“A generation which ignores history, has no past – and no future.” ~ Robert A. Heinlein
In the Russian short story Matryona’s House, written by Aleksandre Solzhenitsyn and published in 1959, an old peasant woman, not yet dead, watches as her children and neighbors tear down her old peasant house while she still lives in it, one board at a time, to build what they think will be a better life for themselves.
Removing landmarks is what the world is up to now. The systematic razing of the past. It seems, we are told now, that even history itself is on the wrong side of history. So, it goes.
The first time I heard of the “Harrison House” I was working for a time at the Intermission Bookshop downtown. Sure, I’d seen it, the old house. Drove by it many times over the years. I always commented when I’d see the trio of mansions lined up on Center Avenue that they, together, stood watch over Brownwood like the personification of wisdom and age, like your ancestors watching patiently while you fiddle around with the foolishness of youth, a tangible reminder letting you know that there is something left of the right way if you can still find it. But I didn’t know that particular house was the “Harrison House.” Not until I worked in the bookstore.
Kim, the bookshop owner, was showing me the piles and boxes of old books in the back room and upstairs that needed to be gone through and sorted, some discarded (damaged/torn/worthless… do you need a torn copy of ‘The Coming Economic Crash’ written in the 70s?) others priced and put on the shelves, and others saved for future consideration. Spending hours going through old books isn’t much of a “job” since I would do it for free, but they were paying me, and that made it all the better.
Kim showed me the Harrison library that had come out of the old house. A lot of law books, history books, and some classics (if you don’t have Will and Ariel Durant’s History of Civilization it is what you’re missing.) Kim shared with me – this was over a year ago – some of the history of the house and the family that built it and lived in it for nigh on 70 years. I looked at pictures. Danielle and I often walked over there and talked about those old houses on Center. But the books! I spent hours in that collection. Many hours. And sometimes when I got deeply into them, I wasn’t there in that backroom looking at old books anymore. Sometimes I started reading, and then I’d travel.
Old books are the time travel that is possible. If your mind is right and you prize knowledge and love truth, and if you are given a sense of the magic of words and the continuity and interconnectedness of things through time, there are moments when you can lose yourself and become so immersed in this other world that the “now” goes away and you can feel a change, even (it seems) on your skin if you are immersed enough, and the air feels different and the glow of the ambient light or the scent of the now changes. And you change too.
History, it has been said, is the light by which we may guide our feet.
Kim and her husband Brent did the work to save the old Queen Theater on Center and turn it into one of the greatest bookstores I’ve ever seen. Before that, they helped save the old bank building that is now the home of Pioneer Taphouse. “Saving” an old building doesn’t always mean preserving it like a museum. Sometimes the only way to keep the building usable is to keep whatever you can of the past, maybe even just the façade if that’s all that can be saved, and then build anew to bring that old history back to use and life. We don’t need a city of museums. But only to our own detriment do we tear down all vestiges of the past without consideration and wisdom. I cannot understand this instinct to remove and destroy the past, when it can just as easily be preserved. Erasure of our history has become pervasive, and although any particular decision might be justified or rationalized (humans are capable of justifying anything,) if you are able to pan back you can see that we are removing and defacing our own history, our past, wholesale. We are, in effect, deleting ourselves.
Go into the bookstore just up the street from the Harrison House and see the images on the wall where the soldiers during the war would – for the price of their ticket – sleep, hair combed back with pomade, heads leaning against the wall. It’s history. It happened, and not too long ago. You can still go see it and if you are wise and intelligent you can remember something you weren’t even alive to experience. For a moment staring up at those ghostly images, you can feel 100,000 soldiers teeming through Brownwood on a Saturday night. Stand underneath the 12-story Brownwood Hotel when it is almost dusk and the sky is darkening blue and electric and it isn’t quite dark then close your eyes and you can maybe hear about that time I told you about when Glen Miller and his band played upstairs in the ballroom. In 1942.
Old pictures can help, but the new generation doesn’t read much, and pictures all just look like the images on their phones… and they don’t move and have life. TikTok history won’t save civilization.
Millions flock to Europe every year to go look at old buildings, cathedrals, epochs and ages of real life. War took much of Europe’s history away, but here in America we pluck down our history with our own hands.
The Bible, in the book of Deuteronomy and in context throughout, warns of removing landmarks. They were both signs and evidence of property lines and something more. The term landmarks also stood for the faith and history of our fathers. Signposts of what has gone before. Some landmarks warn us to learn from the past, others caution us to not repeat it. Others remind us that we are mere caretakers of the place, and if we tear it all down and remove the landmarks then we will forget who we are altogether.
“Thus saith the Lord, Stand ye in the ways, and see, and ask for the old paths, where is the good way, and walk therein, and ye shall find rest for your souls. But they said, We will not walk therein.” ~ Jer. 6:16
I saw the history of the Harrison House, and I learned that many people – with the benevolent intention of saving the house and its history – have offered to buy the property and preserve it. I saw and learned that there were many such offers that would have been beneficial to the University – in a way where everyone could win – and that these offers were rejected or not heard. I’ve heard and read long stories of the history of destroying history in our town. All in the name of progress. But destroying history isn’t always progress.
They say (I’ve heard) that Howard Payne wants the property for student housing, so they can compete for students with places like Texas Tech which have nice student condos and dorms, but aren’t there other properties where other historic buildings have stood and were torn down, that still are empty and abandoned? Why would one believe that this isn’t just another property that will be torn down or removed only to have the lot stand empty for years? And is that the best place for a student housing facility? I say again, I’m saddened at this instinct to remove and destroy history. You can’t look at the case of one house… you have to pan back and look at everything that is happening everywhere. Matryona’s House is being disassembled while we, the living, are still in it. Board by board.
When Kim at the bookstore told me that she felt like the bookstore building was alive, that it seemed to speak to her, I knew what she meant. I knew exactly what she meant. I learned that little truth in an old book, too. I asked her to read a story by Jack Finney titled Where the Cluetts Are. I suggest you find it and read it too. In it, an architect is asked to design a house for a couple – the Cluetts – who aren’t sure what they want. They find some old, old plans of a beautiful century-old house and they determine to build it exactly like it would have been built a hundred years earlier (we are always searching for that older, simpler life, even while we are destroying it around us.) The architect goes to extreme lengths to build the perfect “new” hundred-year-old house. Even using old sawn lumber and keeping exactly to the blueprints. It is perfect. It is even (we learn) located on what was probably the same lot where the original house (from the plans) was built. It had burned down, but it wasn’t ready to go, it seems. The Cluetts move in, and they find that the house just wanted to exist there, because it was perfect. It was the history everyone needs. They are perfect for the house too. I won’t spoil the ending though. You’ll love it.
Every house can’t (and shouldn’t) be saved. It’s just not possible or wise. But some places have enough connections with history, the time, the generations, and the soul of a town or a place that they ought not to be removed or destroyed if they can be saved. It seems to me that this is one of those.
We get to decide if we are the kind of people who will pluck down our own history or preserve it. We’ll see what kind of people we are.
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Michael Bunker is a local columnist for BrownwoodNews.com whose columns appear periodically on the website