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June 23, 2008

Moriah students stage stories from area's mining past

Moriah students dig into history and drama

By KIM SMITH DEDAM

PORT HENRY -- In what little spare time was left at the end of a miner's day, they played baseball and danced.

They slept in shifts, worked deep in the earth hauling iron ore out to build cities.

They came from places like Poland, Italy and Ireland.

And towns grew up around them.

The miners of Port Henry, Mineville and Witherbee came to life recently through their grandchildren and schoolmates in true tales, acted out across the village green.

With schoolbooks closed for the year, Kathy Ploufe's fifth grade celebrated legacy in theater, recalling old days of Witherbee-Sherman & Co., Republic Steel, baseball and union rallies.

"The Miner's Son," written by Lindsay Pontius through the Adirondack History Center Museum's North Country Heritage Program, brought fresh drafts to mines closed 30 years ago.

"Remember and tell the story," the children chanted.

Hayden Fernandez, a fifth-grader at Moriah Central School, played Cheever miner Daniel Murphy coming home from work on a summer eve looking for a baseball game.

"C'mon," Hayden yelled, "play ball!" while his classmates gathered around.

Fifth-graders Sarah Burbank and Shelby MacDougal portrayed miner's wives Molly Hughes and Anna Salerno.

With classmates Courtney Burch and Madison Stahl as Isabel Fernandez and Eva Kolsalski, the girls swept the floor and washed laundry, waiting for husbands to come home.

Some never did.

One life was lost in the mines every two months, they told the audience.

"It was difficult on the women and children."

The performance history piece continued for most of an hour around the Port Henry band shell built where the railroad yard once rumbled.

Pontius staged the production as promenade theater, where the audience follows actors around.

For a brief minute, long-gone miners seemed to smile through time.

The fifth grade, lined up along the Iron Center's railroad cars set on a short length of historic track, shuffled in their old shoes and took a bow. No one said a word for a while, as students handed out chunks of iron ore that sparkled in the evening sun.

Joan Daby, town historian and curator of the Iron Center nearby, said the program gave young people a chance to explore their own past.

"I thought it was done very nicely. The kids really got into it, and history will be more memorable to them because they acted it out."

The program concluded two months that Ploufe's class spent studying the history of the mines.

"If it's forgotten, it's lost," Daby said. "All that history, which is so very important, would be gone. In later years, if they want to delve into it more, at least they'll have the basics. We need people to keep the stories alive."

"I love watching them get committed to what's going on," Pontius said. "They realize they're storytellers and what they say has meaning."

Pontius researched, wrote and produced programs in six schools this year -- Keene, Elizabethtown, Saranac Lake, Westport, Keeseville and Moriah -- on town-specific projects reaching some 700 school children.

The Adirondack History Center Museum produced the shows with a two-year federal grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, Pontius said.

The History Center is now offering professional development opportunities to teachers to explore local history and get ready for the Quadricentennial Celebration in 2009.

kdedam@pressrepublican.com

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