Tucked away in closets and drawers gathering dust, are old home movies made in Cecil County. Some of those flickering images recall how area families celebrated holidays, birthdays, graduations and the gathering of relatives. Some focus on sports and school events, town parades, and fairs, but also squeezed on the aging footage are valuable scenes of the landscape and our built environment. These types of relics from the past grow more valuable with each passing decade and they capture a few minutes of time in a unique, valuable format.
For some time now we’ve said that we’d like to add some of those reels to our collection. Well Jane Bellmyer came through for us again. (You may recall that in 2006, she helped us kick off our Cecil Sounds collection.) A few weeks ago she brought us several reels of film showing the Weaver family, Wiley Manufacturing, the Conowingo Dam, the Susquehanna River and the bridges across the waterway. We just had those digitized so we can watch them on the computer and we just finished take our first glance at those decades old movies. We found them fascinating, especially the scenes of the launching of a boat at Wiley Manufacturing and the water rushing through the Dam.
Click here to review an out-take of this video on our web site. We're still working on publishing this piece, so we'll have improvements on the page over the next few days so check back occassinally as we process this valuable addition to our research collection.
Thanks Jane for continuing to help us build unique collections for researchers.
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