dual personalities

Nell Dickerson’s plea for historic preservation

Having read about it at Garden and Gun, I ordered this book from Amazon on a whim and because I like old, crumbling houses and Shelby Foote. What I find particularly appealing about this book (aside from the extraordinary photographs and the story by Foote) is that it’s not just a eulogy to the idealized old south and great plantation houses, which frankly, I cannot relate to. It is, as it’s subtitle claims, a photographic plea for the historic preservation of everything from small farmhouses, to powder magazines, schools and churches. It is also a plea for the importance of history. As Nell Dickerson writes in the afterword,

Do we want our country to become nothing but a land of strip malls? Let’s honor and preserve the reflections of our collective past that continue to make us a great nation. The battlefield sites, the historic buildings, the writings and photographs we save in our scrapbooks, the great-grand-mother’s hand sewn quilt, the grandfather’s soapstone pipe. Our personal history is part of our national history, and we should pass it to our children with great reverence, because it is not just who we were, but who we are.

Everywhere there are buildings and sites at risk. We can’t save everything, but if we don’t work to save as much as we can, it will all be gone before you know it. History gives us perspective; without it we live in a void. Sapientia per historiam (if I remember my Latin correctly).