Now is the Time for All Good Citizens to Come to the Aid of Their Heritage Center

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The new thing, the Willamette Heritage Center ... i.e., Mission Mill Museum married to the Marion County Historical Society and given an unfortunately colorless name ... needs all our help.

The good folks running the show have a survey about how you use the place and what you think the priorities are. Check it out -- doesn't take long, and the more people from Salem and surroundings who complete it, the better.

Groups like the historical society and the folks who have worked so hard to preserve the mill have done something very, very important. Salem is very, very young in a historical sense -- yet, we are preserving less of our history than ever, thanks in large part to our own American sense of "history is bunk" but also because technology is sweeping things aside. If we're not careful, we're going to have more newspapers from 17th and 18th C. Philadelphia than from 19th and 20th Century Salem.

The public library should be the great archive of all county newspapers and should be working tirelessly to get them all rescued from the destroyers (the people who thought we should microfiche everything and then pulp it) -- but the library budget is imploding. So we're left with the county historical society, so we need to support them and help them thrive. To be ignorant of history is to remain a child forever, as the saying goes. We're going to face some hard, hard times in years to come -- it's important that we have access to the knowledge of how other people faced prior hard times here.