From January 1973 through April 1978, local lawyer and Historical Society "founding father" Bernard Peyton Chamberlain produced a series of half-hour "Community History" TV shows for local access Jefferson Cable Corporation. Chamberlain interviewed scores of local citizens, and his shows covered scores of topics. He and his guests also toured local historical landmarks. While they may not be considered riveting TV by today's standards, the Community History shows nonetheless remain a treasure trove of local lore. And some of us get to look back at ourselves 30 years ago, when we had hair and were thin.
For years these shows were shelved and apparently forgotten. The Jefferson Cable Corporation was eventually bought out by the giant Adelphia Cable Corporation. A former Jefferson Cable cameraman brought the recordings to the attention of the Historical Society in the late 1990s, as they were about to be discarded. While only a relatively small number of the obsolete 1-inch broadcast videotapes were saved, reel-to-reel and cassette audio tapes of almost all the interviews were saved, catalogued, and indexed.
Thanks to a generous $10,000 media preservation grant from the Whitney Stone Foundation in 2001, the Historical Society began the long, painstaking process of preserving the Community History shows. Now the Historical Society is in the process of digitizing the videos of Chamberlain's Community History shows to DVD, and has begun to make them available for free download from our website.
While the visual quality of the videos suffers noticeably from the "ravages of time," the shows are still a wonderful glimpse into local history. Downloaded in roughly half-hour segments, they are suitable for playing on your desktop or iPod.
Please consider helping the Society to preserve Community History by volunteering to transcribe tape to CD (we'll show you how to use our equipment), or by making a donation to the Society's Fund for Local History.
