“Father made a great deal of money out of the mines and started a grocery store in partnership with Poindexter. The store was known as the Poindexter & Clark Mercantile Store. My father started in this business with a great deal of money and no experience. Mr. Poindexter started in with no money and a great deal of experience. The partnership ended with Poindexter having the money and my father the experience.”
Back in the “Good Old Days” of the soul-crushing Great Depression, the government thought up all sorts of make-work projects. I’m certain many folks thought it was just a waste of money, but instead of just dropping money into a big pit like we seem to these days, they made people earn their wages. The projects created some beautiful public buildings and managed to preserve the history of the “average American” in a way that had never been attempted before.
The quote above is from a Mrs. Ford of Portland, telling the story of growing up in Canyon City Oregon. The WPA American Life Histories Project collected hundreds of interviews across the nation, and it’s now all available online http://memory.loc.gov/wpaintro/wpahome.html.
Another incredible site for history buffs is the Oregon Digital Library, which houses a searchable database of collections from all over the state http://odl.library.oregonstate.edu/record/search So many really neat photos and stories here, do a search for Oregon Shakespeare Festival and see photos dating back to the 1930′s.
Why is that man in a swimsuit?
Or what about the Salem Cherry Festival? There’s photos from the early 1900′s.
Getting ready for the 1913 Cherry Festival Parade with the old Capitol building in the background.
I could spend days wandering through these sites! How great is it to have all this at our fingertips and not just mouldering away in some library where only a few historians view it every year?
