What is history, precisely? The stories of great men and great triumphs? The broad sweep of human civilization?
If you ask Anne Bridges, librarian and co-head of UT's Great Smoky Mountains Regional Project, history is in the details. Books, letters, postcards, brochures. Photographs from famous lensmen, snapshots from amateurs with an artful eye. An aging slide from the presentation of an innkeeper in Townsend, Tennessee. A scrapbook kept by a young woman in early 20th-century Gatlinburg, rediscovered later in a bookshop in Berkeley, California.
For almost nine years, Anne Bridges and collaborator Ken Wise have spearheaded a landmark collection effort to gather a definitive archive of materials about the Great Smoky Mountains region from the early 18th century to the dedication of the national park in 1940. These materials include everything from scholarly works to souvenir brochures, from professional photography to rare recordings of indigenous music and folklore, from children's books to scientific studies.
It's ironic that the inventions of the technological age have allowed unprecedented access to some of the rarest and most remarkable finds from the overwhelmingly rural region in a much simpler time. The current digital collection contains vintage photographs of such regional notables as Albert "Dutch" Roth, William Cochran, and Knoxville's own Thompson Brothers, as well as pictures and original documents from various locations around the region, including items recently retrieved from the Arrowmont School in Gatlinburg that tell a remarkable story of a few brave young women and their role in building a community.
Even with its localized scope, a project of this kind can have far-reaching reverberations. Seeking out the materials and putting them into place in the archive can feel like a combination of scavenger hunt and quilting bee, and often leads to some very intriguing situations. "I've received e-mails and telephone calls from faculty and staff at such far-flung locations as Colorado College and Harvard University, letting me know they'd come across Thompson Brothers photographs of the Smoky Mountains they'd had for decades," says Anne Bridges. "I'm always excited by these opportunities for collaboration. And I'm always thrilled to see these surprising pieces of our history come back home."
UT Special Collections
Q: What do Alex Haley, James Agee, Andrew Jackson, and Davy Crockett have in common with Jane Austen?
A: All of them currently reside (in a manner of speaking) in the UT Library Special Collections
Holding 52,000 rare books, 3000 manuscripts, and thousands of primary resources, the earliest of which date from 1481, UT's Special Collections includes a wide range of utterly unique materials that enrich every aspect of the university curriculum.
The selection focuses on the region's social, cultural, and political history, featuring documents from Andrew Jackson, James K. Polk, and Davy Crockett; large collections of work by Knoxvillians James Agee and Alex Haley; a diverse selection of 18th- and 19th-century American literature and historical documents, including a growing collection of antique hymnals; and definitive collections of both Jane Austen and Restoration dramatist William Congreve. The collections are expanding even now with more works, more authors, and more opportunities (some digital), providing access to materials from various points around the university and around the globe.
