Week 8: Harrington, Washington: Public History in Rural America

Courtesy of Robertson Arts & More.

            Richard F. Steele’s “History of Lincoln County, Washington” looks at what makes Lincoln County such a great place to live.  There are ten profitable industries in Lincoln County: grain, hay, dairying, fruit, horses, cattle, hogs, poultry, gardening, and bee culture.  The soil in Lincoln County is very fertile and the amount of wheat grown in this area exceeds what most other areas grow.  Those who do not grow wheat successfully grow fruits, vegetables, or hay.  Raising cattle and poultry as well as dairying are also lucrative businesses.  Everyone who lives in Lincoln County benefit from the advantages of city life: free mail delivery, electric lights, telephones, and great schools.  Steele looks at the towns that make up Lincoln County, gives some background information on them, and explains what make these towns great. 

Courtesy of CONTENTdm Collection. Harrington, Washington

           Harrington 100 Years looks at the history of Harrington from the very first settlers until 1980.  In 1882, the town of Harrington was established and the next year the town gained its first inhabitants and started to grow.  The first store was built and operated by Edward Willis and Charles Billings, and all of their goods sold in the store were freighted from Sprague.  As the years progressed, Harrington continued to grow; a blacksmith shop, hotel, and a saloon were established in 1884.  During the construction of the Great Northern Railroad starting in 1892, Harrington “enjoyed one of its most exciting and prosperous times.” (7) Starting in 1901, Harrington began the steps to incorporate the town and in 1902 they elected their first city officials.  As the 1900’s progressed, Harrington continued to progress with the rest of the town’s in Lincoln County.  Harrington was a farming and cattle community, with wheat as the primary crop. 

Courtesy of Seattle Times. Wheat Farming.

            HistoryLink’s Thumbnail History of Lincoln County looks at the history of Lincoln County and the towns that make up the county.  In 1883, Lincoln County was formed from Spokane County.  One of the region’s first permanent settlers was Russell M. Bacon and was appointed Crab Creek postmaster.  The region’s first industry was cattle and later on wheat became dominant.  The towns Davenport, Sprague, Harrington, Wilbur, Odessa, and Almira make up Lincoln County.  Aloysius Harry Harker was the first permanent settler the area that would become Davenport, but the town was named after John C. Davenport.  Sprague started out as a sheep camp in the 1870’s and was originally called Hoodooville after the early settler William Burrows, also known as Hoodoo Billy.  Sprague boomed during the 1880s when the Northern Pacific Railroad was built.  Harrington became a town in 1883, and was named after W.P. Harrington.  The town was sparsely populated until 1892 when the Great Northern Railway built a station in the town.  Wilbur was named for Samuel Wilbur Condon, who was one of the area’s earliest settlers, and Condon started a ferry service across the Columbia River.  The construction of the Grand Coulee Dam greatly benefited Wilbur.  A cattle rancher from Portugal, a sheep rancher, and a Russian German wheat farmer settled Odessa.  The town was named Odessa to attracting Russian-German wheat farming immigrants.  The town of Almira grew with the arrival of the Northern Pacific Railroad and during the construction of the Grand Coulee Dam, but after its completion the population declined.  Although the number of farms has decreased in Lincoln County, wheat is still the dominant crop and the beef cattle industry is still significant.  

Courtesy of HistoryLink.org.
Northern Pacific Railroad promotional brochure, 1897.

            “Illustrated History of the Big Bend County” looks at the history of Harrington from the beginning.  In 1882, Furth and Robinson bought 1,500 acres of land, which was then deeded in 1892 to the California Land & Stock Company.  Most of the early residents were from Yolo or Calusa counties in California.  These settlers began to grow wheat and began to develop the town by opening a few businesses.  During the construction of the Great Northern Railroad, Harrington prospered and the population greatly grew and in 1904 Harrington built a city hall.

The Spokesman-Review article “Pretty Girl Fights for Home” is about Miss Maude E Green’s fight to keep her land.  A Mr. Joseph Drazan claimed that Miss Green failed to establish her claim on the land and that he had the right to claim it as his own.  Miss Green had only slept on the land for four nights but has worked the land and had raised two crops of wheat already.  She is fighting Drazan’s claim court and Register Ludden and Receiver Wells would decide the case from the testimony from both Miss Green and Mr. Drazan.  

Week 7: Slavery and Public History

            In The Power of Place by Dolores Hayden, chapter 7, “Rediscovering an African American Homestead” looks at the creation and development of the Biddy Mason project.  Hayden first discusses the area surrounding the Biddy Mason homestead painting a picture of the area.  Some information about Biddy Mason is also provided and the few attempts made to mark Biddy’s life.  Hayden then goes on to discuss the work The Power of Place and others did during the Biddy Mason project.  The project consists of several exhibits: Biddy Mason: House of the Open Hand, and Biddy Mason: Time and Place, are just a couple of the exhibits.  This project tells the story of Los Angeles’s development into a thriving city and commemorates Biddy Mason. 

Courtesy of ethicsalarms.com

Courtesy of Wiggins Battery.

            The other reading was chapters 1 through 6 in “Confederates in the Attic” by Tony Horwitz.  Chapter one Confederates in the Attic introduces Horwitz to the world of southern confederacy culture.  Horwitz had always had a fascination with the Civil War and joins a group of hardcore civil war reenactors for a weekend drill held by the Southern Guard.  This is the beginning of his journey through the South.  In chapter two North Carolina: Cats of the Confederacy, Horwitz recalls his time spent in Salisbury, North Carolina.  There he meet Ed and Sue Curtis and others from the Sons of Confederacy, Daughters of the Confederacy, and Children of the Confederacy and discussed why remembering the Civil War was so important to them.  Chapter three South Carolina: In the Better Half of the World looks at how people in Charleston, South Carolina view the war differently.  In Charleston the Civil War does not encompass daily life.  Many people have similar attitudes towards the war as Mrs. Wells, “defeat and devastation were the true legacy of the War, they set the South apart from a nation accustomed to triumph.” (56).  Chapter four South Carolina: Shades of Gray, Horwitz remarks, “hardly a day had passed without some snippet about the Civil War appearing in the newspaper.” (71).  One of the stories was how a statue in York, Maine resembled a confederate soldier while a statue in Kingstree, South Carolina looked like a union soldier.  Horwitz also attends a demonstration for the Confederacy flag and discusses the differing opinions surrounding the flag.  Chapter five Kentucky: Dying for Dixie Horwtiz travels to Guthrie, a town on the border of Tennessee and Kentucky.  In Guthrie, black teenagers shot a white teenager for flying the rebel flag from his pickup.  In Guthrie there is a lot of racial tension between blacks and whites and this incident only increased that tension.  Chapter six Virginia: A Farb of the Heart Horwitz returned to Virginia to take a break from his southern journey, he received a call from Robert Lee Hodge about an upcoming Civil War reenactment: the Battle of Wilderness.  Horwitz joins in on the reenactment and experiences what it is like during one of the enactments.  The groups of reenactors are made up of hardcore and normal reenactors, some taking their roles so seriously that fifty-seven people were hurt and a couple were hospitalized.  In some reenactments, some people had died from heart attacks while others froze to death during an unreasonably cold night. 

            The web reading, “Never mind the slavery, have you dipped a candle yet?” by Historiann.com, discusses how many of the historic museums in the United States do not effectively tell history.  In many southern museums, slavery is not mentioned.  Plimoth Plantation and Colonial Williamsburg are two of the southern museums that incorporate slavery in their historic village and museum.  “It’s not just southern public history sites that “whitewash” history.”

            The next reading, “A white man remembers slavery in the Shenandoah Valley,” by Coffman is an excerpt from Jacob Coffman’s (1852-1938) letter to the Page News and Courier in 1932.  In this excerpt Coffman describes the different kinds of owner/slave relations and how some owners treated their slaves.  He wrote about some slave owners who would beat their slave and were very cruel, “it was said that he tied them over a barrel in the barn and after beating their backs raw, he put salt and pepper on their bleeding wounds.”  He also wrote about some owners who were kind to their slaves. 

            The last reading “Retouching History: The Modern Falsification of a Civil Was Photograph,” discusses the falsification of a photo of Union soldiers.  The photograph is of a group of black Union soldiers posing with a white officer and is believed to be the 1^st Louisiana Native Guard. 

“Given the enormous number of publications and known photographs of Civil War soldiers, it is more than slightly curious that a photograph as striking as one showing armed black soldiers in the Confederate Army has apparently not surfaced in these publications.”

Courtesy of people.virginia.edu. 

Courtesy of people.virginia.edu. 

Week 6: Urban Public History

Courtesy of Illicit Cultural Property.

         

Courtesy of Builders Booksource.

            This weeks reading was from Delores Hayden’s book, “The Power of Place: Urban Landscaping as Public History.”  The first section, “Claiming Urban Landscapes as Public History,” “proposes new ways to understand the urban cultural landscape” and is broken up into three chapters (xii).  The first chapter “Contested Terrain” looks at Herbert J. Gans and Ada Louise Huxtable’s debate over the preservation of “historic landmarks” and what made a building worth saving and preserving.  Gans and Huxtable both agreed that preserving the built history was important but disagreed on what should be preserved; Gans wanted more social history while Huxtable wanted more culture.  Hayden argues that “the power of place- the power of ordinary landscapes to nurture citizens’ public memory, to encompass shared time in the form of shared territory- remains untapped” for ethnic and women’s history (9). 

            The second chapter “Urban Landscape History: The Sense of Place and the Politics of Space,” looks at what “place” is and how people view it differently.  People of different ethnic groups and women view places very differently and areas histories have been shaped from the separation of women and those who are ethnically different.  “Political divisions of territory split the urban world into many enclaves experienced from many different perspectives.” (27) 

Courtesy of PennDesign.

            The third chapter “Place Memory and Urban Preserving,” looks at how urban landscape is connected to memory and is an important resource for public history.  The Brass Workers History and the New York Chinatown History Project are examples of community oral history.  In recent years, more areas that are connected to ethnic communities and women’s history have been preserved, such as the Boston African American National Historic Site and a Women’s Rights National Historical Park at Seneca Falls, New York. 

            

Week 5: The Promise and Perils of Digital History

Courtesy of The LCN. Ronald Reagan

Mike Wallace’s “Ronald Reagan and the Politics of History” discusses how Reagan, as well as others, misinterpreted or used a “mythic” approach to history.  Wallace suggests that Reagan “was able to comfortably… make statements dramatically at variance with widely know facts because they were nestled in a supportive context of myth.” (258) He also notes that Reagan’s time working as an actor in Hollywood influenced his view on history and reality.  Americans tend to forget the past or believe the past in dead and is not as important as the future.  Wallace believes that the reason Reagan was able to confidently speak about things that were historically untrue was a result of “Hollywood history” that would retell myths as truths.  Wallace spends a large part of his essay giving examples of the historical myths or lies that Reagan tells during his time as president.  His opinion of Reagan was clearly shown.

Courtesy of warbirdphotos.net. Enola Gay

Wallace’s “The Battle of the Enola Gay” discusses the controversy of an Enola Gay exhibit at the Smithsonian.  In 1994, the Smithsonian planned to develop an exhibit based on the Enola Gay and soon after releasing the plans were quickly met with criticism and outrage.  Misrepresentation of the exhibit was one of the greatest problems the curators faced.  Political correctness played a large part in the Enola Gay debate and a war fought by various groups on which interpretation of the Enola Gay would be shown in the exhibit or whether there should be an exhibit at all.  In the end there was no Enola Gay exhibit.  Wallace spends the last part of the essay discussing what museums would have to do to get controversy exhibits developed and shown.  He covers this controversy in depth and gives one and idea of what the major issues were surrounding the exhibit. 

Courtesy of September 11 Digital Archive

James T. Sparrow’s “On the Web: The September 11 Digital Archive” discusses how history has moved to the Internet in historical websites and the development of the September 11 Digital Archive website.  Sparrow lays out how the website was created and the design behind it.  What was really interesting about this website, was that regular people could upload their own pictures and entries.  Sparrow notes that the September 11 Digital Archive is “dependent on the needs of its visitors and on its ability to foster a sense of community online.” (411) There is also the need to distinguish credible historical websites from the amateur websites. Sparrow's essay was very informative and gives a clear overview of a way a historical website is designed.