RURAL AMERICA: WHERE HISTORY IS REALLY MADE
I’m a historian/historic preservation specialist, parent of two, a former college-level English instructor, and a disabled Army veteran. I am an outsider to rural Miss
ouri communities like those in Linn County, and thankful to everyone in the communities I’ve visited and spoke with who have welcomed me with open arms as I attempt to help cities and owners of historic and potentially historic properties find their place on the National Register of Historic Places and help them qualify for funding opportunities to preserve history.
I’m from Michigan originally. My mother was born and raised in a rural northern Michigan county that had fewer than 2000 people in it when I was a kid, adn I was related in some way to 90% of them. I spent nearly every holiday break and most summers “up north”. I learned to hunt, trap and fish in that town. It was simple there, not the rat race of the city. I had to endure school in Metro Detroit, but my heart was always Up North.
I enjoyed it so much that I took an underpaying job as a reporter for two small newspapers in northern Michigan (lower peninsula) and sat on the city council for a year. It’s also where I learned to appreciate history.
During the winters when we stayed at our northern Michigan trailer, except for some hunting, ice fishing, and muskrat trapping, much of the time was spent indoors reading my father’s history books. He was a former high school history teacher turned attorney. I helped my mother with tracing ancestries—an important thing to do when most of the county is related to you in some way. My parents made sure I appreciated history. Looking back is how we move forward, they’d say. They lived that truth. In fact, my parents are heritage tourists. We often took back roads, avoiding the interstates as much as possible, while vacationing. We saw interesting things that way and learned about the hidden history that exists in nearly every rural community.
The love for history that my parents instilled in me as a child has only strengthened. I’ve used every opportunity I’ve had to spread the love oof history to others. Many years ago, I was a journalist for two small Michigan newspapers. One editor allowed me to write about the history of the town and write an interview series with area World War II veterans. It was a privilege to tell their stories using their own words. Their stories live on. Forever. That is what being a historian and a preservationist is all about: preserving the stories of our past, preserving our heritage, preserving our stories. In the case of my fellow veterans, it was giving them their spotlight, something we as vets are often denied.
I follow in my parents’ footsteps when it comes to history. I do the same with my family now when we travel. We take the back roads as often as possible. We go through small communities, eat in the local diners, take in the small-town ambience, and relax a little.
One of those back road trips led us to Marceline… kind of. My wife is a D23 member and saw mention of Marceline in the D23 magazine. So, we came to visit.
My family loved the Walt Disney Hometown Museum. It is a truly remarkable place. The volume of information it contains must rival any other museum in the world dedicated to one individual.
I, on the other hand, being the child of historians, literally fell in love with all the aspects of the city not associated with Walt Disney. To me, Walt Disney is just a footnote in the rich history of Marceline and the surrounding areas. There is so much more to appreciate about the area. I was most taken by the Uptown Theatre, the Lincoln School, and that the city was literally founded because the railroad decided it needed a subdivision stop at this point on its line from Kansas City to Chicago. I was even more impressed when I learned Marceline was once an Amtrak stop.
I do see what Walt saw in and loved about this rural community. I saw the same growing up in northern Michigan. I saw it when I was in the Army serving with people from rural communities. I see it in every small to medium city I’ve visited, from my current city of Muncie, Indiana, to Casey, Illinois (home to a LOT of very BIG objects, some of which are World Records), to Alma, Michigan, to Hokes Bluff, Alabama, to Dallas, Oregon, to Pittsfield, Illinois, to Kirksville, Missouri, to Escanaba, Michigan… the list doesn’t stop.
On these back roads is where the most important history exists, history that is often unknown, even forgotten, but as important, if not more important, than any other history.
What struck me the most, perhaps, is that Marceline and nearby communities have architecture you don’t find in many Midwest cities of any size. For example, the Beaux-Arts style of the Marceline Masonic Lodge #481 is unique to the area; while some other buildings show some influence, the Lodge is the purest form of this style in all the counties surrounding Marceline. The Uptown Theatre has an incredible back story, that Walt premiered a movie at it in 1956 is NOT part of that story; Walt is a footnote in the history of the theater. The First Christian Church is a unique version of Classical Revival with heavy Greco-Roman influence. The Lincoln School is one of the last African American schools still standing in the region. The Carnegie Library is only one of about 750 such libraries (at the peak, there were nearly 1700 of them around the world) still standing as libraries. The list goes on.
This is the history you don’t see when you take the interstate, and it is this history that needs to be remembered and saved.
This is a reprint of my column for The Linn Leader, the newspaper for Linn County, Missouri.