A couple of quotes that I’ve saved from the Jack’s Winning Words blog seem to go together and provided the inspiration for this morning’s post here.
“Although we can’t stop the world around us from changing, some things are precious enough to preserve.” (Linda Kast, Editor Reminisce)
-and-
“There’s an old saying about those who forget history. I don’t remember it, but it’s good.” (Stephen Colbert)
It is unfortunate that Colbert’s quote is spot on in terms of our society’s current feelings about history. We have largely become a “throw it away” society with things, with peo0ple and with our history. I am a Board of Directors member of the Milford Historical Society and past president of that board. Like the thousands of other small town historical preservation groups across the country, the Milford Historical Society has as its mission to collect, preserve and make available to the public the history of our little Village and Township. We operate a small museum, The Milford Historical Museum, in downtown Milford, which houses memorabilia, pictures and documents from the Milford area’s past. We also feature a second floor that is set up and furnished to provide an experience like one might have had in a Milford home in the late 1800’s. We provide docent guided tours of the museum.
Like most other small-town museums, mainly volunteers run ours. We have a paid, part-time Museum Director. In addition, we run a program for local high school students which awards them a scholarship at graduation, after they perform a number hours of duties as docents (guides) in the museum. Our hope is interest them in history a little through that experience as well as to help them in their further education.
The Milford Historical Museum is usually open during the summer and fall months from May until November. This year, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we have remained closed and all of our normal activities have been suspended. Those suspended activities include the things we usually do during the year to raise funds to operate the museum. When the museum is open we get donations from visitors. We also collect dues from our membership each year. We normally hold a rummage sale called Granny’s Attic in July and a Home Tour of some of Milford’s historic homes in September. The Home Tour normally contributes about 75% of our annual budget. Neither fund-raising event is being held this year and with the museum closed, we are not getting donations from visitors.
We have made an appeal to the local businesses that usually support our Home Tour, with some success, but not enough to make up for the loss of Home Tour revenue. Unfortunately, the bills didn’t stop when everything else did. We must keep the building environment controlled to avoid damage to the historical contents, so air conditioning in the summer and heating in the colder months must continue. We must still pay to keep the landscaping up and this year we had to have the exterior painted to avoid deterioration of the 100+ year old building that houses the museum.
We believe that the history and heritage of the Milford area is precious enough to preserve and to share with future generations. We hope that you do too. If you would like to make a donation of any size to the Milford Historical Society to support our mission, please send your checks to The Milford Historical Society, 124 E. Commerce St, Milford, MI 48381. Thank you for your support. Come by the Museum when we are able to reopen and take a look at Milford’s history. We didn’t throw it away, we preserved it.
Posted by Norm Werner 
passages that they felt might ferment rebellion. The result was a Bible that was about ¼ the size of the actual Bible and one in which slaves were advised to mind their masters in Peter 2:18 “Slaves, in reverent fear of God submit yourselves to your masters, not only to those who are good and considerate, but also to those who are harsh.”
“reservations” that took place. These are ugly scars on our history, and some would just remove them from our school history books, in an attempt to protect our children from the ugliness of the truth.
written out of our history. We also have intolerance and bigotry against those whom we somehow judge to be “different” – the LBGTQ community, those who are mentally or physically challenged, or those look or speak differently. We cannot write them our of our lives and our history.
does for those who have just read about it or watched old new footage of the events leading up to his death. Thus who were alive in those days remember the context of the events that we now memorialize. We remember the nightly news casts showing black protest marchers being attacked by police dogs and being dragged away by police officers. We remember the speeches and the great gathering on the Washington Mall. The memory of Martin Luther King being shot at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 4, 1968, also provokes memories of where we were and what we were doing five years earlier on the day that President Kennedy was shot, Friday, November 22, 1963, at 12:30 p.m. in Dallas, Texas. It also will be forever linked in our minds to the fatal shooting of Bobby Kennedy just two months later. Those were tumultuous times.
to the MLK Day parade in Milford later today. It will be cold, as it always is this time of year. As I march, I will be reliving the memories of not just a day; but, of an era in our history at once brilliant in the ideals that it sparked and sad in the aftermath of the attempts to douse those hopes and dreams. Yes MLK’s dream is alive, but so too are the dreams of JFK and RFK and the many others of that era who envisioned a brighter future in America for all of its citizens.
NormsMilfordBlog 