Lil' Ol' Harrington

Harrington is a small town situated in the heart of Lincoln County in Washington state.  It is part of Big Bend wheat country and sits on the Great Northern railway.  Sitting just over 20 miles from Sprague and 50 miles west of Spokane, Harrington has grown steadily over its history.  The town today has a high school (which it shares with Sprague), city park, opera house, and a top five nationally ranked classic car restorer.  The hotel is currently under renovation and hopes to be open for business in the near future.

A Studebaker "Bullet Nose".  Courtesy of Crews News.

Harrington was settled in the 1880's by homesteaders and was said to have some of the best soil for growing wheat in the territory.  One year a farmer sold his crop for over a whopping $200,000 (equivalent to about $5-$6 million today).  The city has its own grain elevator and in some high yielding years the silos were packed full and excess grain was put in massive piles next to the silos, until room was made to pack it in.  In the early years the wheat industry was modest due to the fact that crops had be hauled the 20 miles to Sprague to be sold.  That all changed though when Harrington was chosen as a stop for the Great Northern Railroad.  Farmers now had a direct line to sell their grain, cutting down cost and travel.

Wheat harvest in early Harrington.  Courtesy of Harrington.

The city began to boom with the arrival of the railroad.  Land prospectors from California showed up to purchase plots of land, believing they would rise in value with new train depot.  They were right and over the next 80 or so years Harrington saw a steady raise in population growth.  With multiple passenger trains coming and leaving the city several times a day, people began leaving Spokane to come enjoy a day or night in Harrington.  The opera house (which is more of an auditorium with seating for a couple hundred) was bringing in traveling acts to perform with regularity.  Many of these traveling acts signed and dated their names on the walls backstage and in the dressing rooms, many of which are still legible today.  In these booming years in Harrington, the hotel was never empty and the liquor was flowing.  It is said that in his youth famous Spokanite, Bing Crosby, used to come out to Harrington with his brother for nights of drinking and singing.

Bing Crosby singer from Spokane.  Courtesy of Wikipedia.

On our trip Saturday to Harrington, we visited the Electric Hotel, the Harrington Opera House, the legendary Studebaker shop, and took a stroll down the main street seeing old city hall and the old saloon.  The town has that very refreshing small town feel to it; everybody was friendly and knew everyone (probably why every car rolled by slow to inspect us outsiders).  Every building we toured was a living museum.  The Studebaker shop was packed full of cool,old, rare cars; one of them he was working on is only one of six left in the world.  In the owners office he had other old relics, not all associated with cars; an original Mr. Potatoe Head still in the box and my favorite, old baseball cards including hall of famer Whitey Ford.  The opera house was filled with old cast pictures, hand painted back drops, and the hundreds of performer's names.  The owners still put on plays and performances on the old stage, sometimes a couple times a week, mostly by the local high school drama club.  At the time of our visit the hotel didn't look much like a hotel, more of a worksite.  You can tell owners, Jerry and Karen, are putting their heart and soul into the project and I can't wait to see the final product.  I'd like to thank everyone we met in town for their hospitality and informative tours of the town.

Hall of Fame Yankees pitcher Whitey Ford.  Courtesy of Hall of Fame Memorabilia.

On a creepier note, the story about the Shelby girl who died at 13 in Harrington, I'm pretty sure I saw her gravestone while we were wandering through the cemetery.  Also a few of the names of old citizens in the 100 years of Harrington book stuck out as familiar.  Did anyone else who went on the trip notice this?

The New South is the Old South

After reading the first half of Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War by Tony Horwitz, I've come to the conclusion that I would be fine if the South seceded again.  The book starts out nice enough with the reenactors in Virginia.  These seem like very nice men who look at the Confederacy for the historical aspects of the time.  They are a little weird in real life I'm sure, but they're just trying to relive history and you can't knock them for that; it's their hobby and they're not alone in the activity.  I liked what one of them had to say about why he does the reenactments, this isn't an exact quote but close: "I think we all feel a little guilty in the time we live in, it was harder back then so it makes us feel better if only 48 hours."  I don't know about the whole spooning train thing to sleep (call me "farb" I don't care), but these men are, (along with a few smaller acquaintances of Horwitz) the only people introduced so far who have the right idea of how to remember the Confederacy.  They offend no one, and keep it all about the war not a return to antebellum society.

The deeper South Horwitz goes, the more irritated I became.  The first part that made me apologize for America was the group he met with who was trying to keep the Rebel flag on the South Carolina capitol building.  These were some of the more ignorant people around.  They weren't even from the South, most of the protest leaders were from New England, and a couple were Jews.  The worst of all though was Walt.  Walt invited Horwitz to his home (trailer) to chat.  I would have loved to be there with Horwitz for this encounter.  Walt gets up on his soapbox and just starts off on his prejudiced tangents, including a hatred for Jews.  At this point you can almost see the grin on Horwitz face as he's shaking his head about to inform Walt that he was in fact a Jew.  Even in the reading there's an awkward silence and Walt asks what his last name is, and he responds, "i should have guessed."  That wasn't even the worst part.  Walt spends this whole time trying to convince a Jew about intolerance, and the last thing he brings up completely discredits his entire argument.  Walt decides to tell Horwitz his approach to life and politics: essentially, if the government supports it, I don't.  One of the most ignorant quotes I've ever read in a book.  Walt, I hope you're still somewhere in the Lowlands of South Carolina and haven't met a women willing to bear your seed yet.

South Carolina flag.  Courtesy of 50 States.

The title of this post is no more prevalent than in the chapter of Guthrie, Kentucky/ Tennessee.  You wanna know why the rest of the world hates us?  Look at the scene at Redbone's (the biker bar).  Granted I have no idea what Horwitz was thinking going there in the first place, but the people he encountered there are just a black eye on society.  The only decent one was the owner for not letting Tony get stomped out by that cross faded Harley rider; even then though his name is Redbone and he allows that place to exist to make a buck, so he's not exactly an upstanding citizen.  It's people like them that get me going, they shit on everyone elses cultures, beliefs, etc but once theirs get questioned then that's crossing the line. There's more to swastikas and Confederate flags than being rebellious; rebellious isn't a bad thing but the history of those two symbols isn't something that should be idolized, there's a sad and violent history that follows them.

Sesame street's Bert with a member of the KKK.  Courtesy of Bert is Evil.

The Michael Westerman murder was an interesting chapter.  At first I was sympathetic toward Michael, his family, and the whole situation, but as the chapter went on I began to realize a 19 year old new father was killed and people began using it as propaganda.  The KKK and Aryan Nation got involved and it turned into a money grab.  The family allowed it to happen too.  They turned this kid into a martyr for 130 year old cause.  He never knew the meaning of the flag he flew from his truck; I mean he drove it through a black neighborhood on MLK Day in a town he grew up in, he knew where he was.  His wife (who find more ignorant than him) even said he put the flag up because it made his truck look "sharp."  Every memorial service for Michael the story changed.  Michael went from a naive kid just looking to make his truck look slick, to a Confederate martyr who was obsessed with his old South lineage and for what: money and a PR move.  I'm not condoning whatsoever what Freddie and his friends did to Michael.  They could have dropped it and just let him be an inconsiderate, ignorant teen who was just showing off, or at worse pull him from his truck and beat him up; at least that way no one is dead and no 17 year olds would be serving life in prison. The whole situation is messed up and everyone involved made the wrong decision in how to handle it, including the families and the organizations that showed up to support either side in the case.  No one had to die, no one had to go to jail, but to ignorance and poor decisions someone is.

Confederate battle flag.  Courtesy of usflags.org.

I Don't know why it's been so hard to include minority history into our countries history.  It all happened you can't deny it.  It happened within our borders, why is it trying to be hidden?  I don't blame the whites for this discrepancy all together, minorities could have helped get their history out as well.  The Biddy Mason project was decades too late; the church burnt down in the 1890's and no one made an effort to immortalize her until the mid 1980's.  In a city like LA with a large minority population how did this happen?  It took four white women in 1985-86 to actually get this memorial done.  The absence of black and Indian stories in historic sites across the country is appalling.  Yes it's a violent, shameful history at most of these places, but it happened you can't deny it, there's records of it,  what are you trying to hide?  We are entering a time in which this is changing and I for one am happy and will help to this hopefully with my degree and future career in history.

I'm sorry if I offended anyone in class who read this, with ties to the South.  I know there are great people down South and this is just a small minority of the population.  I'm not trying to say to abandon your roots, culture, or history.  Embrace where you've come from, just know that certain aspects of history can be interpreted different ways by different groups of people and sometimes it's just better to keep your mouth shut.  Black, brown, yellow, red, or white, we all have our own opinions that are important to us, but to keep the peace and keep moving forward we need be aware of the good and bad aspects of our respective histories.          

Looking Back, While Moving Forward

Everything in this world must adapt to the times, and history is no different.  Whether it's sports, politics, whatever, the "new" way will be the "old"way by tomorrow.  You can't become complacent.  For the field of history this means joining the technological world.  We can't fall behind the times and get lost in the shuffle.  Call it academic natural selection; only the strong survive.  At first, history was a little slow to see the benefits computers and the web could have on preserving our past.  Since the late 90's however some great strides have been made and digital archive websites have been popping up everywhere.  As the internet becomes more and more available and easier to use this field should explode, allowing our society to literally never forget anything. 

Old books and paper documents aren't built to last forever.  Courtesy of The Private Library.

In his essay "On the Web: The September 11 Digital Archive," James T. Sparrow chronicles the creation of one of our most important digital archive sites, the 9-11 Digital Archive .  Sparrow was one of the leaders in developing this site, and explains what makes and breaks sites like these.  In my opinion, he spends way too much time explaining the software, code, etc. of what went into the site.  While that's important, this is a history book, so more time should have been spent explaining what the pros and cons of digitizing our history could mean for our future. 

This site depends on contributions from the public.  People from all around the US can share their memories, photos, home videos, etc. of that fateful day in 2001.  As part of the ECHO (Exploring and Collecting History Online) program, the site has employees who sift through all the shared data and items and catalogs them correctly onto the site.  The benefit of having the public donate artifacts is that it allows people to have their personal experiences become part of US history.  Each item selected for the archive is number and cemented in its place in history.  A project like this would be doomed without the cooperation of the public; you wouldn't be able to get even a fraction of the stuff you'd need to make this viable.  As of 2006 (reprint date of Public History: Essays from the Field by Gardner and LaPaglia) there is over 140,000 items scanned, uploaded and cataloged on the 9-11 Digital Archive.

9-11 Memorial in NYC.  Courtesy of USA Today.

Beams of light into the New York sky representing the Twin Towers.  Courtesy of Lumination Network.

A con that Sparrow sees in the transition to digital history, is that it's making your everyday citizen an historian.  The transition is killing the need for, as Sparrow puts it, "experts."  If people can just browse the web and find primary sources on sites like these, what is the need for actual historians?

I see Sparrows point and think he's giving the public too much credit.  People are still going to rely on historians to do the hard research necessary write the books and make the documentaries the public uses to learn their history.  It's agreed that history is a dying breed.  I believe that sites like the 9-11 Digital Archive can help revive our field.  These sites give easy access to sources and artifacts, that before weren't readily available to the public.  The part of the public that will use these digital archives are hobbyist just generally interested in the past, high school and college students, and other historians.  These sites aren't going to flood the job market with historians. The digital archives just allow us to better preserve our past and makes it easier for a curious public to find a few more answers than before.  

The future of history.  Courtesy of JFK Library.