The preservation of history is important
Last week, we published a special section for the sesquicentennial celebrations for Dorchester, Abbotsford and Colby. It was a little different than what we typically do here, almost more akin to doing research for a high school history paper than for a typical article in the Tribune Phonograph, which was a good change of pace for myself. I personally have always been interested in history, though usually that revolved around events on a larger scale. Zooming in on the story of a single town, especially one that I was more personally familiar with than places like New York, Rome or Hong Kong, was a different experience.
A lot of our research came from the centennial books and from the old newspapers held here at the office. I can’t tell you how many times I flipped through the pages of Colby’s centennial book, searching for that one bit of information that I knew I had read somewhere, but unsure of where exactly that somewhere was. By the time we were wrapping up the project, I’m fairly certain I had the order of the book, which had at first seemed frustratingly random, nearly memorized, navigating it with the deft skill of an aged captain on their final voyage. I would not go as far to consider myself any sort of expert on the topic now, but I will count myself as much more knowledgeable than I had been previously.
It was compelling to see how things have changed or how other things have stayed the same. The very reason why these towns were formed in the first place, the railroad, now lies dormant, though the highway running through them remains as busy as ever even as it undergoes repairs. Businesses come and go, rotating on a carousel of changing hands, but oftentimes still filling the niches left by the prior ones. Church buildings constructed decades ago still house services to this day, but new houses or other structures are being added every year.
Trying to piece together a picture of how these towns have evolved over time, while time consuming, was also very rewarding. Digging into the history of Colby cheese, the stories behind the libraries or fire departments, or the details of how various industries interacted with each other and needed to adapt to changing conditions over the years, gave me context to many of the familiar entities I had grown up with and gave me appreciation of the people and effort behind them.
And while I may find such things interesting for their own sake, it also demonstrates why preserving such information is necessary. Knowing where we came from is important to making decisions as to where we wish to go. Understanding the context of why things are the way they are is key when deciding how to proceed forward.
The preservation of information is an especially important topic now. Rapidly evolving technology, while great in many ways, also means that the mediums on which we store and access this information are also changing quickly. Music on cassettes, data stored on floppy disks and home videos on VHS’s are becoming increasingly difficult, if not impossible to access, and anything that was not transferred to the most recent medium will be lost forever as the ways to access those mediums become outdated.
Which leads me to question how our most recent history will be recorded. So much of our personal histories are placed online, and while this makes sharing our stories easier than ever, what happens when these platforms are inevitably replaced? Tools like the “Wayback Machine” help preserve an archive of what the Internet was like over time, but it is still something that bears some consideration. The centennial book was constructed through the gathering of physical photos and stories and notes written on paper. If an eventual amalgamation of these towns’ 200 year histories were to be assembled for their bicentennials, will our advancement of technology make such a project easier or impossible?
It is, of course, an impossible question to answer now, but I believe it is one worth thinking about regardless.
Also, if our short introduction to the histories of Dorchester, Colby and Abbotsford in any way piqued your interest, I do suggest trying to find a copy of the centennial books for a more in depth look at the histories of these cities. There are a lot of interesting bits of information and pictures there that we could not cover in their entirety and I think it’s certainly worth a look over!
A C ertain Point of V iew
