Dr. Marty Olliff's monthly series turns its attention to a Wiregrass farmer demonstrating how tools were once made.
Modern hand tools’ handles are made on an industrial scale, often in small factories by machines running for hours at a time. This means they’re relatively inexpensive, readily available and easily replaceable (because the tool-making industry has created size standards).
But not long ago, when farm folks in particular had more time than cash, tool…
Dr. Marty Olliff's monthly series continues with a focus on the Wiregrass Archives' documentation of local historic churches.
Local history is a funny thing. Unlike Great Britain, where local history is the subject of scholastic interest, in the U.S. it’s usually the concern of avocational historians who might not be trained in academic theory but who really know how to do the “spade work” required to dig deeply into the past of a…
Dr. Marty Olliff's monthly series continues with a look at some of the oldest collected photos in the Wiregrass area.
The Wiregrass Archives didn’t intend to collect large quantities of photographs, but we have accumulated images in many 19th-and-20th-century formats – cased photos, glass-plate negatives, “tintypes,” panoramic prints, cabinet cards, as well as hundreds of paper prints, slides and negatives.
The oldest photographs in the Wiregrass Archives collections are ambrotypes in the Michael Matthews Collection…
Dr. Marty Olliff celebrates Women's History Month with a look at the history of women's groups in the Wiregrass.
The women’s club movement in the U.S. began in the 1890s and was closely associated with the New Woman of the Progressive Era though the movement lasted well into the post-World War II era. It continues today.
Local women – from the elite in the white community and fewer but more broadly based among African-Americans…
