The Lawrence County Museum has found a way to make the objects in its collection come to life.
No, there's no poltergeist afoot, and this isn't a Halloween story. But the discovery of a hundred-year-old document in a place far from Bedford, Indiana has brought vintage photographs and faded artifacts out of the museum's vaults and into an arrangement that reanimates the year 1908 for 21st century visitors.
A Serendipitous Start
The exhibition Through the Eyes of a Teenager: 1908 germinated from a phone call. Rowena Cross-Najafi, president of the Lawrence County Historical and Genealogical Society, was contacted by Jan Davis, a realtor in California.
"She said that she had found this diary in the garage of a house foreclosed on in San Diego," explains Cross-Najafi. "The resident of the house had already moved on, and this stuff was still in the garage. Unlike a lot of people, who would have thrown it out on the curb, she looked through it and found out what it was."
On the diary's front page, the California realtor had found the name Mary Lemon beside an address on 15th Street in Bedford. "Immediately after the call, we were out looking for the house," Cross-Najafi recalls.
That the historian was this excited about a house mentioned in a diary she'd never laid eyes on should indicate just how significant a historical document she thought the diary might be. A few days later, it arrived in the mail. "We stood around it and just gaped," Cross-Najafi remembers. "First of all, the girl had beautiful handwriting. And there were so many names named."
These Are The Good Old Days
The daughter of an affluent mill-owner, Mary Lemon was fourteen when she began writing in the diary she received for Christmas in 1907. A positive, outgoing teenager, Mary chose to chronicle activities with friends and current events over looking inward.
"Because she was so much a product of her time," Cross-Najafi reflects, "so involved in it and so observant of it, that enabled us to experience that time through her eyes."
The view through Mary's eyes is a privileged perspective of Bedford in its heyday, a time when it was known primarily as the limestone capital of the world. To reconstruct that epoch, gallery coordinator Becky Buher picked out names, addresses, pastimes, and artifacts from the diary that could be represented by photographs and objects in the museum's collection.
Miller's Confectionery, the Monon Railway Depot, and two silent movie theaters, the Crystal and the Majestic, all crop up in Mary's pages. All are represented here in maps and photographs.
The curators were elated to find an artifact Mary describes at length in the journal: Bedford High School's 1910 class banner, flown from the flagpole by a group of juniors in contempt of school leadership, resulting in suspensions along with a great deal of teenage drama. The fact that the black and gold Art-Nouveau-style banner turned up in the collection of the Lawrence County Museum. It makes Mary's world all the more real.
"This is the thing that she wrote about," Cross-Najafi exclaims. "The exact thing!"
Bedford And Beyond
High school wasn't all tomfoolery for Mary. The show also includes copies of The Comet, a monthly publication she helmed. After graduating, Mary went on to Denison College, and eventually to Vassar, where she took her bachelor's degree in Medieval French. Mary's Vassar yearbook is also on view. It turned up, along with the diary, in that San Diego garage.
With the help of two of Mary's granddaughters, who were living on the West Coast, Becky was able to piece together Mary's life between Vassar and California. After college, Mary married John Norman Darrow and the couple moved to New York City, where Darrow worked as a stockbroker. Ultimately, the Depression took its toll on the family's fortunes. Darrow's name turns up among the charter members of Alcoholics Anonymous.
Just three months before the Great Crash, however, a photograph from the Indianapolis Star preserved the image of the good life Mary and her family had theretofore enjoyed. Lent to the exhibition by Mary's granddaughter, the photo takes us back to a sunny afternoon in July 1929, in the summer resort of Chautauqua, New York. Mary's son, nieces and nephews are nestled amongst captains of industry and technology: Henry Ford, Thomas Edison and Adolf Ochs, founder of the New York Times.
Through the Eyes of a Teenager: 1908 is the culmination of a series of remarkable feats: the discovery and rescue of an abandoned diary, its repatriation to conscientious stewards, and the reconstruction of a life interwoven with history-not only Bedford's, but the nation's as well.