Dennis Found It!
Researching local history relies on a combination of luck, deduction, hours of following leads, the memories of strangers, searching old newspaper archives, luck, travel to places that might yield a clue, dogged determination and more luck. For example, it was by chance that I discovered a long-forgotten envelope of photos of the last community ice harvest at Stillwater Reservoir complete with a letter describing the scene. It included a list of some of the people in the photos, but no way to match the names with the faces. I proceeded to show the photos to anyone who might conceivably recognize someone. This long process gave me about half the identities, but half remained a mystery. I had concluded that I would probably never identify the others. As it happened, however, a year ago I gave a talk at the Stillwater Hotel about the hotel’s one-hundred-year history. After my talk a woman I didn’t know named Michelle Kelly approached me. She identified herself as the grand-daughter of Emm...