Staunton-Parkersburg Turnpike Audio History Project Talking Across the Lines has contracted with The Staunton-Parkersburg Turnpike Alliance based to complete two new CDs of audio history highlighting the western portion of the Turnpike from Buckhannon to Parkersburg, covering six counties West Virginia counties. The Staunton-Parkersburg Turnpike National Scenic Byway follows this historic route across West Virginia. According to Turnpike Coordinator, Mary Rayme, "We're excited to start this project with Talking Across the Lines. There is still so much history left to preserve along the Turnpike and we are so pleased to have the Klines creating the CDs for this historic project. There are still folks who have Turnpike stories and memories to share, and I am looking forward to hearing the finished product." Carrie & Michael Kline are Talking Across the Lines, a folklife documentary consulting and production firm. The Klines created a 4-CD set of oral history, local music, and ambient sounds of nature that focus on the eastern section of the Turnpike. (See http://www.folktalk.org/turnpike.html.) The new CDs will focus more on the western portion of the Turnpike especially focused on the African-American, ethnic, rural and industrial history and the role of the Turnpike in the Underground Railroad. Michael and Carrie Kline have worked extensively in West Virginia and Ohio where they produced recordings on the Underground Railroad and local heritage music, with Cherokees in North Carolina, in Pennsylvania and in Southern Maryland's Chesapeake region where they produced a fast-paced documentary, Born and Raised in Tobacco Fields, and a two volume series of CDs featuring African American sacred music. Anyone living on or near the western part of the Turnpike with stories or songs to share that relate directly to the history of the Turnpike are encouraged to contact the Klines via their website, http://www.folktalk.org. Funding for this project is from a Scenic Byways grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation and will also include additional interpretive signs on the Turnpike, focused on the western portion. The federally designated Byway is managed by the Staunton-Parkersburg Turnpike Alliance, a non-profit organization headquartered in Beverly, WV, dedicated to preserving history and promoting tourism and recreation along the Turnpike. National Scenic Byways, including the Staunton-Parkersburg Turnpike, can be seen at http://www.byways.org. You can visit the Turnpike online at http://www.spturnpike.org or call 304-637-7424. _______________________________________________________________ Overview of the Wheeling National Heritage Area and the Wheeling Spoken History Project Wheeling, West Virginia, population 34,000, is a declining, industrial city sixty miles southwest of Pittsburgh on the Ohio River, just north of the Mason-Dixon Line. The most ethnically diverse city in West Virginia, Wheeling's history is imbedded with the enriched intermingling and also the conflicts of race, class and ethnicity which characterize most American industrial cities. With only half its population of sixty years ago, Wheeling's long, narrow, river valley is made up of distinct inner-city and suburban neighborhoods. There is little of the hostility and violence one would encounter in a larger city, but just as little interaction across geographic and socioeconomic parameters. For most of Wheeling's young people, the future lies elsewhere. A large shopping mall built ten miles to the west in Ohio has long since sucked the downtown dry. The last of the coal mines have closed, and the reign of steel has diminished. Industrial might is history. Yet Wheeling's greatest resources of all, it's cultural pluralism and pivotal labor and industrial history, have remained undervalued commodities. With a resurgence of interest in local heritage led by City fathers and mothers à la funds from Senator Robert Byrd and oversight by the National Park Service, the Wheeling National Heritage Area Corporation has come into being. Don Briggs was the United States Park Service staff person assigned to assist the City in its plans to become a National Heritage Area. He informed the local Heritage Core Group that in order to arrive upon themes to showcase to tourists, the City would have to contract to undergo an ethnographic survey. His plan was to let the people of Wheeling talk about their community and, based on the topics that emerged from their discussions, design meaningful tourist attractions. This grassroots approach to designing a National Heritage Area is both sensible and rare. The value of this approach to recording local history is that those who are seldom consulted have a chance to determine what is important to tell visitors about their world. A premise here is that if the Heritage exhibits appeal to Wheeling citizens, then the honesty and humanity of the displays will probably attract tourists as well. In April, 1994, Carrie and Michael Nobel Kline were awarded the contract to conduct Wheeling's Ethnographic Survey. The team soon renamed their work, launching "The Wheeling Spoken History Project." By the end of July, 1994, the Wheeling News-Register had agreed to publish what evolved into a 30-part series entitled, "Wheeling's Spoken History," in which Dr. and Mrs. Kline intercut excerpts from several narrators each week and sought out compelling artwork to round out the articles. The newspaper series quickly expanded the Spoken History Project from a research effort into a public forum for generating new conversations about an old city. With the Project's phone number printed with each article, citizens have not hesitated to correct the survey's findings or offer additional names of people to interview. The Spoken History Project also had an opportunity to create a series of audio tapes to accompany museum exhibits, as well as a 22-part series of radio programs for commercial broadcast on AM-radio, all produced by interweaving portions of different people's life story interviews across thematic lines and mixing in relevant music. Click here to view the products of the Wheeling Spoken History Project U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Huntington District Oral Historical Update From 1996-1998, under contract with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Huntington District, Michael and Carrie Kline conducted 60 oral historical interviews with Corps employees, retirees and those affected by Corps projects. They produced a ninety-minute historical audio tape entitled "Working A Square Watch" to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Huntington District. Click on Soundbytes (above) to hear samples from: "Working a Square Watch" -Senator Robert C. Byrd "A towboater's life" In addition the Klines produced a full length manuscript comprised of transcribed and interwoven portions of the interviews. In Their Own Words is written as a conversation amongst those involved with the Huntington District of the Army Corps from the 1960s through the mid-1990s. Read an article written by Carrie N. Kline based on the Klines' research with the Huntington District of the Army Corps of Engineers.