Updated December 4, 2024

I had a friend, Coleen Grant Hardin, who was fascinated with genealogy, just as I am. She once told me the story of her great-grandmother, Dr. Elizabeth Durbin Irby Crow Smith, one of the first woman physicians in Northern Louisiana. As Elizabeth passed away at age 73, she said to those around her:

It’s a shame for me to die and take all this knowledge with me.

Few of us will gain the wisdom Elizabeth did. She was a resourceful, twice-widowed mother of seven during the Civil War and Reconstruction in the South and the only medical doctor in a large rural area. Still, her words make me wonder: what have I learned in my lifetime that I hope to pass on to someone someday?

Until she died at age 97, Coleen was inspired by her great-grandmother to gather and organize her papers, photographs, and memorabilia for family members and others she hoped would treasure them. Many have, and likely many more will. My friend found her genealogy work meaningful, as I do my own.

In 2007, four years after we started our community/history project, Rob and I focused on doing oral history interviews of neighbors, and we gave our project a name—Voices of the Violet Crown. Together, we created a friendly logo for it (left) to convey what we see as the spirit of the project. (Read more about the phrase “violet crown” here.)

Then it became clear to me—I am a voice of the violet crown, too. I began to envision a website where we could share what we’ve gathered in new ways. It also would be a place where I could articulate my experience being a neighbor here and coordinating this project.

Perhaps Voices of the Violet Crown always was meant to be, when I look back at a few of the people who inspired me before I even knew what I wanted to do with my life.

• Author, historian, actor, and broadcaster Studs Terkel, who insisted that people’s stories of their everyday lives are worth telling, worth listening to, and worth sharing.
• Poet, writer, and social theorist Judy Grahn, whose poem “Common Woman,” celebrates the kinds of women whose lives often are overlooked, especially as they grow older. The long poem ends with her acknowledgment that she, too, is a common woman, whose strength and courage and persistence and love have made a difference.
• Scholar, essayist, translator, cultural critic, and writer Lewis Hyde, whose inspiring article on the art of giving, “The Gift Must Always Move,” appeared in Co-evolution Quarterly, No. 35, Fall 1982.
• Visionary writer, farmer, and activist Wendell Berry, whose fiction and nonfiction writings emphasize the value of memory and sense of place for a community’s citizens. (Dave Sikkema has a good blog series about Berry.) Here’s a quote from Berry’s nonfiction work The Long-Legged House (1969):
  

A community is the mental and spiritual condition of knowing that the place is shared . . . the knowledge that people have of each other, their concern for each other, their trust in each other, the freedom with which they come and go among themselves.

I dedicate this blog post in memory of a few Voices of the Violet Crown we have come to know through this project and as neighbors (more about each of them here):

Jim Bauer, Roger Beck, Al Boemer, Evangeline Bushacker, John and Judy Carlson, David Glenn Cooke Jr., Sarah Walton Parmele Cooke (who lived to age 106), Margie Eichelberger Daugherty, Don and Gladys Gresser, J. D. Harper, Bob Harwood, Billie Herron, Lydia Huebel, Dr. Glen Eugene Journeay, Ginny Kalmbach, Lois Kasper, Al Kirby, Margaret Lankford, Evelyn McCathran, Emory Muehlbrad, Ellen Murtaugh, Frieda Neff, Nesbitt (Neb) and Helen Parson, Ben Joe Petmecky, Marion Prellop, Howard Darwin Pringle, Sidney and Billie Shelton, David Sikes, Mae Waggoner, Bill and Ginny Williamson, and Ann May “Annie” Haydon Wingfield (101). And, Diana Gresser Almaraz, Jon Carl Becker, Steve Boemer, Craig Cherico, Robert William Cooke, Karen Burns Dailey, Al Evans, Kathey Ferland, Renald Ferrovecchio, Paul Foreman, Kyle Gillman, Martha King, John Leffler, Chris Lippincott, Jenny Malin, Chris Noffsinger, Michael Prellop, Kay Nell Swenson Ramsey, Bob and Deborah “Debbie” Muehlbrad Rockett, Ryder “Red Ryder” Schwartz, Dave Shulder, and Barbara Zimmerman—all of whom died far too young.

I dedicate it in honor of neighbor Howard Bennett (at left in the photo, in 2010). He was Violet Crown Festival emcee for many years beginning in 2003, and he narrated our film A Community Mosaic. We can’t imagine anyone doing either with more heart.

And, I dedicate it in honor of my husband, Rob Burneson (at right in the photo). Without his love, support, patience, creativity, and technical skill, the Voices of the Violet Crown project would not have been possible.

Next—”‘Sherman, Set the WABAC Machine!,’ Part 1,” on Voices of the Violet Crown.