WILLOW CREEK — The Gazette’s back room is a mess. Filing cabinets bulge with issues dating to 1891. Cardboard boxes overflow with photographs — some labeled, most not — spanning the paper’s entire history. And on Clara Winslow’s desk sits a new flatbed scanner and a spreadsheet that will eventually become the most comprehensive digital archive of Willow Creek history ever assembled.
“The idea is simple,” says Winslow, gesturing at the organized chaos. “Scan everything. Tag it by date and subject. Make it searchable. Put it online so that anyone — a historian, a student, someone researching their family tree — can find what they’re looking for without spending three days in my back room.”
The project is funded partly through a small grant from the Maine Historical Society and partly out of the Gazette’s own budget. Winslow estimates the scanning alone will take six months, assuming she can spare two hours a day from her regular duties.
The harder part is the identification. Winslow has already found dozens of photographs — town celebrations, mill workers, school classes, Ice-Out gatherings — that are either unlabeled or labeled only with cryptic notes like “summer 1947” or “the Taft family, probably.”
“A lot of these people have no one left to identify them,” she says. “That’s where I need the town’s help.”
Starting next week, the Gazette will publish a weekly “Do You Know This Person?” feature in the print edition, reproducing an unidentified photograph and asking readers to call in with information. Winslow plans to post the same photos on the paper’s website and at the library.
“If this works, we’ll have a town photo album that goes back 130 years,” she says. “I think that’s worth a little effort.”