NCPR launches regional history project – needs your photos and memories of work!
This fall, North Country Public Radio is launching a new project, North Country At Work, which aims to revive, preserve, and share the work history of our communities within the Adirondack North Country. These stories will be shared on-air, on our website, and eventually as an ever-expanding, multimedia archive.
To do this, North Country At Work will be hosting “community photo sharing events” around the region to collect people’s memories, stories, and family photographs from their attics and albums. We’ll scan the photos, record the memories, and give you a digitized copy to take home.
The next event will be held on Sunday, August 28, at the Whallonsburg Grange Hall. For more upcoming events, information, or to tell us where to go next, go to ncpr.org/work.
Photo Caption and Credit: One of many camera crews who ventured to Saranac Lake to shoot silent movies, 1920s. Saranac Lake was often used to mimic conditions in the Arctic, Siberia and Alaska. Saranac Lake was sometimes known as “The First Hollywood” and many major early 20th century films were shot there. Photo courtesy of the Saranac Lake Free Library
Tags: ncatwork, North Country At Work, upstate new york photo archive
I guess this is one of the changes that has taken place as a result of the insane urge to take photos of everything and anything. If you are actually working, you shouldn’t have the time to take photos of you working because it would be an indication that you aren’t working.
I have to agree w/ Pete. As a stone mason I have pics of my jobs for my portfolio, but not much of working. As a train conductor, again, only promotional photos. As a brewery worker I’m behind the scenes. I do have a few photos that survived the below zero temps while I was operating a groomer on the trails of Gore Mountain. The most photos of me working is as a singer-percussionist which I loose money doing.
Really, Pete and Kent? There are amazing photographs going way back into the 1800s right up to present time of people doing the work that created the communities of this region. With related texts, oral histories, and images of the tools of the various trades, we will build an archive of what has made the Adirondack North Country tick, and trace changes in the work life of our communities. This archive will be designed for the public–easily searchable by type of work, location, time period and a dozen or more other tags. Want to know about logging in Hamilton County in the 1880s or dairy farming in Malone prior to WW II? You’ll be able to zero in–as will institutions and educators.
In addition to the digital archive, you’ll be hearing stories of work life on the air.
So, again, we invite everyone to root around in their attics and old photo albums for images of people at work through the last 150 years–or today.
Thanks!