WILLOW CREEK — Every eighth-grade student at Willow Creek K-8 School will complete a heritage field trip this year under a new curriculum that sends students into town to document oral histories, map historic sites and interview longtime residents.
The program, developed by Principal Colleen Desjardins and town historian Jed Thorne, is designed to give students a hands-on understanding of the town’s history while creating an archive of oral histories that could become a tourism resource.
“We are losing the generation that remembers the mill before it closed, that remembers when Main Street had a movie theater and a bowling alley,” Desjardins said. “If we do not record those stories now, they disappear. And once they disappear, we cannot sell the town’s history to visitors.”
The program has three components. In the fall, students research and visit five historic sites on the new downtown walking map and write interpretive text for each. In the winter, they conduct oral history interviews with residents age 65 and older, focusing on the mill era and the Ice-Out tradition. In the spring, they produce a digital presentation that will be posted on the town website.
The oral history interviews will be recorded on digital audio equipment purchased with a $1,500 grant from the Maine Humanities Council and archived at the Carnegie Library.
Lydia Barnes, 70, the town’s oldest living resident and a fixture at every Ice-Out for 64 consecutive years, was the first interviewee.
“The students asked me what it was like to watch the mill close,” Barnes said. “I told them it was like watching a clock stop. The whole town ran by that mill’s whistle, and when it stopped blowing, nobody knew what time it was anymore.”
The school plans to make the oral history collection available to visitors through the library’s listening station.
“We are training the next generation to be the town’s storytellers,” Thorne said. “That is how history survives and how tourism thrives.”