History Harvest archives local stories, artifacts at FoCo Museum of Discovery

In the digital age, history can become simultaneously easier and more difficult to keep track of, especially with physical media being phased out. Local and community history can be especially vulnerable, but Colorado State University’s history department and the Fort Collins Museum of Discovery are working to collect and preserve those stories and artifacts.

As part of a project for HIST 479: Practice of Public History, students in Associate Professor Sarah Payne’s class organized an event for community members to bring an artifact to the Museum of Discovery and have it included in their digital archive. Payne discussed the event as an opportunity to get a realistic, impactful archiving experience.

“It’s perfect, though, because it’s like actually doing public history instead of just inventing some kind of, like, fake project in a class that you just have to … make something up,” Payne said.

Annabelle Storey, a student in the class, functioned as an interviewer for the project and discussed the importance of including missing perspectives in historical documentation. 

“Anybody can come and bring an object that’s important to them … that can now be seen by other people who now hear their story, like, for years to come,” Storey said. “You want people to feel important.”

Allanna Walters, who grew up in Greeley, Colorado, and visited Fort Collins from Ohio, brought a pearl ring that used to belong to her grandmother.

“I was just thinking about … how objects travel,” Walters said. “My grandparents got married and grew up in Illinois, and then my mom, so you know, their daughter-in-law grew up in Colorado, and then my mom wore it for years.”
“We are trying to tell the undertold stories of Fort Collins, Northern Colorado and Colorado as a whole.” –Jessica Jackson, CSU director of social studies teaching
History Harvest is a recurring event situated within the larger History Matters project at CSU. The project’s mission is “to support Colorado teachers in bringing research-based, hyperlocal, culturally responsive content into their classrooms,” according to its website.

One of the leaders of History Matters, Jessica Jackson, discussed the broader significance of History Harvest in connection with education throughout the state of Colorado. Jackson serves as the director of social studies teaching and is an associate professor in the history department.

“We are trying to tell the undertold stories of Fort Collins, Northern Colorado and Colorado as a whole,” Jackson said. “And so we worked with a group of teachers and graduate students last year; we built a series of resource sets and lesson plans with (the research).”

The project aims to expand historical knowledge as well to tell a more accurate and robust story about Fort Collins and its communities.

“We tell histories based on what’s in the archives,” Jackson said. “So if we can expand the stories we tell based on our community, then we can expand the histories that we’re telling back into and bringing those artifacts back into the classroom.”

A wide variety of objects were brought in to be archived, including a watercolor painting brought by community member Emilee Askeland. The painting was done by Askeland’s aunt as a Christmas gift for her parents; she said her aunt was looking for a creative gift and decided to paint the house she grew up in.

“My grandpa has some before and after pictures when they just moved into the house and when it looked like this, and it looks really close,” Askeland said. “It just makes me think about that because he was just so proud that it looks like he wanted it to. It’s really important to me, so I’m happy to have this connection.”

Each item brought to the Museum of Discovery will be photographed, archived with community interviews and put online in the online artifacts collection.

Reach Aubree Miller at life@collegian.com or on social media @aubreem07.