Living Witnesses to Social Change and Family Documents as Community Archive

Introduction

This article is part of a series of essays dealing with methodological strategies in the visual study of social change. In earlier articles, I outlined methods for studying social change by (a) repeating photographs of the same location over time (Rieger, 1988, 1996), (b) photographing changes in processes and functions (Rieger, 2003), and (c) tracking and recording the experiences of participants in episodes of social change (Rieger, 2004). The present article examines the vital role of living witnesses and family memorabilia, including photographs, in reconstructing the outlines of social change in small rural communities.

Special problems are often encountered in doing such research in small rural communities, which typically lack the formal institutional density necessary for the generation and preservation of systematic records of community affairs, events, and local history. When such documentation is sparse or nonexistent, the researcher is thrown back on the residents’ shared recollections, family memorabilia, photographs, and other artifacts, which become a kind of default “community archive” (Rieger, 2006). It is precisely the use of this approach in the present work which made possible the construction of the following narrative of the growth and decline of a small Upper Michigan town.

The Case of Trout Creek, Michigan, as a Small Rural Community

The community that is the focus of this study is Trout Creek, Michigan, located in a relatively remote section of southeastern Ontonagon County in the western part of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula (see Figure 1). Trout Creek was established in the late 19th century as a lumber mill settlement. It was always a “company town” in that its only reason for existence was the milling of hardwood and softwood trees cut from the surrounding forests. Lumber was shipped out mainly by rail. The largest of the local milling operations, built around 1911-1912, was owned by the Weidman & Son Lumber Company (see Figure 2). It was taken over in the late 1930s by a succession of owners, and it eventually came to be known as the Abbott Fox Lumber Company. By the middle decades of the 20th century the milling activities had been mostly consolidated under the control of Abbott Fox, which operated two mills in Trout Creek. At its peak, the company had nearly 200 employees. Through a merger, it became the Fox-Cliffs Company in the 1960s (Trout Creek Centennial 1888-1988 booklet, 1988).

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Figure 1.

Upper Peninsula of Michigan.

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Figure 2.

Trout Creek Main Street, ca. 1912.

By 1912, a wooden building had been erected for an elementary school and eventually a high school curriculum was developed. The original wooden school was replaced by 1919 with a larger brick building, and significantly expanded in 1931 with the addition of a gymnasium. During its heyday, from the 1920s through the 1950s, the town of Trout Creek consisted of the mills, the many company houses occupied by the mill employees, a few more substantial homes for the mill managers, several churches, and a small cadre of commercial establishments, that is, two hotels (see Figure 3), three grocery stores, a couple of lodging houses, a drug store, a hardware store, a clothing store, a “co-op” general store, three gas/service stations, a bank, a “show hall,” several saloons, a post office, and a small railroad station with cartage and passenger service. The local economy, dependent as it was on the ups and downs of the lumber industry, remained fragile. Wage rates were low and most young people dropped out of high school before finishing to go to work in the woods or at the mill. Trout Creek’s population rose above 500, but it remained, nonetheless, a town where locals liked to say that there were no strangers—that everyone pretty much knew everyone else. The relative isolation of the community in the surrounding area tended to reinforce its local social solidarity.

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Figure 3.

Trout Creek Hotel, ca. 1910.

By the late 1950s, the supply of raw material within a practical distance of the lumber mill was gradually becoming exhausted and the size of its workforce was slowly reduced. This led to a gradual exodus of local residents. The Trout Creek community suffered a devastating blow in the late 1960s in the wake of labor negotiations at the lumber mills. After many years the workers had finally voted for union representation and, rather than accept a labor contract, the mill owner decided to shut the operation down. During the labor turmoil, one of the two existing mills was torn down in stages and the other was completely destroyed by fire on November 9, 1968 (“Mill Rebuilding Hopes Emphasized Following Fire,” 1968), the cause of which was never determined. ¹

This loss of its main economic engine was catastrophic to the community. It accelerated the loss of jobs. Many workers were forced to leave to find employment. The end of milling operations precipitated a veritable chain reaction of disasters: Between 1960 and 1970, Trout Creek lost 26.9% of its population, a decline so dramatic that the community was forced to close its high school and send its students to Ewen, a community about 18 miles to the west. Stores in Trout Creek, including the co-op, closed for lack of business. Eventually, the only enterprise that survived was a bar. Rail service to the community, even for freight, was ended and the tracks were removed. A major highway, State Route M-28, that originally ran through the center of town, was rerouted around its periphery, bypassing the community completely.

Inevitably, with so few children left, the elementary school was finally closed, and all of the remaining students were bussed to Ewen. Buildings sat abandoned and the town took on a distinctly bleak and disheveled look. Several of the church congregations disbanded or merged with congregations in other small towns in the area. The local Catholic church was torn down. Morale and community spirit sank to the lowest level ever. The collapse of the local economy drove most residents of working age out of the area to seek employment elsewhere. The town has shrunk and the community sustains only a small population of mostly older people. Thus is the history of the town in broad outline.

The Absence of Local Records

Throughout its dramatic arc of growth and decline, Trout Creek remained an unincorporated village. At its peak the village of Trout Creek itself had a population estimated variously between 550 and 1,000, and the surrounding rural area of Interior Township contained approximately 260 additional residents living in the open country or in very small hamlets. Except briefly during the early 1890s, Trout Creek never had a local newspaper, even a weekly (Dreiss, n.d.). The nearest such paper in the area, the Ontonagon Herald, was (and is) in Ontonagon, more than 40 miles to the northwest, and for most of its history it only rarely took notice of happenings in Trout Creek. A small weekly paper, the Cloverland Press, in Ewen stopped publishing by 1940 and only a few individual copies of that journal remain in existence.

Few other local institutions existed in Trout Creek which produced the kinds of records or other documents that would provide any in-depth insights into local affairs and the surviving documentation from them is sparse. The operating records of the most important entities, the lumber companies—now long out of business—apparently no longer exist. The schools went out of existence through consolidation. The small town businesses closed down one after the other and now almost all of their buildings are gone. (In recent years a small grocery store and a little restaurant opened, but remained in business only intermittently, and both had closed by 2011; see Figure 4. In any case, they postdate the major drama of Trout Creek’s growth and decline.) Even the volunteer fire department, organized in 1948, has not kept more than the sparsest record of its activities.

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Figure 4.

White Door grocery and School House restaurant, July 2003 (Jon Rieger).

The researcher who wants to study the pattern of social life and growth and decline in such a rural community faces a daunting challenge. Absent any repository of more formal, institutional sources of information, the only remaining window into life in Trout Creek is through the experience of the individual inhabitants—their recollections and whatever photographs and other memorabilia can be found that have survived the passage of time. Thus, this project became grounded in a presumption that people’s recollections, photographs, and family memorabilia could be harnessed to reconstruct the history and social changes that have occurred in that place.

Previous Studies Connecting Individual Experience and the Social Process

Linking the experience of individuals to the larger social process is a common research strategy. As an example, one of the most interesting such studies done to date was a project completed by Bill Ganzel that addresses the link between biography and social change, and reported in Dustbowl Descent (1984). In the 1970s, Ganzel tracked down a number of individuals who had been photographed during the 1930s and early 1940s by Farm Security Administration (FSA) photographers. He rephotographed them and interviewed them about their experience since the original pictures had been made. While Ganzel’s encounters with his subjects seem to have been brief, the comments he recorded from them often contained revealing observations about changes in the society that had occurred since the time of the earlier photographs. In addition, the impact of those changes on the subjects’ lives was often self-evident, and frequently acknowledged by them. Though Ganzel’s execution was more superficial than would be ideal in a similar sociological undertaking, his approach provided a model for the present effort.

At the other end of the scale are family pictures: There is a long precedent for the presumption that family picture collections and albums can offer insights of interest to social scientists. The well-known studies by Michael Lesy (1980) and Richard Chalfen (1987) are illustrative of those devoted to this genre of photographic documentation of social life. In a later analysis, Chalfen (1991) showed how family albums revealed ethnic self-identification among Japanese families and served as a form of communication from older generations to younger ones. A more recent example is a study by Schwartzenberg (2005, p. 70) which supports the use of family photographs, combined with interviews, as the basis of “‘vernacular’ history, as well as a resource for constructing ‘official’ histories.”

The absence of the normal kinds of records and documentation needed to fill in the history of social change in a community like Trout Creek made necessary my reliance on cooperation from individual inhabitants. In carrying out my research, I made use of several kinds of individual and family sources, especially (a) eye witness accounts and (b) family documents, that is, privately held collections of photographs, documents, and memorabilia. These resources were accessed primarily through multiple, often intensive photo-elicitation interviews (Informant Interviews, 1999-2011 ² ) over a period of years in which all of these kinds of materials were used as “memory-triggering” devices. Photographs constituted the bulk of the material content of the available collections, and they became a crucial basis for reconstruction of the history of, and change in, the community of Trout Creek.

It did not surprise me that photographs should predominate in the collections of my subjects. The nature of contemporary community life is such as to generate many photographs, and they tend to get saved: They are made for a variety of purposes, and they can accumulate in community, institutional, and other repositories, public and private. They consist of everything from the routine membership pictures that various organizations regularly take, to the photos appearing in grade and high school yearbooks, to pictures accompanying local media stories, including those of athletes, teams, and clubs, to the thousands of snapshots made for or preserved in family scrapbooks. The challenge for me was to illuminate community history and change by linking my subjects’ personal lives visually and orally with the larger social processes, discerning the impact of change on the participants, and explicating the ways in which change in a broader social context was mediated in the experience of my subjects. The present study draws on a considerable variety of images to link individual actors to broader social events, and to show the tie-in between the experience of individuals and the dynamics of the social context in which they found themselves.

Photographs and Family Memorabilia as Evidence

The photographs that had been collected by my subjects were occasionally buttressed with news articles and other documents that helped me establish the general outline of the history and social change that took place in Trout Creek. All of these materials were pressed into service in interviewing knowledgeable local citizens, especially older ones, who could provide the explanatory linkages among the miscellaneous documentary materials I collected to produce a coherent account of events and their meaning in the tapestry of community life. My procedure was to arrange to borrow photographs and other documents as they came to light in my interactions with my informants, take them back to the county historical society’s museum, copy them, and return them to their owners, which I could usually do within a day or two. Photographs were copied using a camera on a copy stand and other documents were reproduced on a standard copy machine. Any labeling, dating, or other indicia associated with these artifacts was also copied. This yielded a gradually increasing inventory of family archival material that formed the basis of subsequent interviews. As new photographs and documents accumulated, it necessitated repeat interviews with a number of my informants, a development that did not seem to annoy any but a few. Many of those who helped in the project became interested in what I was doing and seemed pleased to assist me in it. Photos kept turning up and I kept reinterviewing my subjects. One of the interesting consequences of this was that it gave me a check on how consistent the accounts were that were coming from my informants. Also, I could share the emerging information I had gotten from others, and this often triggered further elaboration on the part of those being interviewed, and occasionally, divergent accounts of past events. Interviewing multiple informants about the same events helped me triangulate discrepancies among varying accounts.

I found that many of the photographs and artifacts that figured in my interviews with local residents had the unanticipated effect of revealing a high degree of “imbeddedness” of these subjects in their community and in their level of involvement in the social processes of that community. That connection can be instrumental in the study of social change. The community had been small enough that residents had almost all been witnesses or participants in significant events and thus shared knowledge in common. However, the descriptions my informants offered about the community were also to some extent shaped by their own unique experience and their social locations within it. Taking account of that circumstance aided me in the selection of subjects so as to illuminate different elements of the local social structure. The correspondence between community dynamics and individual experience is, admittedly, not isomorphic, but the fact that these factors tend to be related to each other means that an examination of one can provide insight into the other.

Reliance on such materials and sources is not without limitations, of course, and those limitations can be significant. For example, I found that community events were very unevenly documented by the photographs taken and collected by local citizens. Some kinds of activities tended to be extensively covered while others were not. Furthermore, some events and certain aspects of community life do not necessarily lend themselves easily to visual documentation. Many photographs in family collections have little apparent “community” content, consisting of mere snapshots of family members at various stages of the life cycle. An additional frustration owes to the fact that often family archive materials, including articles clipped from newspapers and other periodicals, as well as photographs, are undated. People in the photographs are often unidentified. The pictures are sometimes faded, the details are indistinct, relevant information sometimes can be found only in the distant background, and so on. In reviewing the materials salvaged from Trout Creek’s past, I encountered the full range of such problems. For some community events and institutions, no specific historical documentation could be found. The materials available and the testimony of my informants could not establish unequivocal dates for certain key community events. Some of my informants were in their advanced years and their memories were inconsistent and occasionally quite unreliable. Some of the conflicts among different accounts of the past among my informants were simply irresolvable in the absence of better documentary evidence.

My efforts to reconstruct the evolution of the Trout Creek community were aided by the fact that in recent decades an interest in community history began to develop among at least some of the local citizens. A local group had formed which was devoted to collecting community historical materials and a small library and museum had been started in the abandoned railroad station (Roundtable group, 2004). These same residents were largely responsible for assembling a commemorative document for the town’s centennial celebration (Trout Creek Centennial 1888-1988 booklet, 1988). The content of this document consisted of donated material from private collections of local citizens and commentaries provided by some older residents. ³ Some of the history-minded people began helping me in my own work by digging out photographs and other artifacts that might be of interest to me, identifying older citizens with knowledge of the community’s past, and brokering interviews.

Initial Documentation

For me, the selection of a setting for the exploration of the methodological issues outlined above occurred quite by accident. As a result of a silent auction at the 1987 meeting of the Rural Sociological Society (its 50th anniversary conference) in Madison, Wisconsin, I came into possession of a dozen large (16 × 20) matted commemorative black-and-white photographic prints made from negatives in the FSA collection in the Library of Congress. The pictures were delivered to me wrapped and ended up sitting for some years in a home storage closet. In 1999, I happened to be clearing out an accumulation of “stuff,” and pulled out the prints. To my surprise, one of them had been taken in Ontonagon County, Michigan, where I have been engaged in research for many years. It was titled, “Residents of Trout Creek, Michigan, August 1941.” The photograph was taken by John Vachon, then a photographer with the Historical Section of the FSA. It showed what appeared to be a family—12 people—lounging next to their home in this small town in Ontonagon County (see Figure 5). This remarkable photograph eventually became the baseline for my exploration of the connection between individual participants and the process of social change, in this case, in the community in which they lived.

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Figure 5.

Residents of Trout Creek, Michigan, August 1941 (John Vachon).

The challenge offered by the Vachon photograph was initially quite difficult. The picture had been taken nearly 60 years before. The Trout Creek community had long ago suffered substantial decline and was now only a shadow of its former self.

Who were the people in this photograph? Why did Vachon take this particular picture? My search into FSA records did not turn up any significant project on the part of the FSA photographic unit in Ontonagon County or nearby. ⁴ What significance, meaning, or purpose did this photograph from an isolated part of Upper Michigan have within the larger scheme and schedule of Vachon’s work across the upper Great Lakes region?

Pursuing the Vachon photograph turned out to be an absorbing and illuminating project. It took a good deal of reconnoitering before I was able to establish even the identity of those pictured. A researcher at the Ontonagon County Historical Society (Ristola, 1999) eventually helped me connect with an aged, long-retired former resident of Trout Creek. That individual, after examining the large photograph, recognized his best boyhood playmate, Wesley Carlisle, and said his guess was that the people shown in the Vachon photo must be the Carlisle family of Trout Creek (Saari, 1999). Only three of the people in the Vachon photograph remain alive today and only one of the three, now at an advanced age, still lives in the local area (see Figure 6). Because Trout Creek is only a remnant community—most of its residents having long since moved away—the reconstruction of the community’s history, not to mention the Carlisle family’s history, has been slow and difficult. Only a handful of Carlisle descendants remain somewhere nearby. The surviving reservoir of knowledge about the family at the time of the Vachon photograph—1941—is small and slowly disappearing. I have conducted interviews with almost all of the surviving members of the Carlisle family and their descendants living in Ontonagon County and in the surrounding region (see Figure 7), and these interviews have been augmented, as described hereinbefore, by similar interactions with a platoon of other knowledgeable local informants. As my work continued, it became ever clearer that the experience of the Carlisle family was highly representative of Trout Creek residents generally. The experiences of the members of this family paralleled the drama of the community’s growth, eventual crisis, and the diaspora that followed.

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Figure 6.

Carlisle ancestral home, June 1999 (Jon Rieger).

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Figure 7.

Photo-elicitation interview with Betty (Gauthier) Maki, 2011 (Dillan Thompson).

Trout Creek and the Carlisle Family

Fred Carlisle (1878-1955), accompanied by his wife Clara (1887-1965), came to Trout Creek around 1911 in pursuit of employment at the mill, which was just then being built. Fred remained employed there for the rest of his working life. He and Clara already had two children before they arrived in the area and by 1941, at the time of the Vachon photograph, they had had seven more, all but one of whom survived to adulthood (see Figure 8).

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Figure 8.

Carlisle family structure in August 1941.

It was a big family. They lived in a company house with no indoor plumbing or wiring, which they eventually bought, in “Mill Town,” a district where the poorest workers resided. The seven boys and one girl who survived into adulthood all left school early and most ended up working for the lumber mill (see Figure 9). By 1941, the four oldest, all boys, had married and had children of their own. (One had died in an accident while working several years before the Vachon photo was taken.) From all the evidence I have gathered, the Carlisles were, de facto, one of the core families in Trout Creek, not because of their wealth or prominent standing, but because they were a big family that gained a reputation as solid, reliable, hard-working, and respectable people. During their time in Trout Creek, the Carlisles mostly remained a struggling family near the bottom of the local economic order. Nonetheless, they apparently participated in nearly every aspect of village life and exhibited an open and consistent devotion to the community. ⁵

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Figure 9.

Trout Creek lumber mill, 1941 (John Vachon).

Photographs I have collected from various sources show the imbeddedness of the Carlisles in the Trout Creek community. Here is some of the photographic evidence: (a) A pivotal early photograph, dating from around 1930 (see Figure 10), establishes Fred Carlisle (father of the whole brood) and several of his sons as members of the lumber mill workforce; (b) a picture taken of the mill force around 1952 (see Figure 11) shows no fewer than four members of the Carlisle family as employees (by then Fred Carlisle had retired from the mill but another son [Everett], not pictured, also worked there); (c) another photograph (see Figure 12) shows son Wesley as a member of the Trout Creek Volunteer Fire Department (his brother, Freeman, was also a member, though he is not pictured); and (d) a picture of a military honor guard taken at the local cemetery (see Figure 13) shows Claude Carlisle as a participant—he was one of the Carlisles who served in the military during World War II—at the dedication of a new monument commemorating Trout Creekers who had lost their lives in the war. These photographs show the important intersection between the lives of these individuals and the broader social structure in which they were participants. An examination of the few surviving school yearbooks showed a similar pattern of participation among the Carlisles in various activities including athletic teams. Bernhardt, the son of Mose and Eini Carlisle, seems to have been a particular standout in athletics.

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Figure 10.

Lumber mill force, ca. 1930.

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Figure 11.

Lumber mill force, 1952.

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Figure 12.

Trout Creek Volunteer Fire Department, 1949.

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Figure 13.

Dedication ceremony for World War II Trout Creek War Memorial, 1949.

Not only school activities drew the participation of Carlisle family members. In 1947, Mose and Eini’s daughter, Beverly, was a founding member and officer of the local American Legion Auxiliary Unit, and in 1988, Gilda was its president. In 1972, a Township Civic Improvement Committee was organized, with Wesley Carlisle, Jr., as its leader. Years later, Lois (Carlisle) Perttula served as the Committee’s Secretary. That community participation continued down to more recent times, as shown in a picture (see Figure 14) of the Trout Creek 1988 Centennial Committee, which includes no fewer than four Carlisles (plus one by marriage).

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Figure 14.

Trout Creek Centennial Committee, 1988.

Tracking the experience of Fred and Clara Carlisle’s children reveals the impact of change in Trout Creek. The most severe challenge was, of course, the closure of the lumber mill, which demanded radical survival action by local residents. The town experienced a veritable evacuation, a pattern that was replicated in the Carlisle family. Freeman migrated to an industrial job in Jackson, Michigan, in the Lower Peninsula. Pete sought employment at the copper mine in White Pine, 43 miles to the west, but eventually ended up finding a job at a sawmill in Vesper, Wisconsin. Wesley, followed by Claude, found work in a sawmill in far away Coos Bay, Oregon. Mose continued to live in Trout Creek and, for a while, commuted each week to a job in Newberry, 187 miles away, at the eastern end of the Upper Peninsula. He eventually got a job closer to home, at the White Pine mine. Gilda remained in Trout Creek while her husband commuted to work 56 miles to the west, in Bessemer. Everett managed to stay at the ancestral home with his now-widowed mother and he commuted a job in L’Anse, about 42 miles to the east. Whereas work had once united the family, it now painfully divided them. For many workers in Trout Creek, the dispersal was permanent. All but two of Fred and Clara’s children eventually returned to live in Trout Creek or nearby, for at least some period of time, during their later years. In this they are similar to many out-migrants from rural areas who, in their retirement, gravitate back to the communities from which they came, or to communities like them. Today, only a few of the Carlisles remain in Trout Creek or nearby, and only a handful of people related to them still reside there.

Trout Creek Today

There has been a near-total erosion of the original social structure in the community of Trout Creek as the 21st century begins. Interior Township’s entire population was just 336 in 2010 and the town itself has declined to about 200 or less. For those still of working age, Trout Creek is merely a bedroom community: They must commute as far as 80 miles to jobs in the surrounding area. There are no regular businesses in town or anywhere nearby. A chiropractor comes in to provide services several days a week in the back of the closed grocery store, the American Legion still maintains a local clubhouse that opens periodically for events, and the community’s small U.S. Post Office still keeps regular hours. The township government meets monthly in the volunteer firehouse, a small one-storey building that long ago held a local bank. There is a residuum of retirement-aged people—most of whom grew up in the town—who have stayed, largely because, in most cases, their homes are paid for and it would be too expensive for them to move. There are very few young single adults or young families with children. One resident (Pelkola, 2012) claims that, until it shut down recently, the biggest regular activity in town was associated with the Senior Citizens’ Nutrition Program, which provided minimal cost lunches on Tuesdays and Thursdays in the basement of the Lutheran Church, at which, incidentally, Gilda (Carlisle) Russell worked as a volunteer server (see Figure 15). A recent commentator (Scott, 2005) describes Trout Creek as one of the Upper Peninsula’s many “shadow towns.” The town still sponsors a modest community festival in the late summer each year called the “Pondfest,” which is held in a small park adjacent to the original mill pond near the Carlisle ancestral home.

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Figure 15.

Gilda (Carlisle) Russell volunteering at the Lutheran Church, July 2004 (Jon Rieger).

Summary

I have described hereinbefore a set of strategies—interviewing local residents who had been participants in the community, examining accumulations of family memorabilia, and conducting extensive photo-elicitation interviews—that I used in reconstructing the history of social change in a small rural community, one too small to have benefitted from any “official” chronicle of its past. The strategy exhibits significant limitations but may constitute the only feasible way to learn about social change retrospectively when conventional records do not exist. I relied on the collection of what amounted to “informal” evidence, and buttressed that evidence as best I could with extensive interviewing of knowledgeable local informants. What could be learned was limited by my informants’ selective memories and their differing perspectives regarding past community events. I also found that the connection between individuals and community events is variable, as is the level of congruence between findings derived from different methods I used (e.g., photo-elicitation, interviewing, family archives, photographs, and the like). But it is still possible by such strategies to illuminate the general dimensions of social change in communities of this small size.

Implicit in my approach in this study is the argument that the experience of these citizens of Trout Creek so characteristically reflected the nature of the town and the broader experience of its whole citizenry that they could be accepted as proxies for that larger population. My subjects exhibited all of the earmarks of having been intimately involved in the tissue of social relations in this community. The Carlisles exemplified life in the town, and as they did so, they became, in many ways, emblematic of the community. Because the selection of the Carlisles as an initial window into Trout Creek was a chance thing, the success of having substantially fixed on the experience of this particular family might therefore be said to be the luck of the draw. Still, the present effort makes it at least possible to imagine that a strategic focus on particular local residents who are participants in the local drama of community life and change can form a basis for a successful research effort. The efficacy of such an approach is clearly dependent on how well the informants selected “represent” their community. Such a selective approach may not yield the breadth of knowledge that might be gained from a more exhaustive recruitment of informants or study subjects. How broad a base of such citizens is needed to attain an acceptably precise result is a judgment that must be made in each instance by a discerning researcher.

Even with the ready cooperation of the members of what had been a core family in the community, the reconstruction of the key elements of experience and social life in Trout Creek, especially retrospectively, was greatly augmented for me by the availability of photographs and other material in other family archives in Trout Creek. Because of the passage of a lengthy period of time, it was only with considerable effort that I was able to find enough informants in a position to have the kind of information I needed to explore, over the duration of the study, the depth of the connection between the social process and the participants in that process. And while I eventually found an adequate number of the “right” informants, some were now too old and/or their memories too fogged to retrieve the needed details of their own earlier lives and/or those related to, or associated with, them. The photographs provided the critical helpful evidence, and enabled me to document the occurrence and chronology of events that composed the saga of social change and individual response in this small settlement. Nevertheless, a time is rapidly coming when the generation with direct experience of the history of the Trout Creek community will be gone, and it will become exponentially more difficult to utilize the methods outlined here to study social change in such a place.