How do you disappear the story of more than five million people from history? How do you do it so well that some experts say: There were no orphanages in the 20th century, they all closed down in the 19th century.
If survivors of the American orphanage system hadn’t come forward, the history would have been lost forever. Now, in Burlington and elsewhere, survivors and advocates are faced with the challenge of not just telling the story, but reviving it, claiming a place in history and giving the nature of the story its due.
But even the best remembered bits of information can fade fast. And the longer you want something to last in the historic record, the harder it is to preserve. I wrote about this in The Invisible History of the Human Race.
In the early twenty-first century the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) assembled a team to investigate how people of the present might best communicate key information with people of the future. How should we mark radioactive waste so that generations in years to come do not accidentally stumble across it? Initially the team wanted to create a physical record that would last as long as the radioactivity, potentially for tens of thousands of years. But teams from Sweden, Canada, and Japan had already tackled the problem, and the experience of the Japanese team suggested that this approach would not be fruitful: The Japanese had created a silicon carbide tile that measured about twelve square centimeters and looked much like the kind of tile that might be found on a bathroom wall yet was incredibly hard and would not erode, which meant it could be buried in the ground. The team etched the necessary warnings on it with a laser, so the writing would never fade. There was just one problem: If you dropped the tile, it shattered.
Actually, there were two problems. The archivist, Gavan McCarthy, told me that the other problem was ensuring that people who found the tile many thousands of years in the future could understand what was written on it. “Without continuous knowledge, then all systems of knowledge are fatally flawed,” he told me.
Preservation isn’t just about the durability of records; it’s about the durability of the people who care about the records. At a certain point after Shakespeare’s plays and the books of the Bible were created, they became so popular that no central body was required to plan their migration from one technology to another—it just happened. Whether for pleasure, out of righteousness, or for profit, generation after generation has engaged with the texts and transferred them from whatever whatever medium they found them in to the one they preferred. From his original draft on parchment, Shakespeare’s plays have over the centuries been rendered in many formats. A copy of his complete works came to me free on the iBooks.
The trick is that information never lives in just one record. It gets transferred from one form of record to another. Ideally, it would be recorded inside many different formats at once.
I can’t imagine a more perfect way to think about the recently announced memorial garden for the children of St. Joseph’s Orphanage. Not only is it another way to mark the story, another format — it’s a living, breathing place. Visitors will be inside the record, looking up the bluff to see the old orphanage building, gazing out over the lake where the children swam. If there is a time in the future when the books and articles and other bits of media about the orphanage are hard to find, I imagine that people will still walk in the garden and ask themselves, “What happened here?”
Seven Days published a wonderful article about the garden and the process of creating it. The former residents group, Voices of St. Joseph's Orphanage, worked with Burlington’s Parks, Recreation and Waterfront department to design it. The local Pomerleau Family Foundation made a generous donation to start it.
[It] includes a sculptural arbor woven of natural elements, stone benches with a sight line to the orphanage building, wildflower plantings in flowing serpentine shapes and glacial boulders etched with the words of former residents.
Read more, here, and if you’re nearby, plan your visit.