Local History: "The past is a gift to the future"

With all the excitement from CIL fading a bit, I wanted to get back to something amazing and local I learned about before I left.

Earlier this month, the Rensselaer Ladies Literary Society hosted Brian Capouch, who talked about the work he has been doing restoring old buildings and houses in the Jasper, Pulaski and White county areas.

Capouch, a professor at St. Joseph's College, has discovered quite a lot about Jasper County history through his research on his own properties and on properties he drives by that pique his interest.

He has uncovered stories about homes in the area that used to be stops on the underground railroad, and homes that belonged to Jasper County's first white settlers. He also shared the story of a town that might have become the county seat -- as it had the first blacksmith shop, first school and first store -- if the railroad hadn't come through a little farther southwest than the little town at the fork of the Iroquois and Pinkamink rivers, an area known today as Pleasant Grove.

Capouch said he considers these lonely old homes and sites in rural areas just as valuable as any big-city preservation site for the history they have seen, and more at risk, often because the land is considered more valuable as farm ground than as a home or a historic site.

Capouch said he learned a hard lesson early on in his restoration work, when he discovered the log cabin his family had built. Going on with the new owner about how he could restore the property, he failed to notice how his intentions were not being welcomed, he said. A few days later, the home burned to the ground.

Since then, he said he tries to offer assistance and to convince property owners to consider the possible return on investment of restoration as opposed to letting the home deteriorate and be razed. Sometimes, he has paid out of his own pocket for stopgap measures on other people's property, such as to repair windows to buy a home a few more years. "If you can keep the rain out, keep the animals out, then you can keep these homes going," he said.

Capouch has also started a website about his work, http://www.oldmedaryville.org/. The photo galleries are especially interesting.

The title for this blog post came from Capouch's site. As a fan of history, I couldn't agree more with the sentiment.