a typical research day
going through the boxes
I began this immense undertaking on a suggestion from one of my professors (also adviser, confidante, and friend) and when I signed on to the idea, I was oblivious to the sheer volume of what I was about to tackle.
What began as a project about a river in the middle of Illinois swelled into an unanticipated reflection of the community of individuals who have somehow been touched by the Middle Fork including a machinist, a few engineers, multiple homeowners, local business owners, budding politicians, conservationists, and lovers of nature.
The story of the Middle Fork reaches back to an era long past with a different set of cultural values, ideals, and goals that I initially struggled to connect with. However, one night as I was going through more archives in the doldrums between autumn and winter I found a letter my grandmother had written to Bob Bales of Homer, Ill. concerning the fate of the river.
Nobody was more surprised than I to see my grandmother’s Deerfield, Ill., address on the top of the page. She was a prairie person, not a river person, my dad had said. Whether I liked it or not, I had been tied to this project far before I had given it a single thought. Some things are left up to fate.
After a full calendar year of working on this finished product — archival research, a canoe trip, multiple tanks of gas to get to danville, tons of phone calls, thousands upon of thousands of photos, (seemingly) endless hours of tape, and many, many hours of time — I’m happy to see it finished.
Tremendous thanks and gratitude to everyone who assisted me with telling this story, I couldn’t have done it without you.
About the Project
one of Clark Bullard’s 10 meticulously preserved boxes of archives
- A.M. Cole
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