photo by Cindy Steele
Brown County Historical Society
~ story and photos by Boris Ladwig
The Brown County Historical Society keeps a veritable treasure trove of documents weathered by the decades: Black and white photos show the Old Salt Creek Mill, a flood from a century ago and dirt streets around the courthouse. Leather-bound property records tell descendants where their ancestors made a living after their arduous journeys from overseas. Crumbling court records reveal transgressions of Brown County residents’ forefathers, from election fraud to horse thievery.
The documents’ physical fragility— some reveal traces of charring from an 1873 courthouse fire— perhaps serves as a bit of a parallel to the fact that they exist at all. If the Historical Society hadn’ t preserved the photos, documents, recordings and artifacts, they would not just be lost to time, but likely destroyed and as unrecoverable as parchments from Pompeii.
Many documents hail from private provenance, and many of those that originate in the hands of government scribes eventually leave their bureaucratic care for a trash heap or recycling receptacle. Some government agencies discard the records when the law no longer requires them to be preserved. Others simply run out of space to keep voluminous older records and / or lack the funds for digitization.
“ So much of it gets lost,” said Rhonda Dunn, the Historical Society’ s archivist.
The threat of permanent loss serves as a primary motivator for Dunn and the dedicated volunteers of the society, who gather, maintain and catalog the documents and artifacts to preserve them for people today— and many years from now— who want to learn about how their ancestors came to live in Brown County, how they earned a living and how the their daily lives resembled and differed from those of today.
Julia Ottenweller, another volunteer, said she regards preserving the county’ s history as important work, in part because knowing their past gives people a different perspective on their present and future.
“ We need to know where we came from,” she said.“ We need to understand that things( have not) always been the way they are now.”
Ottenweller sat in Dunn’ s office on the History Center’ s second floor recently to organize old circuit court records that detailed criminal and divorce cases, land disputes, and other disagreements and transgressions.
She had recently read a case where someone was caught hunting on Sunday, an illegal act back then. Another Brown County resident had gotten in trouble for disrupting religious services, apparently by
44 Our Brown County • Sept./ Oct. 2023