Appomattox Court House National Historical Park, the Carver-Price Legacy Museum, and Appomattox County High School are partnering to record local history with national significance. Members of the park and museum staff along with A.P. History students from Appomattox County High School are learning techniques to record the experiences of citizens that lived through history that is ultimately linked to the old village of Appomattox Court House, the site of General Lee’s surrender on April 9, 1865.

The objective of this project is to train current students to document, through recorded interviews, the experiences of integration/desegregation in Appomattox schools in 1970 from those who were students and teachers at that historic time. Simultaneously, staff from the Park and Museum will use these techniques to document the recent history of those involved with creating the Footsteps to Freedom program for the 150th anniversary last April. This program highlighted the recreated funeral of Hannah Reynolds and featured 4,600 luminaries for each emancipated person in Appomattox at the time of the surrender.

Participants felt that the program that opened a dialogue, resulting in the current conversation to document the stories of desegregation. David Wooldridge, Museum Technician at the park recalled a mother at the Footsteps program explaining the ceremony to her daughter and said about slavery, “We can’t change what happened then, but we can remember them now.”

Some staff members and students participated in a training session held Dec. 11 at Carver-Price Legacy Museum. Additional students and staff from the Park and Museum will attend a second, all-day session on Feb. 5 also at the Museum. The training is provided by Michael and Carrie Kline, of Talk Across the Lines. The Klines have more than 25 years of experience of documenting folk life and local memories in smaller communities. The Klines enjoy offering workshops in “Listening for a Change.”

After their visit to Appomattox in December, Carrie Kline wrote, “It feels like a critical time for experienced people to do interviews around black history in Appomattox right now, along with teaching others to keep it going. You have opened the door and it’s time to record people’s feelings and experiences and then go on to build exhibits around the recordings.”