I have a separate blog and a sustained website that covers the history (as we perceive it) of the erstwhile town of Fairfield, which was in a nice cozy corner of the Whitewater Valley (East Fork) in Franklin County, which is in Indiana, not far from Ohio and not even close to the city of Franklin, which is in Johnson County, not far from where Jacob Whetzel put his stake in the ground in around 1808.
That data dump will bring you quickly to the present, which has disappeared as swiftly as your click on another URL.
To the degree any of this is important connects to my willingness to go looking for the fun stuff that happened a million-million years ago. The newspapers of the time have provided eyebrow-listing experiences.
And a lot of laughs and OMG moments.
To the point: Fairfield's history has been recorded by many former residents who were shoved into the Dumpster of progress between 1964 and 1970, when the US Army Corps of Engineers engineered the dam just north of Brookville.
By 1975, the valley was a lake and we gathered our love for home and stashed it. As years went by, we collected it all and put it back into a readable form. There's a lot we've recorded. In 2015, we'd have celebrated our town's bicentennial. (No I wasn't there for all of it.)
The other small towns around the area expressed some astonishment that Fairfield could care enough to achieve that. Most of those towns are weed-infested junk yards -- like they were in 1959.
By collecting that history, I came across people I knew, places I remembered and many events I had no idea about.
Spending a year gathering information and producing a blog -- the highlight of my writing career. The blog mattered to me.
If you're sure what to write, just wait. Do the blog. Get a sense of yourself and your own place in time.
The book will follow.
THE FAIRFIELD I REMEMBER
THE BLOG FOR OUR 200TH ANNIVERSARY
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