While poking around some picture files while on break last month, I happened to notice I had a version of this particular photo that had a clearer resolution than other versions of the same photo. On zooming in, I noticed that for the first time I could read some of the signs on our building. Prior to this the oldest information I could find was a 1992 map. This photo above was from 1888, just three years after the Middle Ground and our buildings were built, so it was very likely that the signs were the first stores that occupied this space.
We now had enough keywords to start searching, and as most historical digging does, one lead led to another and another, and soon we were able to piece together much of the early history of our space.
I spent the better part of the month compiling these details into a coherent and hopefully interesting format. The Library of Congress had articles from The Press of Stafford Springs up to about 1920. We have some information after that, but with enough gaps that I’m going to have to spend some time in the Stafford Historical Society museum to piece it all together. I’m waiting until I’m able to do that safely (yay science!), but also my month off is up and we need to focus on making things out of clay again for a little while.
Also the reason I came across the picture is that I was very self-indulgently compiling all of the photographs of our own renovation, now that it’s been over five years and I’m losing track of those picture files. That too, leads me to another roadblock that I will attack after vaccination and when I have time. (It involves dragging devices to the Apple Geniuses and recovering lost photos… after only five years. Boo science!)
But I got a good start on both of these picture histories. Feel free to take a look at the links at the bottom of our About page or click here and here.
I’m hoping that I’ll start to be too busy living life in my free time to spend giant chunks of time on these side projects, but I am also grateful for having had the forced solitude to do them. I’ve also reclaimed my clay creativity more than any time since opening the shop, and I feel I’ve reached a level of organization and flow with the studio that will allow me to continue on this path. This particular season I have some new clay to experiment with, and some more slip casting ideas… :)