Neighbor Lori Hayes brings out all her memorabilia to the Community Archiving event, including family photos, newspaper clippings, and awards from when she was the Director of Urban Forestry in the Parks and Recreation office in the City of Philadelphia. (Photo: Maleka Fruean)

Molly Ward just recently became a librarian at the Joseph E. Coleman Northwest Regional Library. One of her first assignments, given to her by head librarian Jane Easley, was organizing and highlighting the library’s Germantown and local history section. 

Easley knew that their Germantown book collection, some of which is cataloged and some not, was sparsely explored and under-browsed. But for Ward, it immediately became much more than just the book collection. 

It led to the start of the library’s Let’s Make Histories! community programming series, with the Community Archiving kick-off event on October 29, 2024. Ward, librarian Caroline Slama, and Library Trainees Lillian Ly and Najla Rashad helped coordinate this new event.

Ward explained how her organization of the Germantown history collection led to the series.

“Seeing a book collection like our Germantown book history collection shows me that there’s some really valuable resources that are underused. And it also shows me that we have to work really hard to bring in more of that history into our library building. And that’s what public history does,” said Ward. 

Ward continued, “But public history is often something that is seen as in the domain of the academic. It’s not often something that’s deeply connected to a public library. We began looking at ways to bring public history into our public libraries so that we can explore our own collection and add to it and make history something that feels like it matters to our community.”

She and the Coleman Library team decided to dedicate an entire season of programming to expanding the Germantown history collection, calling it Let’s Make Histories, to acknowledge and prioritize the histories people make now, in public spaces, and together. October was designated Archives Month Philly, celebrating Philadelphia history, local archives, and archivists all throughout the city, so they knew it would be a good kickoff month. 

Caroline Slama, another new Coleman librarian, used to work for Historic Germantown and was assigned to work with the Germantown Historical Society. While there, she helped folks in the neighborhood and nationally with reference requests on family history, the history of their house, who lived in it, and when it was built. 

When she arrived at Coleman, she immediately started working with Ward and the other staff to connect with the Historic Germantown sites. She arranged for the donation of duplicate Germantown High School yearbooks to the library’s Germantown history collection. She also helped bring many of the local historical sites to the kickoff event.

The library was packed for the kick-off with representation from St. Luke’s Church, Johnson House, Historic Rittenhousetown, Germantown Historical Society, Society for Preserving Philadelphia African American Assets (SPPAAA), Labor Jawn Podcast, Stenton House, Wyck House, Crossroads Women’s Center,  and PA Photos and Documents.

Flowers, tea, and appetizers were set up, and tables included activities like the digital scanning of photographs and documents, scrapbooking, collage-making, and family storyboarding. The library asked both the organizations and attendees to bring objects, pictures, and documents that held significance for them, and many organizations brought historical photos, letters, and books that encapsulated their stories. 

Neighbor Lori Hayes (pictured at the top) brought an entire bag of photos, newspaper clippings, awards, and other memorabilia from her family’s life in Germantown and her service as the Director of Urban Forestry in the Parks and Recreation office. Sitting at a table unloading her photos, she noticed longtime neighbor Paula Paul place an old Pickett Middle School T-shirt on the table. 

It turned out that Hayes had attended the school as a student when Paul herself was a teacher on staff.

“[Pickett Middle School] was built in 1970 at Wayne and Chelten. And it was opened as a community-controlled public school. The community fought to have a community-controlled public school, whatever that meant at the time,” said Paul. 

The school is now Mastery-Pickett Charter, a public charter school run by Mastery Schools for sixth to twelfth grade.

Paul was a college student studying history at the time of Pickett’s building. After reading in the now-discontinued Germantown Courier about neighbors being invited to help shape the curriculum and knowing how intensely she disliked the way history had been taught to her, she signed up on the committee. They later asked if she wanted to help teach the curriculum she helped shape.

As the conversation unfolded, they found out that one of the children in an old classroom photo Paul brought of her students had recently connected to Hayes on Facebook. 

Folks assembled around the St. Luke’s Church table, sharing old photo albums. People who had heard of each other but never met were introduced. Nostalgia, conversations, and sentiments were shared about buildings that no longer existed, neighbors who had moved away, and long-ago gatherings.

Crossroads Women’s Center was glad to share its decades of work, both internationally and nationally, on campaigns against poverty, Wages for Housework, and very local issues.

One of its Germantown-based actions was in 2015 when Nancy Carroll’s (a longtime community housing activist and an organizer involved in the center) grandson, Tyree Carroll, was beaten by 12 police officers in Germantown. Protests and legal action followed, and drug and assault charges on Tyree were eventually dropped. 

All of these stories, from community organizers’ actions and movements to the history of the houses in the neighborhood, make up a rich and complicated tapestry of a community. 

Caroline Slama says every neighborhood has important history, but not all neighborhoods have the funding or infrastructure for a historical society. She thinks the public library is a great place to provide public access to community history and archives. 

“I think my feeling is very much that the public library should be this epicenter for community history and local history. And the fact that we have library branches that cover the whole city is such a good infrastructure to start from,” she says. 

The kick-off event is over, but making history is still happening. To find out more about upcoming events in the Let’s Make Histories! Series at Coleman Library, you can visit their website.