First of all, please understand that I am calling myself a local historian in the absolute loosest, mostly tongue-in-cheek way. It’s mainly for the purpose of illustrating that libraries and library workers do a lot more than folks realize.
My county doesn’t have a singular historical society.
We have the C.H. Moore Homestead and DeWitt Count Museum, which is a Victorian mansion that once belonged to prominent resident and attorney C.H. Moore, and features a gorgeous two-story library that still houses part of his vast private collection (the rest are housed at the library I work at). The museum features both permanent and temporary displays of county history.
We have the DeWitt County Genealogical Society, which occupies a room in the lower level of the library. With their help and resources, folks can find all sorts of records relating to family history in the area. They’re in the office, so to speak, every Thursday, and just an excellent source of knowledge and research.
And we have the library that I work at. The upper floor of the old building has been turned into our local history archives. We have a collection of all sorts of items that have been donated to the library that have historical significance to the city, county, and the people who’ve lived here. We also have a collection of local newspapers, which are available on microfilm. Many of the yearbooks, picture collections, and the newspapers up until I think 1965 have been digitized and put online.
Preserving local history is actually one of our core library values and part of our mission statement. It’s something that my director in particular is pretty passionate about because we don’t have one big local historical society. You can watch her and her fabulous dresses do Tales from the Archives videos on our YouTube page. Not everyone who works at the library ends up hips deep in local history, but we all end up learning the history of the library and we all know the value of local history.
I probably would have been content with knowing the history of the library and letting that be the extent of my involvement. Then my boss asked me to create the library’s podcast. When I finally came up with a concept, the plan was to cover all aspects of the library and its collection and services and archives, which included local history. The very first episode of the podcast I did was about the only public hanging to occur in my county, something I never knew about because, hey, it’s a small town. Nothing happens in a small town, right?
My director then came across something about a man being murdered in the county courthouse. Sure, it happened in 1855, but still! A murder in my little town? Well, as it turned out, it happened a lot back in the day and over the stupidest shit. Looking up one thing in the newspaper for one topic has led me down other rabbit holes when another article caught my eye. This was how I found a list of 22 murders committed in the county from 1855-1913. I spent months researching them, which turned into multiple podcast episodes, a program I had to do four times because it was so popular, and a video that’s on the library’s YouTube.
Not all of the local history I’ve researched has been about murder (though, admittedly, a lot of it has). I’ve researched the library building, the longest-tenured librarian, the third of the county’s four courthouses, our Friends of the Library volunteer group, tornadoes, floods, an arms bust, an infamous mayor, our first woman sheriff, a suffragette train, railroad accidents, a devastating fire, county ghost towns, a scandalous will dispute, and even C.H. Moore himself.
I now have a list of topics that I need to research for future podcast episodes.
This has also led to me hosting a couple of regular local history true crime programs, Crime Club for the teens, and Coffee and Crime for the adults. We’re going to get together, have some snacks, I’ll present a local history case, and we’ll chat about it. Crime Club starts this month and Coffee and Crime kicks off in November. It means more work and more research, but I’m excited to see how these programs go.
I never thought of myself as a history person, really. I never anticipated becoming one of the go-to people in the library for local history either.
But, if you need to know something about the history of the library or maybe a local murder, just ask.
If I don’t know, I’ll be happy to find out.
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