Preserving Pocahontas News - Sept. 25, 2014

I was up in Bartow this week to walk around the late Jessie Powell's property at Travellers' Repose. As most of you know, the place is going up for auction this weekend and the future of yet another county historic landmark is very much on our minds.

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I was remembering back to November of 2010 when a small group of us took Jessie to the Top of Allegheny. She was 95 at the time, and though it was a sunny day, it was brisk as November usually is.

We followed her to the Civil War cemetery, watching as she stopped at every stone. Across the field, up and down we went. She rarely stopped to rest. Finally reaching the site where her Yeager ancestors once lived, she told a story of their 500 sugar maple trees that were cut down during the war to build cabins for the troops.

"Would you let me take your picture here?" I asked.

She sat down on what would have been the steps up to the old house that existed only in her memory from stories handed down. Smiling like a child, in her pink coat and white hat, it was as if time stood still. She had gone back to a time where you and I have never been.

I took a hundred pictures of Jessie that day. Regretfully, it was the last time that I saw her. Those pictures were placed in the Preserving Pocahontas archive so that future generations would remember this chapter of Pocahontas County history that she was so proud to be a part of.

Preserving the past, in the present, for the future! That's really what Preserving Pocahontas is all about.

I mentioned last week that we are going "on the hunt." And the hunt is for financial support for Preserving Pocahontas. As much as we depend on your contributions of photographs, historical documents and so forth, we are always mindful of how much time and money it takes to maintain this massive archive that we have built.

For example, our digital images of photographs and documents must be copied to new hard drives every five years. This is how we protect them and insure that data will not be lost over time. We now have thousands of files that are ready to be copied.