A Little Story about Local History

Yesterday I received an handwritten letter from an older woman who lives in California. She grew up in East Grand Forks, Minnesota. This fall, she returned to town to revisit some of her past, particularly, (as her letter says) the happy times. On her itinerary was the Grand Forks First Church of God where her brother had been married on a snowy Christmas day in early 1950s. The church has also hosted a going-away party for her brother when he went into the Air Force and it was where he received his call to join the ministry. She even recalled the name of the charismatic preacher, Reverend Ray Finley and his successor Rev. Cecil Evans. Finley’s efforts ensured that the church survived a devastating fire in the March 1944. 

When she visited town, she was not able to find the little white church on 3rd and Walnut Street and she soon learned that the church has been torn down a few months before.  She says in her letter that she was heartbroken. She contacted me because someone has mentioned to her that I might have some information about the church. She had no idea that the church was over 100 years old.

Needless to say, two copies of Chris Price’s The Old Church on Walnut Street: A Story of Immigrants and Evangelicals are now in the mail to her.

While some sense of modesty made me a bit reluctant to share this story on the blog (and, yes, I realize the irony of this statement), I decided to post it because it speaks so eloquently as to how individual buildings and neighborhoods serve to locate memories. Our rapidly changing urban landscape puts ever increasingly pressure on us to find ways to preserve these places of memory whether in brick, mortar, and wood-frame form or as texts, photographs, and plans. The letter that I received yesterday provided a very real experience to confirm that investing in the preserving the past will make a difference to real people. (In my 15 years of studying Late Antique churches, never once has someone from Late Antiquity taken the time to thank me or even politely as about my work (most of them, of course, have been dead for 1500 years).)

Moreover, this work is relatively easy to do. Our book took less than 9 months to bring it from a chat over a few beers to text, plans, and paper. With all due respect to Chris Price’s efforts, the result book will never win a National Book Award or a Pulitzer Prize. It has, however, served its function. In my 20 some years as a professional historian, I’ve never been as pleased to share my work as I was the send those two copies of The Old Church on Walnut Street to someone who I’ve never met in California.