_______________________BOOKS RECEIVED______________________NewEngland, 1/1986 ____________________BOOKS RECEIVED____________________
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By Geoffrey ElanHow to Write a Dull Town
History
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proportion. Another example
of the reverent reporting of trivia comes from The Book
of Heath (Paideia Publishers. P.O. Box
343. Ashfield. MA 01330): "September 14, 1885: Due to the increased price
of the rental of telephones, Preston
Bakes, the Misses Maxwell and George Bemis had theirs taken
out" Sandwich: A Cape
Cod Town
($21.50, 145 Main Street, Sandwich, MA
02563) is 572 pages long, counting index, bibliogra-phy,
genealogical charts, lists of subscrib-ers, and other shilly-shallying.
The author, R.A. Lovell, Jr., writes with
the gravity and individuality of the
classic town historians of the 19th century. I think he's done a splendid job, but he
complains that he was forced to "prune greatly
what we would wish to relate...." It is
the duty of the historian to prune away the
inessential facts and avoid what E. B.
White called the mistaken notion that everything
is impor-tant. To do so, however, would be to vio-late Rule
#3... 3. Don't offend anyone.
A section of Durham, New Hampshire: A History
1900-1985 ($25, Phoenix Publishing.
Ca-naan, NH 03741) begins with the words, "With no intention of slighting
anyone," then rattles off a lengthy list
of persons who helped out the Town Recreation
Commit-tee (See Rule 02). Such a list belongs in the Town Report, not in the town
history A more common
application of this rule is not to rock the boat by
injecting elements of history that are at
odds with the accepted local myths. This
can take the form of selective amnesia,
as in Fitz-william: The Profile of a New Hampshire Town, 1884-1984 ($16, Phoenix Publish-ing,
Canaan, NH 03741), which lists all
the sextons of the
past century in a five-page chapter on cemeteries, but gives
one line to a community of several
hundred Italian stoneworkers and their
families who worked in the quarries. On
the other hand. Renee Garrelick, author
of Concord
in the Days
of Strawberries and Streetcars
($17.50. Concord
Historical Commission. |
350th, Box 535. Concord. MA
01742). is to be commended for reporting
the stoning of Irish and
Italian laborers in that town along with warm memories
of wildflower decorated "school barges" and town baseball
teams. Paul Maureau
probably made no friends in Masardis, Maine, by
writing with candor and sympathy in
The Masardis Saga ($10.95, TBW Books. Day's Ferry Rd., Box 164.
Woolwich. ME 04579) t about the pleasures of visiting
hunters, or “sports" of the late 19lh and early
20th centuries: "I have heard many tales
of women who made extra money on
their ' backs, if they happened to be
pretty and friendly. They would have been
unmarried or widowed women. I suspect,
when you remember that dollars were
scarce in this part of the world, you can
hardly blame them for making hay while the
sun shone." But he made a town and
a time come vividly, humanly
alive. And that, I
suppose, is what marks a
good town history for me. There is no story without conflict, the
spark of life that leaps from the clash of flint
and steel, old ways and new ideas, immigrant
and Estab-lishment. The embodiment of this ap-proach to local history is
Far Out the Coils ($15. The Tashmoo Press. RFD Box 590 Vineyard
Haven. MA 02568) by Henry Beetle Hough, who died last June on
his beloved Martha's Vineyard. The
book is subtitled, -A personal view of
life and cul-ture on Martha's Vineyard." and it man-ages to pack so much
history, insight, hu-mor, indignation, and love into 128 pages that it fairly quivers in the
hand. I think it was
John D. Rockefeller who once listed three rules for
getting rich. The first was to start work early
in the morning. the second was to work late into the night, and the third was to
find oil The lesson for town histories in
Rockefeller's parable is ihat earnest efforts
and good intentions are not enough. If
you want a good town history, you have to
find oil: a Henry Beetle Hough, a Paul
Maureau a Gladys Hasty Carroll; a
Spindletop lurking in the library.
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"WE HAVE ABOUT
7OO TOWN HISTORIES in our little Yankee Publishing Inc. library, and
receive two or three new ones each month. I’m
defining the term loosely here, to include
histories of counties, regions, valleys,
parts of towns, churches, neighborhoods;
perhaps it would be better to call them
local histories. They generally have three things in common: They are written by
amateur historians, they do not achieve
wide readership, and, alas, they are unreliable and stupefyingly dull. I intended to
discuss how to write a good town history, with
examples. The trouble is, there are not many
examples, and they tend to defy
classification; that is why they are good. The failures
are all very much alike, and that is why
they are bad. So. based on the principle that
we lean more from our errors than from
our triumphs, and on the fact that I have had more experience with the former
than the latter, here are Elan's
Infallible Instructions for Writing a Dull Town History. I. It should
be written by a committee.
That way more of
the town will be involved in the project, and different viewpoints will be
represented. This will result
in renewed civic
pride and a bland pudding of a book without a point of view.
As the old joke says, an elephant
is a horse put together
by a committee. |
Committees have
produced some great works. The King James Bible was
written by a committee. It shows. See
the "begats" in Genesis, and the endless
itinerary of the Israelites in Numbers, both
faithfully reproduced in most town histories. It might be argued that the purpose of a
town history is to tell who begat whom and where they traveled and lived in
their lifetimes. My response is that those are
records, not history, and there is a
difference between the archivist and the
historian. History is story, not facts. What we
remember of history (including the Bible) is the story it tells, not the lists of names
and places. A committee, however, finds it
easier to pile up facts than to tell a story.
This leads into the second rule, which
is... 2. Don't
leave anything out. An extreme
example of this is
one history that begins in the Paleozoic Era, when
"fishes swam where Chicopee and Holyoke
people now walk." Holyoke-Chicopee: A
Perspective by Ella Merkel DiCarlo ($
11.95, Main Poland Road. Conway, MA 01341) bubbles with personalities and
appealing stories. But the extinction of the
dinosaurs in the Connecticut Valley, the plagues
that swept the area clean of Indians, and
the color of the wig wore by the
proprietress of a no-torious house of ill fame all get equal
billing. There may be perspective, but
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