Some good news on preserving our past
It’s only been within the last few hundred years that humanity has been good about recording our time here on Earth.
Consider that, despite his towering stature, we have relatively little information on how William Shakespeare lived, or if he was even the sole author of the plays that bear his name. We have no recording of Abraham Lincoln’s voice, so most of us have been left to imagine that it was as deep and resonant as Charlton Heston’s in “The Ten Commandments” (it was apparently a high-pitched and modest instrument, as per the recollections of those who did hear it). The first primitive photographs didn’t emerge until the 1820s and 1830s, meaning that how we perceive most of our past is derived from paintings or suppositions.
And even with all the recordings, photographs, books, films, microfilm and other artifacts at our disposal, we are in constant danger of losing them. Storage areas flood, paper becomes brittle and cracks, photographs become brown and fade. Things simply get lost or discarded. Consider that 75 percent of all silent films are now lost, according to the Library of Congress, and up to half of all American films made before 1950 have vanished.
The same goes for structures of historic importance. Across the United States, buildings where history was made have been bulldozed and replaced by parking lots or shopping centers. Just last month, we reported on how the studio once used by artist Malcolm Parcell, located just a few miles south of Prosperity, has become a vandalized, graffiti-defaced ruin.
Fortunately, there was some good news to report on the front page of the Observer-Reporter on Monday about efforts to preserve our past. First, the Washington County Community Foundation is giving $1,000 to the Donora Historical Society to create prints from a collection of glass negatives taken between 1906 and 1959 by Bruce Dreisbach, who inspected steel plants in Donora. All told, the Donora Historical Society has 4,000 of the Dreisbach’s glass negatives, which contain images from mills that are now long-shuttered, along with photos of Dreisbach’s wife, Lulu Miller Dreisbach, and the development of the Cement City housing development, built in 1916-17 and now on the National Register of Historic Places.
And speaking of historic places, the City of Washington and the Washington Rotary Club are launching an ambitious effort to renovate Washington Park’s 108-year-old Main Pavilion. It’s estimated that $800,000 will be needed to repaint its ceiling, upgrade its kitchen and restrooms and do other work.
“Shabby is not the right word to describe this Great White Lady…,” Park Burroughs wrote in the Observer-Reporter Monday. “Weary is more like it. When the wind blows, you can almost hear her sigh.”
How can people help? Checks payable to the Rotary Foundation can be sent to Washington Rotary Club, P.O. Box 1418, Washington, PA, 15301. A Facebook page, Washington Park Pa. Main Pavilion Renovation, has also been created.
Richard Moe, the former president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, once noted that “there may have been a time when preservation was about saving an old building here or there, but those days are gone. Preservation is in the business of saving communities and the values they embody.”
That’s why both these projects deserve support.