It must be noted that both Arthur and I spent some time as newspaper reporters in the 1970s when our dream to carry on my family's legacy in the local newspaper world burned bright. Newspaper reporting in a small town meant you were first and foremost charged with providing accurate information. After all, you were the eyes and ears of the community.
All these years later, in our pursuits that involve writing and music and the intersection of the two, we still hearken back to those lessons learned when we were young and hopeful. And it was our interest in truthful and careful reporting that took me to the Potter County Historical Society last month. I was in search of documentation of a snippet of information Arthur had remembered from a long-ago newspaper piece about New Century Club.
New Century Club was a women's club that began some time early in the twentieth century - and celebrated a milestone anniversary during our time at The Potter Enterprise. It was that celebration and the retrospective of the club printed in the paper that needed to be found.
The volunteers at the Historical Society are always anxious to help solve mysteries involving the community and its people and these women went to work to help me on my quest to find a truly obscure piece of information. Diane Caudell checked sources online and provided the year of the club's establishment, a framework that send Linda Goodnoe Russell upstairs to pore over old newspapers.
Julia Kolat recalled that there were records of New Century Club stored on the third floor of that fine old brick building. And she took me up the sweeping staircase to the second floor and then up the narrow steps into the attic space. Stacked on the floor, carefully boxed and labeled, records of the Club that served the community for more than 100 years are stored.
And thus began my introduction to Belle Haskell Lewis.
These are her words, taken from a multi-paged document tucked in the front of an over-stuffed scrapbook of clippings. Typed on a typewriter, double spaced with wide margins at the top and bottom, it is a history written in 1935 - a 30th anniversary retrospective.
I was asked to write a history of the New Century Club but many of the records I find missing and most of those available are mere outlines of programs, lacking all the life and color that characterized our activities...
To look back over the road we have travelled is interesting and enlightening. We see a procession of years steadily moving forward. In some of these years things apparently were static. Old customs and traditions held fast and were meticulously observed.
Then as the years passed a more extensive outlook was gained and closer contacts were made with the world's great movements. There were years that were exciting, exhilarating, heartbreaking.
Our country was emerging from its seclusion, and with high purpose had entered a war, to maintain a principle which we thought had been established to be a beacon light to the world.
The years that followed the World War brought a larger, fuller life for women, a freedom that in 1905 was talked of with bated breath, lest we be thought unwomanly.
Thereafter followed years of reaction, with changes so radical that they seemed to threaten, to undermine, what to us had seemed to be the fundamentals of society. Years of doubt, of confusion in the fog of which we are still wandering.
While we have been moving forward, keeping pace as best we can with the changing world, accepting innovations, following the trend of modern thought. Ever advancing, we have been carried into realms scarcely dreamed of before.
Yet when we looked backward we find that we have left behind us many things that were infinitely precious. We have lost old friends, old ideals wherein we found safety and comfort and security.
Dreams that we once entertained have been dissipated; illusions that we once hugged to our hearts as being things of utmost importance have vanished, lost in the clear light of science.
Old friends: How the essence, the flavor of their kindly spirits permeates all the years since they left us. Many of them we will see no more. We recall how they looked, what they said, even what they wore!
Recollections of them, and of others, come to us over and over, like some haunting phrase of music, a bit of melody wrought out of our association with them in the New Century Club.
... What of the New Century Club of the future? We find ourselves in the midst of a giant upheaval. What the world will be like, how many of our institutions will survive, no one knows.
There must be no limit to our horizon, it must extend beyond tihs world even into eternity. We cannot escape the past, it determines the future. We can never say, "It is finished."
I was enthralled by the discovery of this woman's writing and by the history of New Century Club but lest I forget – that obscure piece of information that was the purpose of my visit to PCHS was found by Linda in the newspaper from 1980. And Arthur's memory was accurate and what he's concocting from that piece of Potter County History - and others - is his story to tell.
And as for me, I'm now on a quest to learn more about Belle Haskell Lewis (1864-1955) and share in this New(ish) Century, her observations about the last New Century.
For now, her poem, published in her 1955 obituary in The Potter Enterprise.
My Tapestry
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