Manatee History Matters: It takes care to save local legacies

While I often find myself going on and on about my work at the Palmetto Historical Park in conversations with friends and family (and even strangers behind me in the Walmart checkout line), I'm hesitant to disclose my actual job title.

Once people find out that I'm a curator, they inevitably ask me ridiculously difficult questions about history:

Who was the first baby born in Manatee County?

Was anyone ever lynched on Old Main Street?

Because it already happened, people assume we have all kinds of information about the who, what, where and when in history.

In reality, we only have what someone from a previous generation thought was worth saving.

For example, the oldest building in our collection is Palmetto's first post office, built in 1880. This post office would not still be standing today if it weren't for the foresight and determination of Josephine Harrison.

In the early 1980s, Jo Harrison happened to discover the fire department was planning a training exercise that involved burning down a rickety old wooden structure. The building was falling apart anyway.

Luckily, Jo knew the building was our first post office and organized a group of Palmetto leaders in 1982 to fight for preservation of the structure.

According to the late histo

rian Alice Myers, under Jo's leadership, this group was chartered and became the Palmetto Historical Commission. She was the founder and first president.

As the driving force behind many other preservation efforts (not to mention her humanitarian causes), Jo Harrison seemed to realize history doesn't save itself. If we want to have any heritage left to pass to the next generation, we have to do the saving.

Unfortunately, preservation doesn't come cheap! Saving the old almost always costs significantly more than building a new version.

In 1991, Palmetto's Carnegie Library was in such bad shape officials considered tearing it down.

Jo made an impassioned plea to Palmetto City Council: If they gave her the estimated $40,000 it would cost to raze the building, she would fundraise the rest needed to restore it.

This was just the beginning of another of Jo's success stories, as I sit in the old library now, typing this article.

Yet the library is not in perfect shape today. Some 25 years after the restoration Jo spearheaded, the windows leak and we plan to begin more preservation work this summer to fix the problem.

A conservator's work is never done as time moves inexorably forward.

The newest project being undertaken by the Palmetto Historical Commission is an Education and Preservation Center. As of right now, all but one of the buildings in the Palmetto Historical Park are historical structures, which we try to keep as original as possible (when you walk into the schoolhouse it feels like a schoolhouse instead of a museum).

This is great for giving visitors a glimpse into daily life of the past, but it makes it difficult to continue our preservation efforts.

It takes a lot of resources to save history, and not just money: space, time and effort, too.

The Preservation and Education Center would be a new structure with temperature- and humidity-controlled storage as well as a workshop for archive and artifact preservation. While we need a new building in order to control the environment enough for museum-quality preservation, we don't want to simply plop down a modern structure into our quaint, old-fashioned historical park.

Instead, the plan is to tie this new resource back into the beginning by making the façade look like the postmaster's home, which was originally attached to our 1880 post office: historical context on the outside, a modern preservation workshop on the inside.

Josephine Harrison was passionate about saving history and better yet, she was able to ignite the same enthusiasm for our heritage in others. When accepting the Manatee County's Distinguished Citizen Award in 1988, she said: "If you like a place well enough to live in it, you should get involved."

To help us continue Jo's effort to preserve our history, please donate to the Preservation and Education Center fund. Checks can be made out to the Palmetto Historical Commission and mailed to P.O. Box 1192, Palmetto, FL 34220.

Tori Chasey Edwards, Palmetto Historical Park curator, enjoys horrifying schoolchildren by explaining the nature and use of chamber pots. Contact her at tori.edwards@manateeclerk.com or call 941-723-4991.

This story was originally published December 29, 2015 at 12:00 AM with the headline "Manatee History Matters: It takes care to save local legacies."