One evening while sitting at my desk by the glow of a dim lamp in an otherwise darkened room, I took a break from diving into some research on a historical figure in colonial Pennsylvania to lament to my girlfriend the sale and impending demolition of a historic Mail Pouch barn. She admitted to me that she doesn’t get it. “Get what?” I asked back. “How or why, you care so much? Why does it matter? I just don’t understand how you can spend so much time on something that’s so boring.” She didn’t ask in an accusatory way. Or in a resentful “you ignore me and spend all your time reading about dead people from 200 years ago” way. She asked in a way that was generally curious. She really just didn’t understand why I was so interested in this historical stuff. And, to be honest, I didn’t really have a great answer for her right away. To me, the answer I gave was simple: “Why wouldn’t you be interested in all this historical stuff? George Washington literally owned, walked on, and had dinner on the very same land that I grew up on. The land I hunted and trapped and adventured as a child. You don’t find that fascinating?!” As can likely be assumed, she shook her head and chuckled “No, not really.” Man. I didn’t understand why she didn’t enjoy this history as much as she didn’t understand why I did.
Our evening went on like normal. Feed the dog, cook dinner, eat, watch some TV, clean up from dinner, pack lunches for work tomorrow, and then off to bed. But her questions kept nagging at me. Her disinterest kept nagging at me. Sure, we grew up in different parts of the state, so it can be understandable that she didn’t really care about my local history. But she wasn’t interested in her local history either, and that bugged me. And that fed into a problem history buffs, historical societies, historians, and museums are running into everywhere – people just don’t care about local history. There’s no interest. Museums and historic sites are shutting down left and right. Historical societies are being disbanded and properties and artifacts sold because their caretakers are dying off without a new generation to replace them. Unless people young and old get interested in their local history, nothing is going to change. In fact, it will only get worse.
But why even care? Who cares? What difference does it make if you know what happened where you live 50, 100, or 200 years ago? Unless you’re working in a historical field it probably has little impact on your job. It likely doesn’t really change much in your day-to-day life. Even so, there are plenty of reasons the regular, everyday citizen should at least have a passing semblance of what once happened where they live and work and play.
It allows you to see how far we’ve come as a town and community.
It’s easy to get downtrodden thinking that things will never change and that you don’t have a say in it. Or that your local leaders can’t make the right decisions no matter who’s in office. But knowing the history of your community can show you how much progress has been made over the centuries and decades. Being informed on what’s happened in the past and what has worked or hasn’t worked helps create citizens who are loyal to their communities. Citizens that will stand up for what’s right for the whole and not the individual. Citizens who are intelligent and informed voters, who elect leaders who are intelligent and informed to make better, more informed decisions for the community.
It gives hope that we can accomplish things that others in our community have accomplished before us.
People often get discouraged from a young age growing up in a rural, low-income area that there’s no opportunity to make something of themselves because they don’t live in cities like New York and Los Angeles, but a glance back at our past tells a different story. It shows a kid from McDonald who grew up to compose one of the most famous Christmas songs of all time. A woman from McDonald who became a computer pioneer, or any number of professional football players and coaches.
It gives you a sense of place and importance in how your community fits into the bigger picture.
Although we often hear how Pittsburgh and its steel fit into the larger national history and identity of the United States, we don’t hear of how our smaller communities played a part in the bigger picture. George Washington’s suit against his Mount Pleasant Township squatters determined how western land settlement would be claimed in the years after the American Revolution. The coal, oil, and gas fields discovered in the 19th century became a main national supplier of energy to allow Pittsburgh to become so successful and make our nation what it is today, long before the natural gas activity we see today.
It’s a way to explain how and why things in your community are the way they are, and why the people in that community act and speak the way they do.
It allows people to create collective memories and experiences. Even though we may not currently be living similar lifestyles or working similar jobs, the lifestyles, jobs, and backgrounds of our ancestors have been passed down to us and give us commonality with each other as a community. It also helps explain physical characteristics of the community, like the prevalence of miner company towns with their streets of identical houses, or large mansions from a wealthy bygone era in an otherwise economically depressed town.
In an ever-growing national community, it gives you an identity that allows you to stand out and be unique in a society where everyone is constantly trying to be the same as everyone else.
Since smartphones, social media, and the internet allow us to associate with people of all ages across the globe, having a tie to your local community and its history and heritage allows you to stand out from the pack and create connections with like-minded folks wherever you go. Although we may think our town’s drab, boring, or “nothing to write home about” while at home amongst our peers, the moment we head to the beach, away to college, or to that job in a far away state, we suddenly start looking and identifying things to show off our hometown.
History isn’t just all facts and dates that you learn from a dry lecture or PowerPoint presentation in a high school history class that you’re required to take. History – especially local history – has the possibility of being interesting. Fascinating. It allows you to take a step back in time to see how those before you lived. The struggles and hardships they endured. The hard work and effort. The fighting tooth and nail it took for them to survive. To build a world that’s ever evolving and progressing. A world that’s better – where you don’t have to go through the hardships they did because they did the work for you.
Looking back at our history – your history – gives you perspective. Perspective to see how good and easy we have in 2024. Although you can have this viewpoint with any kind of history, from the ancient Greeks and Romans to Victorian England or the Roaring 20s, a look into local history actually tells the story of where you live. It allows you to follow the steps a historical figure took. It allows you to see how far we’ve come as a town and community. It gives hope that we can accomplish things that others in our community have accomplished before us. It gives you a sense of place and importance in how your community fits into the bigger picture. It’s a way to explain how and why things in your community are the way they are, and why the people in that community act and speak the way they do. In an ever-growing national community, it gives you a unique identity in a society where everyone is in a race to be the same. Learning your local history allows you to appreciate what once was, and what can be.
So go talk to your parents or grandparents. Your aunt or uncle. That old man or woman who lives down the street you never talk to – or the one you make small talk with on summer evenings across the fence. Ask them what it was like growing up here when they were your age. What changes they’ve seen in their lifetime. Take a moment and discover the vast and fascinating history that we have to offer, and wonder what mark you and your family will leave on the history that’s being made today.