Historical collection details Cary's past
If you're interested in taking a peek at the history of Cary, stop by village hall to view a sampling of the Harper-Freeman historical collection.
Over the last couple of decades, Betty Freeman, who served as Cary's unofficial historian and died in her late 80s in 2009, collected thousands of local items dating back to the 1800s and 1900s.
From a 1894 ad for a 25-cent Algonquin vs. Cary baseball game to a turn-of-the-century wooden washing machine, a 1930s bamboo vaulting pole and a 1950s vehicle sticker, the items are as varied as the generations of residents who have lived in Cary since its inception.
The marvel of it all, says Cary Village Administrator Cameron Davis, is how carefully and precisely Betty labeled and cataloged everything.
The village now owns the entire collection, which is stored throughout village hall and composed of items owned by Betty and her brother Henry Harper, who died in November at the age of 92. Items from the collection are being displayed in a glass case at the entrance of village hall, and are rotated on a monthly basis.
“Betty kept wonderful records,” Davis said. “She was pretty amazing in terms of what she kept.”
Among the items are more than 100 artifacts that belonged to John Hertz, a businessman who owned a horse farm in Cary and who built what is now the oldest part of the current village hall.
The collection also includes about 50 binders full of thousands of pages of documents, including old photographs, newspaper clippings, records of public meetings, property sale abstracts and more, Davis said.
It was Henry Harper who sparked the family tradition of collecting items, says his son, Bob Harper, who owns Cary Station Antiques in Cary and who donated the entire collection to the village after his father's death.
“My dad had picked up a few things years ago, and then we both started getting into collecting stuff,” said Bob, 70. “Betty got into it 18 or 20 years ago and started finding a lot more things. She started putting the history of it together, putting names on things, putting dates on things.”
As word got around that Betty liked to collect old things, residents began to approach her asking if she would like to keep this or that, Henry Harper said. “She and dad lived here since the (Great) Depression, they knew all the older people in town,” he said.
Staff from the village and from the Cary Area Public Library are working to catalog the collection, and their goal is to post it all online along with photographs of each item by early 2012, Davis said.
Some of the items, such as a 30-foot, one-piece wooden counter from the old general store downtown, are so large that they have to be stored at the public works department.