Flashpoint: Hercules Historical Society
Last month, Living with the Railroads welcomed a new collaborator aboard the project. On January 16, Stephen Lawton of the Hercules Historical Society (HHS) visited us at Stanford to discuss our partnership with Historypin. A real-estate broker by trade, Stephen is a former Southern Pacific Railroad brakeman with experience in fields as diverse as land development, urban planning, and information technology. Through his work on both sides of the divide between public and private development, he has cultivated a remarkable interest in historic preservation. This led him to join his local historical society in Hercules, one of the youngest communities in the Bay Area. He has a skill set that intersects sharply with the methods of digital history, and his experiences speak to possible connections between land development, preservation, and spatial history. In honor of our new partnership, this post is an effort to encapsulate Lawton’s wisdom for the benefit of a wider audience.
The Hercules Historical Society is now a partner of Stanford's CESTA and a contributor to Living with the Railroads
Because “the crowd” will eventually assume responsibility for contributing the bulk of content on the Living with the Railroads website, we hope to understand why members of our target audience choose to become participants. As Lawton writes, he visited the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA) to discuss “how one local amateur expert encountered Historypin and the factors that motivate him to contribute content.” In his case, the motivating factors seem to be tied to the land--his story revolves around a unique strand of local history and the incredible changes that have occurred at Hercules Point. At the turn of the twentieth century, Hercules was a company town of 100 homes and an explosives plant. What the HHS calls an “instant neighborhood” arose there soon after the Second World War. Today, the municipality boasts a population of nearly 25,000.
"Statue of Hercules" (1925-1929)
When Stephen Lawton moved to the area in 1991, he saw that growth and development were still taking place in historic neighborhoods. When he found opportunity to contribute, his passion and experience led him to public service. As a board member for the city’s planning and redevelopment projects, he helped introduce the first “form based” zoning code to be adopted by a California city, and he founded the Northern California Chapter of the Congress for the New Urbanism. Spaces created by the relocation and preservation of the 20 remaining powder company homes inspired him to study local history more closely. In the course of his detective work, he found fantastic photographs from the city’s industrial past. Along a shoreline literally created by the Southern Pacific Railroad empire, Hercules Point powder products once traveled via train:
"Southern Pacific Main Line at Hercules Point" (1900-1910)
"Acid Plant, Hercules Point" (1904-1906)
As researchers in the digital humanities, we value interfaces for their connections to whatever elements of society or culture they allow us to investigate. For Lawton and the HHS, Historypin documents the town’s transformation while allowing them to pursue their own questions about historic preservation. This is how we envision Living with the Railroads serving historical societies and railfans alike: a community platform that engages with a variety of individual interests. As shown by Lawton’s contributions to the project on behalf of the HHS, our model will work best with a decentralized network of individual Historypin channels. While logged into a channel, railfans can visit the “Projects” tab on Historypin to find Living with the Railroads, then click “contribute” to add photos, text, and videos. The site is now live, and we look forward to major expansion in the coming months.
At the time of writing, Living with the Railroads already features hundreds of pins and comments in the activity feed. Our contributors include the Modesto Art Museum, the Palace of the Governors Photo Archives, the California State Library, the History Center (of East Texas) and Robert Bowdidge (Google employee by day, railfan by night), and, of course, the Hercules Historical Society. Thanks to the tireless efforts of researchers here at CESTA, the project now includes pins drawn from public-domain photographs in the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) and the Getty Institute archives. To find these pins and more, follow us on Historypin, and be sure to check out the Hercules Historical Society site--it’s a blast from the past.
