Telling True Stories: An Origin Story
By Tom Morgan
Proctor Academy sits less than ten miles from downtown Franklin, New Hampshire, but sometimes feels a world away. Near the end of 2015, Franklin Falls visionary Todd Workman contacted Proctor Athletic Director Gregor Makechnie to brainstorm ways Proctor might get involved in helping the revitalization efforts beginning in the City of Franklin. An email was sent out to Proctor faculty, and in early January 2016, a group of us boarded a minibus for a trip to the Three Rivers City to try to bridge the gap.
After we arrived downtown, we met up with Workman, who lead us on a walking tour through the historic district. It was a cold, overcast morning, and we trailed behind him, rubbing our hands together or shoving them deeper into our puffy jackets. The city was derelict. The Stevens Mill, the old Stanley hacksaw building, the Light and Power Mill, and much of Central Street sagged under the weight of cold and neglect. But, up above Toad Hall, in the now-former TakeRoot Co-Working space, Workman pitched his idea of transforming Franklin through permaculture, urban-design planning, grant writing, and much-needed partnerships with local non-profit institutions like Proctor. About halfway through his pitch, I was hooked.
In the late 90s, I spent a few years working as a cook in Helena, Montana, a once-wealthy turn-of-the-century mining town. Sitting in Toad Hall, I could see similarities between Franklin and Helena. The red brick buildings downtown, the irreplaceable Victorian homes on the edges — these were the same. But, Helena was full of bakeries and diners, burger joints and coffee houses; small, alternative movie theaters; saloons and shoe shops; and a few old-time inns. And, I remembered the satisfaction of living on a hilltop within walking distance of downtown, and the way the cold nipped and the snow crunched underfoot on weekend nights as I merged into the warm crowd pouring out of the Windbag Saloon or Miller’s Crossing. Helena has never been on anyone’s list of up-and-coming towns in America, but I always remember it as very much alive. And, there, sitting in a folding chair listening to Workman, I gazed out of oversized brick-framed windows into the Central Street traffic and it clicked.
I knew Workman was onto something. I knew that if I could see past the trash and the lead dust, the boarded-up storefronts, and the feeling of emptiness that sat like a thick inversion layer in the downtown winter air — I knew the solid bones of Franklin’s mill buildings could hold life once again. And I knew that if the opportunity to help the revitalization efforts came up, I was all in.
My first opportunity to bring students to Franklin came at the end of March 2017. At the beginning of the spring trimester at Proctor, we cancel our regular classes and hold a five-day-long intensive workshop, which we call Project Period. Faculty design workshops on whatever interests them and students sign up. With the help of Proctor Alumnae Ali Berman, I designed a workshop focused on interviewing and web-based writing skills called Telling True Stories: Franklin. The idea was to spend four days interviewing community leaders involved in Franklin’s revitalization efforts as well as other people in town, write a few small articles, publish them, and see what kind of response we could get.
It was during this workshop that I first interviewed many of the key people involved in the city’s early revitalization efforts, such as Jo Brown (who is now the Mayor), Marty Parichand, Elizabeth Dragon, Oscar Gala Grano, Jason Grevior, and others. It is also the first time that I learned about many of the opportunities and obstacles Franklin faced in attempting to bring life back into its streets. Our small workshop published eleven stories in five days, which garnered over 4000 individual reads of our Telling True Stories: Franklin publication, making the Project Period an amazing success.
Five years later, I’ve had the opportunity to repeat the Telling True Stories: Franklin Project Period workshop with a new group of Proctor students. In five days, the six of us — Josh, Sierra, Thomas, Carly, Liam, and I — conducted 16 interviews, took over 500 pictures, and wrote 12 articles chronicling Franklin’s revitalization efforts. I am proud of my students — four freshmen and one sophomore — for working hard and engaging with this project. Before this week, most of them had never stepped foot in the city. Now, I’m sure, each one of them could credibly conduct a walking tour of the Franklin Falls Historic District. With a few exceptions, they conceived of and wrote the first drafts of the articles published here on our Medium site during the workshop. I have since finished the final drafts, edited the articles for publication, and posted them here.
It is our hope that these stories add to the growing list of articles published about Franklin’s revitalization efforts — each one inching the Three Rivers City closer to the day when all of the Central Street storefronts are full, the renovated mill buildings are humming with energy, and every Franklin school thrives with warmth and life once again.
Telling True Stories is a Proctor Academy production.
