Archive-keeping as heritage work: the keepers of the town's memory

Banked Sources, Black History, the Events Calendar and 2011 Comprehensive Plan, assembled

Lakeville's heritage was kept before it was designated, and its keepers were private: a picture-keeper, an interviewing historian, and the quilters of the centennial — this article gathers the scattered record of the keeping itself. Jeanne Geyer is the type: the town's picture-keeper and narrative historian, whose local keeping the banked sources file carries at pointer, and whom the town's own 2011 Comprehensive Plan thanks by name — "a special thanks to Jeanne Geyer for the use of her historic narrative and photographs of Lakeville" — the plan's history chapter, the Black Bear Tavern and Hilltop lines among it, being her narrative in the town's official book. Frederick Karst's 1970s interviews with the Huggart Settlement's descendants and pioneer families, checked against the census and the deed books, recovered a community the county histories had lost sight of — oral-voice work as heritage work, carried whole in the black-history articles. The centennial quilts are the third form: the town's principal portable heritage object in the banked heritage article's own words, with the Lakeville Centennial Quilt pictured on the 2011 plan's cover — the town's history stitched by its makers and then printed as its plan's face. No heritage pageant as such and no survey-card campaign of the town's own stands in the reached record; the SHAARD survey cards under G-SP-7 are the residue, named for any survey limb. The keeping, as documented, was three private acts — and the town's public heritage programme, when it came, was built on what the keepers had kept.