The Similkameen News Leader
Editorial
September 4, 2007
WHEN HISTORY BECOMES HISTORY
We never thought we'd see the day when Princeton Museum would become the butt of jokes the punch line to a more serious problem.
Maybe you've heard a few of them already.
What do you get when you put a dehumidifier in the basement of the Princeton Museum? A few litres of water and the satisfaction of preserving precious documents for one more day.
What's it mean when the alarm goes off at Princeton Museum? The basement's probably flooded again.
Which has more cracks - the pavement on Old Hedley Road or the basement walls of Princeton Museum? It depends on who's asking.
There's no doubt the place where most of Princeton's history is stored needs some work. The Society and volunteers who baby-sit the collection of historic artifacts, documents, and rare items that connect the community to it's past have done the best they can with what they have.
Now it's time for an overhaul.
A road trip a week ago along Old Hedley Road helped us connect with the past and the pioneers who were responsible for the early development of the region.
We hiked a portion of the Dewdney Trail, which dates back to the 1860's. The section we explored was easy to access and for a moment we imagined what the trip would have been like for the traders, miners and others who used the route as the only way through the Similkameen Valley.
We marveled at trees discovered along the way that were blown down in a recent windstorm that were no less than 200 years old. We tried to imagine the landscape and what the area would have been like in the early 1800's.
We visited pictographs and discovered others we had not seen before. These were markings left behind by First Nations people traveling the area long before the Dewdney Trail happened. We tried to imagine what the area would have been like in the 1700's and before.
Then we realized how lucky we were to be living in a place where the Museum has all this information and so much more either displayed or warehoused in boxes and file cabinets constantly in danger of destruction only because of the condition of their present home.
We tried to imagine the history of the area becoming history.
It sent us back to a time when history was passed down from family to family and generation to generation in the only way it could be kept alive without damage through verbal communication.
You'd think with all the technology at our disposal in the present day that finding a way to preserve the local history would be easier than figuring out how to power another dehumidifier in the Museum basement without tripping a breaker.
Or tripping over a bucket of water.
