It's All History

Yesterday and everything before that: history. All we know: history. Our entire lives: history. You might think with history comprising almost everything about people that people would be more interested in history. But, it seems so, well, past. Even Point Roberts, anomaly that it is, joins the rest of the world in having a history. And it also has a historical society. What it doesn’t have, though there have certainly been efforts to obtain it, is a place for the records of its history to call home. There’s a community project in need of being taken up by the larger community.

The historical society also has an extensive collection of photographs of Point Roberts and of its inhabitants of long years back. I’ve seen a number of them because the Point Roberts Quilt Group looked at them before it made the Community Quilt that hangs in the Community Center. Each block in that quilt is based upon an actual photograph of a Point Roberts long gone. I made the one that has what looks like a lifeguard station at Lighthouse Park, but is actually the lighthouse that was there before it was a park. And also the heron part of the center panel.

The Historical Society has turned some of the photographs into notecards that are sold at The Blue Heron. The Society also runs programs each year, including an excellent one on the Point Roberts’ cemetery. An accompanying booklet is available from them about the cemetery and its origin and experiences. And some years back, the Society sponsored a show of 'Abandoned Houses of Point Roberts,' a series of wall quilts I made. They've been terrific to work with.

Most recently, the Society put out a call for those of us who are the Point Roberts of the ever-so-brief present (and who will be part of the Point Roberts past all too quickly) to write the story of how they came to Point Roberts. They hope to collect enough to create and ultimately publish a kind of social history of our own times, a time when photographs are so voluminous that they need to be accompanied by more words than are now being written. There used to be letters and journals to tell about daily life and daily decisions. Now, there are blogs, of course. But I can count on the fingers of one finger the number of actual letters I’ve received in the mail during the past eight months. So the Historical Society is hoping to get people to do a little writing, and their members will be responsible for keeping track of it. Imagine, years in the future, social historians and local scholars reading through your accounts of how you got here (that, of course, assumes you actually are here). Imagine you, in the nearer future, reading about how your friends and neighbors got here.

I wrote ours awhile back and a nice guy from the group called me up today and thanked me. That alone might be enough reason to get your story to them. He’ll probably call you, too. Anyway, if you are a local dweller and own a pencil or pen, you can send your story to The Point Roberts Historical Society, at PO Box 780, 98281. And if you don’t have a pencil or any paper or a stamp even, you can just email it to them at historicalsociety, followed by at-pointroberts-dot-net. (Do the address the right way; I just write it this way to keep their spam mail somewhat reduced.)