This is a rough transcript.
Thank you. I appreciate the opportunity to be here. What’s great is when you send your bio, you can say that your website is one of the most popular; nobody can argue with you.
Really is a pleasure to be here. I love speaking at museums. Love the opportunity to get really down in the weeds in some local history.
I think that’s just so critically important. And it sounds odd to say sometimes, I think there’s so many museums out there and even railroad museums, and I think sometimes we overlook the great local stories. And that really, to me, is what makes history so interesting. It’s the people, it’s the places, it’s the local stories.
And even when you look at something like the Western and Atlantic Railroad, it’s easy to sort of gloss over the many towns and communities along the Western and Atlantic Railroad.
I’m just a couple stops to the south of here. I’m in Smyrna. I don’t have any stops. It is, I didn’t, didn’t look at the timetable to check, but it’s a few stops south of here and and like Cartersville, we have some great stories that I think when you write a history of a railroad like the Western and Atlantic, sometimes you just sort of gloss over them because there’s just not space for all those great stories.
But that’s really what makes a place unique. And I think I often look at sort of the world that we live in, it’s sometimes we think it’s a little bit crazy, and I tend to — there’s a great Bob Dylan lyric, “people are crazy and times are strange.” And I think that kind of aptly sums up a lot of what we see.
And I think sometimes when I get a little maybe — start thinking about the world and thinking about how crazy it is, I like to look back into history, because I think there’s great lessons in the past that have made us who we are today, makes the towns where we live the way they are today.
Why there’s a railroad here? Because it’s all all in the past and all in the history. And I think if we’re going to understand the world in which we live today, we really have to understand the past. And a couple years ago, that didn’t seem like a controversial statement. Some days — today, it might seem like a controversial statement, but I don’t mean it to be controversial. Just mean it to be maybe a little bit thought provoking.