Barbara Powell is interested in saving the West - one photo, one artifact, one bit of oral or written history at a time. It's a community effort, she said, information picked up and related over time, collected, and written down for those who come after.
One facet of the community effort started with the Humboldt Museum, which provided historic photos and the Humboldt Sun which has published a photo in each Friday's newspaper along with a short history on the photo compiled and written by Barbara Powell under the headline, "Looking Back."
Powell will now be providing a photo and description for The Battle Mountain Bugle once a month. The Humboldt Sun found Powell in the course of writing about the museum, found she had access to many historic photos and stories, and was good at writing them down. The partnership was born.
Powell was born in Winnemucca in 1944. Her mother was born in Dun Glenn, now a ghost town in Pershing County, but originally a silver-mining community within Humboldt County before boundaries changed with the creation of Pershing County.
"I've been interested in history my whole life," said Powell. But along with her interest in looking back, Powell is also a forward-thinker, very involved with the latest technology available to preserve both the photographs and the historical stories they represent.
Powell has a website where she has the pictures and stories she and the museum have collected. She also has an impressive Mac computer system with 7 teraflops, a measure of computing speed equal to one trillion floating-point operations a second. To readers not fluent in geekspeak, that means very fast operating speed and a huge amount of storage. She estimates she has stored 10,000 to 11,000 photos in various files, in addition to the stories she's written herself and collected from others.
She said some great work is also being done at the Humboldt County museum, using technology to preserve photos. "I worry about things deteriorating, but we have some wonderful skills in (museum director) Dana Toth and board member Joyce Lacaillade," said Powell. "They're doing some great work."
Museums are filled with wonderful historic photos, but many of them come with a problem. Many times, the people in the photos are unknown; often the location or the exact time are in doubt. Identifying old photographs isn't just a problem for the Humboldt Museum, it's a problem for every museum including the Library of Congress.
The "Looking Back" series is an attempt to write down the memories, even imperfect ones, before they vanish.
Often Powell doesn't know who took the photos she gets, but she does her best to find out, and says that any historical photos she gets go right up to the museum. "Some I've literally saved from going into a trash heap," she said. "If I find or I'm given old photos, I try to identify them, I ask around, if I can't find out, I save them until later - you never know, someone may come around who knows about the photo."
When she has the opportunity, she scans photos others share with her and puts them on a DVD then returns both the originals and a copy of the DVD to those who loaned her the photos so they can share their photos with family or anyone else they'd like to. When people offer either Powell or the museum a photo or photo collection, she says they sign a permission slip to allow use of the pictures for research and publication.
"I'm starting to get things (photos and information) from others and I want to spread out to involve more people," said Powell. So far Liz Chabot, Woodie Bell, Ted Hoskins, and others have shared photos and stories. "If we could get more people involved we could get more photos and we need to get these stories written down!" Powell insisted."We at the museum feel these photos and stories need to be shared."
Powell has some Native American photos, which she says are pretty rare. "The Indians didn't really like to have their photos taken, and photos taken of them were often buried with them," she said. "I know a woman of Native American descent who knows about some of the photos, so she's a resource."
Powell readily admits there are times she can't corroborate dates and other details on some of the photos. She takes responsibility for any errors in picture identification or story sharing.
She knows many of the stories first-hand because the pictures were taken by her own family, and the memories were shared first-hand. "Pops didn't take many photos, but my grandparents did," said Powell. "I try to independently confirm my memories on my own family's photos and try to get the stories that go with Humboldt Museum photos and I try to get the stories people give me with their photos, but it's not always possible."
By way of background, Powell said, "I'm one of nine kids, cats, and other critters. I have a very good memory, as did my parents and grandparents who told me stories about northern Nevada. I lived in many mining towns, some of which are now ghost towns. My dad was a miner, so was my grandfather and my great grandfather. Dad hauled us all over the place, I lived in Sulphur, Midas, in Paradise for a short time, I lived up on Poverty Peak when they had the mercury mine up there." Powell said that far from being a comprehensive list, "These are just the mining camps where I lived in Humboldt County, I've been in old mining camps all over the West."
Powell said her dad loved to talk about the history of the areas and about the photos his parents had taken.
She described herself as "one of those 'listening kids.' "I liked to listen to anyone talk about the past; I still do," she added.
Powell said her "Looking Back" series has prompted some responses from other history buffs. "The Humboldt Sun published a photo of a1902 passenger train wreck when six people were killed," she said. Powell's story about the train wreck also appeared in her "Looking Back" column.
Quincy California resident Ted Haskins, who was originally from Winnemucca, gets The Sun just to keep up with what's happening in town. After seeing the photo and reading the article, he sent additional historical photos. Some were of the buiding of the Western Pacific Railroad. Another photo he sent showed some pretty young women, many years ago, fishing in Humboldt County in their long skirts. That one ran recently in "Looking Back" and Powell used Haskins' photo information.
Haskins graduated from Humboldt County High School in 1944 and sent his graduation program from that year along with the photos.
Powell said the museum has also enjoyed photos from Liz Chabot, Woodie Bell, Bob Hapgood and others. "We'd love to get more people involved, we need to get these stories written down." she said.
Powell hasn't limited herself to a newspaper column, she has an e-book available only to Mac users through the I-Store. It's called, "Life On The Edge of Forever." Cost of the book is just $3.99, "I wanted people to be able to affort it," said Powell.
She also has a website: www.nevadasdesertlegends.com with photos and stories. Powell said she'd love to hear from people who know more about the photos posted or have photos and stories of their own about the West. She claims that it's not hard to learn to scan photos and write stories about them.
In spite of an e-book, a website, and 10-11,000 pictures stored on computer, Powell claims she is "fairly computer illiterate." She describes herself as a
"Self-taught antique geek dinosaur."
Look for photos and stories "Looking Back" nearly every Friday in the Humboldt Sun.
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