Brown County Historical Society

~story and photos by Boris Ladwig

The Brown County Historical Society keeps a veritable treasure trove of documents weathered by the decades: Black and white photos show the Old Salt Creek Mill, a flood from a century ago and dirt streets around the courthouse. Leather-bound property records tell descendants where their ancestors made a living after their arduous journeys from overseas. Crumbling court records reveal transgressions of Brown County residents’ forefathers, from election fraud to horse thievery.

The documents’ physical fragility—some reveal traces of charring from an 1873 courthouse fire— perhaps serves as a bit of a parallel to the fact that they exist at all. If the Historical Society hadn’t preserved the photos, documents, recordings and artifacts, they would not just be lost to time, but likely destroyed and as unrecoverable as parchments from Pompeii.

Many documents hail from private provenance, and many of those that originate in the hands of government scribes eventually leave their bureaucratic care for a trash heap or recycling receptacle. Some government agencies discard the records when the law no longer requires them to be preserved. Others simply run out of space to keep voluminous older records and/or lack the funds for digitization.

“So much of it gets lost,” said Rhonda Dunn, the Historical Society’s archivist.

The threat of permanent loss serves as a primary motivator for Dunn and the dedicated volunteers of the society, who gather, maintain and catalog the documents and artifacts to preserve them for people today—and many years from now—who want to learn about how their ancestors came to live in Brown County, how they earned a living and how the their daily lives resembled and differed from those of today.

Julia Ottenweller, another volunteer, said she regards preserving the county’s history as important work, in part because knowing their past gives people a different perspective on their present and future.

“We need to know where we came from,” she said. “We need to understand that things (have not) always been the way they are now.”

Ottenweller sat in Dunn’s office on the History Center’s second floor recently to organize old circuit court records that detailed criminal and divorce cases, land disputes, and other disagreements and transgressions.

She had recently read a case where someone was caught hunting on Sunday, an illegal act back then. Another Brown County resident had gotten in trouble for disrupting religious services, apparently by

talking too loudly near where the services were taking place. A polling inspector had run afoul of the law for looking into a ballot box to see how someone voted.

“You never know what you’re going to find,” Ottenweller said.

Dunn said many people mistakenly believe that they can access almost any old record on the Internet, but she estimates that only about 10% of historical records are available online. That means for most records—those that survive, anyway—people have to come to the History Center to find the physical record.

The Brown County Historical Society was founded in 1957, met in the new Art Gallery, and on Monday, Sept. 16 of that year, elected Karl S. Ehrnschwender as its first president and Eudora Kelley as vice president. The Historical Society appointed its first archivist in 1972, but until fundraising and volunteer work enabled the construction of an archive room in 1981, records were stored in boxes in the Society’s office and the archivist’s home attic and guest room.

The organization housed its collections for many years in a former bowling alley building on SR 135 north of town, and in the Traditional Arts building at the site of the current History Center. The quest for a better building began in earnest at the early part of the millennium, said Robert Coulter, another Historical Society volunteer, former archivist, and member of the building committee.

Broad support from benefactors and the community enabled the Society to build the 18,000-square-foot, $3.2 million Brown County History Center without a mortgage. Coulter said the furniture was donated, the electrical system vendor knocked off a large chunk of the cost, and organizations such as the Community Foundation and Lion’s Club helped with grants.

Architect Kirkwood Design worked together with General Contractor Dunlap Co. Local artisans Paul Bay and Sons installed 100 tons of Brown County stone. Construction included 91 tons of structural steel, 48,000 feet of wiring and a “highefficiency variable refrigerant flow system with zone control.”

The building’s first floor houses a gift shop, meeting room, historic displays—including dolls, snake skins and a turtle shell—and a storage room for artifacts, from old typewriters to paintings and printing presses.

The second floor holds a larger meeting room that generates revenue by hosting events such as wedding receptions. That floor also houses the temperature-and humidity-controlled room that preserves tin type photos, high school graduation photos going back to the 1940s, a cabinet with old road and plat maps, court records and old newspapers. Dunn said older newspapers hold up surprisingly well, as they used to be printed on cotton rather than the flimsier tree pulp.

The oldest documents date back to 1848, a leather-bound volume of tax records that show the names of the taxpayers, how many acres they owned and how much they paid in taxes. Some records show people had to pay extra taxes if they owned a dog, horse, carriage, or pocket watch.

Despite the building’s prominent location, at 90 Gould St., a five-minute walk from the Brown County Playhouse, Coulter said many people still don’t know the building exists. And despite a dedicated core of volunteers, the society is struggling with an aging membership as Brown County increasingly becomes a haven for retirees. “We could always use help,” Coulter said.

You can get involved by contacting the Brown County History Center at 812-988-2899.

The archives are open Tuesdays and Fridays. People need only to bring their curiosity. Most of the volunteers have chipped in for more than a decade and usually have a good idea of what to find where.

The Brown County Historical Society volunteers also operate and maintain the Pioneer Village Museum complex just south of the History Center, next to the courthouse. It is open weekends during the busy season.