman's history existed only as an oral history that she'd probably told to a few family members and friends. Unfortunately, this type of history will fade over the years unless someone cares enough to write it down.
Take a couple hours, talk with your parents, grandparents, aunts or uncles and get a story or a few thoughts from them about what life was like in Washburn in the 30's, or 40's, or 50's, or even yesterday. Little details of life today will be fascinating to people in 50 years. Write the story down and mail or E-mail it to jeff@washburnmaine.com. It can be added to the archive. These collective stories will create a much more vibrant history of Washburn than will ever be written in a newspaper.
Phylis passed away January 15, 2001, but her scrapbook will go on. She continued creating her scrapbook until October or November of 2000. As she worked on it or supervised as her sister pasted more stories into the book, she would remember doing this and how friends would come to visit and not remember when so-and-so got married. She'd just get the scrapbook and look it up.
You can do the same thing here.
- Jeff Allen