Public Historian’s Exhibition Success Undermined by Single Footnote in Local Newspaper

Front of house at the Mill Street Gallery opened on a Tuesday with an email printed and taped to the counter, which the duty volunteer read twice before deciding it was not a complaint about the café. It was from the editor of the Quarry County Register, forwarding footnote four of Saturday's feature on the mill centenary, and it began in the editor's own type: Please look at this before the school groups arrive.

The school groups arrived anyway. They came for label seven, the most photographed panel in the room since March, when a community interpretation grant from the Lazlo Foundation paid for the new labels, printed at a weight the former director had called unignorable. The exhibition has logged just over eleven thousand visits. The mayor opened it. Two classes a week are booked through June.

Label seven tells you that Josiah Reamey, who built the drying sheds, warned the night shift minutes before the water came in October 1911 and stayed on the roof until everyone was counted. It is the emotional centre of the gallery, and the reason four teachers have asked for the audio guide to be shortened.

Footnote four runs four hundred words in a feature nobody was sent to read. It cites the inventory of the Reamey estate from the Quarry County Probate Court, which opens on Wednesdays before the same clerk who has taken requests since 1991, and the deed attached to it. Reamey sold the mill to the Carver syndicate in February. The flood was in October. The warning was signed by the mill's manager, Samuel Pike, a name that appears nowhere else in the exhibition.

"I didn't call it wrong," said Owen Petrie, who wrote the feature. "Footnotes don't call things wrong. They give you the page and let you do it yourself." The footnote drew more letters to the editor than the article drew readers, a ratio the paper's letters editor described as unusual and not entirely bad.

The museum's response was a corrective card, smaller than label seven, mounted beneath it, stating that the warning was Pike's and that Reamey had already left the county. It has become the second most photographed object in the room. Children are asked not to stand in front of it, which means they stand in front of it.

Where the doubt went is traceable. Edith Marrow's monthly history update for January recorded that Reamey "is said to have warned the shift," citing a 1954 anniversary booklet printed by the mill widows' committee. She kept the three words. The label copy, drafted from her update and approved at a meeting she was not invited to, dropped them. "I wrote three words of doubt and I watched nine people take them out," Marrow said. "I'm not angry with anyone. I would just like the three words back, for the record, where they were."

A woman identifying herself as Pike's great-granddaughter arrived on Thursday with a photograph of a man on a shed roof and a family story about a rope. The photograph now has a case. The audio guide has been re-recorded: the line now says the shift was warned, and that records disagree on by whom, delivered in the same warm voice that had previously said Reamey saved everyone.

Dario's First Questions: the first history term a newcomer pretends to understand is the interpretive label. Everyone nods and means the sign. The argument in this gallery is about which of those you agreed to.

The forwarded email remains taped to the counter, now on the second shelf, where it is still readable. The Register has promised a footnote two, concerning label twelve. The volunteer has not been told what to do about that, and has decided, correctly, that the instruction will arrive in print.