Recently, I spent an hour sorting through newspaper stories from the mid-2000s about the sale of a regional drugstore chain. The week before, I skimmed articles from the 1960s about racial discrimination at a popular swimming spot. And prior to that, I was reading accounts of specters and phantasms at a home built in the early 1800s.
The details that materialize by diving into the local past illuminate life, business and culture at specific points in our history.
From the newspapers on my laptop emerged a portrait of the brothers who owned a hardware store that closed after a blaze in the 2010s. There was the report from the 1990s of a rumored treasure hoard buried at a long-lost colonial-era Loyalist fort. And a 1960s account told how a movie theater at a new mall would have a seating plan designed “to eliminate bothersome rising to admit other patrons to the row.”
