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Faces of the Forest |
| This new section is an effort to highlight those people in our communities who work to bring understanding and clarity to the past, present, and future of development and conservation in the Northern Forest region. Starting things off, we decided to speak with a man who has spent a lifetime organizing the scattered records of the past into readable history - no easy task, by any means. |
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Richard Colburn: Piecing Together the Past
By Greg Coyle and Jayson Benoit
Just south of the Clyde River down the Twin Bridges Road in East Charleston sits a modest modular home, its front windows looking out eastward into the narrow wetland valley framed by Deer Hill to the north and Pierce Hill to the south. At least two other houses have stood on this spot before, and two houses burned to the ground here. The oldest was the home of a schoolteacher who tried, futilely, to teach Richard Colburn to play piano more than seventy years ago. |
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"Like most kids I didn't practice," Richard says. "I got home from school and I'd work on the farm or gather sap, do my homework, and go to bed. I took a few lessons again in high school, but the teacher got disgusted with me. She said, 'Richard, you're wasting your time and you're wasting mine.' I still today would like to play the piano. I guess it wasn't for me."
Richard came to own the land his childhood teacher's house stood on, and now he lives in the small home his mother built there after his father passed. It is this type of story that Richard seems most to enjoy - simple, disparate details that yet overlap to encompass a lifetime - and these are the type of stories he collects and composes as an author and as a member of the Charleston Historical Society (CHS).
"We make more history every day, you know? Your breakfast is history. If you ate lunch yet, your lunch is history." While most of us take these details for granted, Richard's passion for history ensures that he will not - and residents of the town, present and future, benefit from his doggedness. This commitment is made readily apparent by the sizeable collections of the CHS, maintained voluntarily by Richard and his sister Audrey. News clippings from 2010 have already found their place in the albums of the CHS, and Charleston residents can rest assured that history will not forget them as long as Richard is here to record it.
A Lifelong Passion
When Richard was born in 1927, his family lived on Echo Lake and his father worked at the bobbin mill just outside of the East village. The family moved several times, but never more than a few miles from where they began. "After my wife and I were married I lived in Orleans for three months. That's enough of that," he says.
Clearly not a traveling sort, Richard cultivated a keen appreciation for his hometown history early on. "My father used to be a cemetery commissioner. When I got old enough to wanna earn some money, probably 14 or 15 years old, he let me help."
The job left an impression, and Richard has been doing it seasonally most of his life. "Working in the cemetery I'd see graves disintegrating - the marble gravestones especially, with the weather. I could see that one day you wouldn't be able to read it. So I thought, 'Well, write it down.' I copied whatever was on the gravestone: names, dates, poetry. Some of it's very original, so I thought it should be saved."
But it's not just the unique gravestones Richard has catalogued. It's every gravestone in every cemetery he visits. In 1994 a compilation of Richard's notes on cemeteries in Charleston was published by the Charleston Historical Society, and more printings have followed as the books have sold out. But that doesn't mean he's done with the project. "I started going in a circle from here in driving distance. I go by towns. The farthest I've gotten is Sutton. If I do a town, I do all of [the cemeteries there]."
Beyond the Gravestone
Richard's attention to detail and fastidious organizational skills have not been limited to the local burial grounds. As he took over another of his father's positions, that of clerk of the Charleston community church, he began to organize and compile all of the records concerning church business and events. Over three years of labor, he put together the pieces to create a 400-page history of the church spanning the years 1841 to 2007.
Richard and his daughter, Grace Frizzell, have also compiled volumes of local newspaper clippings from the early 19th century on.
"I do it just for the fun of it," he says. Amazingly, no one in the preceding 150 years had realized the entertainment value of these endeavors.
Currently, Richard is applying his patience and meticulous nature to the transcription of hundreds of pages of handwritten documents he came across this past winter in the town clerk's office.
"I started out by finding a proprietor's book. It was in handwriting you could barely read, [so] I asked the town clerk if I could take it home and type it on my computer. And of course, I knew the answer. You can't take that stuff out. But she says - you know it just shocked me altogether, I almost fell over - she says 'I'll photocopy it for you.' She copies them for me in her spare time."
Having completed those transcriptions, Richard is now tackling a larger stack of documents - the first Selectman's meetings dating back to 1806. "I don't believe anyone has looked at these documents in two hundred years," he says, riffling through a sheaf of Xeroxed papers, "It's all good stuff."
For example?
"In 1806," Richard points to a rough, hand-drawn table on one of the sheets, "there were seven male adults, six oxen, and one silver watch. They taxed the watch. That was Abner Allyn's watch, and he had it for a long time here. He was the only one taxed for a silver watch."
Richard sets the papers down on his kitchen table and smiles happily. "You'd think it would be a gold watch, wouldn't you? What's that silver?" |
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