Faculty and students in Western Kentucky University’s Department of Folk Studies and Anthropology are playing a key role in a project to document the history and culture of Allen County.

The two-year Allen County Folklife and Oral History project is made possible by a grant from the Laura Goad Turner Charitable Foundation.

Four WKU students have been working in Allen County since May and have identified about 100 individuals and locations to investigate over the next two years, according to project director Erika Brady, professor of Folk Studies.

About a dozen graduate students and six undergraduate students enrolled in fieldwork courses will be following up on those leads while another group of students in a cultural conservation course will be gathering information on food and cooking.

“We will be looking at many aspects of Allen County community life – music, religion, agriculture, celebrations and more,” Dr. Brady said.

The community project was spotlighted in an open house for the new Allen County Newseum on Sept. 19 at the Allen County Community Action Center in Scottsville. Staff from the Washington D.C.-based Newseum, which blends five centuries of news history with up-to-the-minute technology, have designed and installed interactive kiosks, photos, a walk through the 200 years of history and interesting information about the area in the halls of the Community Action Center. 

The open house provided the first opportunity to share with the public this great educational resource made possible through private contributions. The public is invited to visit the Newseum exhibits and to tell their stories in the interactive recording booth. The Newseum and the Allen County Folklife and Oral History project will work together to celebrate Allen County life and to keep memories alive for future generations.

The students will use recorded interviews, photography and video to cover a broad range of historical and cultural themes, identifying the elements that make community life in the region unique.

“One thing we’ve already discovered in our work is a common theme of ‘it’s just very Allen County,’” Dr. Brady said. “We’re trying to explore what ‘very Allen County’ means.”

The project may be the first community-based survey of this scale conducted in this region, she said.

“We hope we will have a substantial documentation of the folklife and oral history in Allen County,” Dr. Brady said.

The completed project will be maintained at the Allen County Community Action Center and the Kentucky Library and Museum at WKU. Dr. Michael Ann Williams, head of the Department of Folk Studies and Anthropology, is the project’s associate director.

As part of the two-year grant, WKU will be training “community scholars” to continue the initiative, Dr. Brady said.

“It is our hope that this project will provide a resource for Allen County and a basis for further work and provide a better understanding of life in that area,” she said.

For information about the Allen County Newseum, contact Charity Parrish, Public Information Coordinator for Community Action of Southern Kentucky, at (270) 782-3162, ext. 175, or cparrish@casoky.org.

For information on the Allen County Folklife and Oral History Project, contact Dr. Erika Brady at (270) 745-5902 or allenfolklife@gmail.com.