An Opportunity To Share Your Mahaska History
The Mahaska County Historical Society gathered for their quarterly meeting at George Daily Auditorium this past week.
Oskaloosa, Iowa – The George Daily welcomed the Mahaska County Historical Society to host their quarterly potluck at the auditorium.
The potluck was in place to help George Daily kick-off a project that will be bringing the community together to share personal and community photos throughout the next months.
George Daily’s Andy McGuire said that the project of collecting the photos, and the stories that go behind those stories are made possible from a grant received from the Iowa Arts Council.
The grant is called an Arts Build Communities Grant, and three communities in the state get it every year. Those three communities and their project are funded with $10,000 as part of the grant.
Andy said that they had been working on their project for a couple of years, with the basic idea to create a multimedia variety show, kind of like George, “but about all the history in the county instead of just one person.”
Allison McGuire is helping to lead the way on the project, and she explained that the play made from those histories would be a condensed 150-year history of the county into two hours.
“We are turning to the community to help us find the resources and the stories that they think should be considered and should be included in this variety show,” explained Allison.
There will be various events in the coming weeks that will coincide with the project, including events with the Mahaska Young Professionals. Events will be held in New Sharon and Fremont and another at Penn Central Mall on March 17th. “We’re asking people to bring in photos and stories to help us curate the history of Mahaska County for this variety show,” said Allison.
“From that, the pieces that we can fit into the actual show will be collated and condensed into a shorter format for the show that’s on June 15th and 16th,” added Andy.
The show will be called ‘Home Again,’ “so we want you to come home again to Oskaloosa and experience that history,” explained Andy.
There will be a follow-up that will be more focused on the future and what you want for the future of the community. The project will look at past, present, and future of Oskaloosa. “We’re trying to hit all three aspects of time,” said Andy.
The project will use some archives already available, such as the Chuck Russell collection and the Historical Society archives. “We also know that a lot of people don’t consider the photos they’ve taken in their families as quote ‘History’. Just in my experience, just with directing George last summer, we wanted to incorporate photos of the community from the 60’s and 70’s into the slideshow aspect,” said Allison. “We struggled so much to try and find really representative pictures of that time and the square and of the downtown that included people as well as the buildings.”
“We know those photos are out there,” added Allison. “We want to be able to see what they looked like and how they’ve changed. There’s a lot of history that comes through when seeing what people were wearing, and what people are doing. We want to be able to incorporate those kinds of pictures as well.”
Allison said they ask participants to choose up to 3 photos to be scanned at one of the events. “We do know it’s a hard task to try and narrow your personal collection down to 3 that best tell the story of the community.
The photos will be scanned with their owners standing there while the pictures are scanned in. People will gather the information through video recording of the story behind the image and then hand the photo right back to the owner.
Andy said they hope to find more people who want to keep the collecting and digitization continuing after we are done, “so that this can be an ongoing project, maybe for the historical society, maybe for someone else. “The people who hold these stories won’t be around forever. We want to capture them.”
