Speaker 1: Pushkin. Imagine there's a place in our world where the
Speaker 1: known things go. A corridor of the mind. Along the walls,
Speaker 1: shelves stocked with proof, and all around the clutter of clues,
Speaker 1: wooden card catalogs, metal file drawers, walls covered with old maps,
Speaker 1: and over here my mother's sketch books, my father's notebooks.
Speaker 1: This place stores the facts that matter and matters of fact.
Speaker 1: It's all that stands between reasonable doubt and the chaos
Speaker 1: of uncertainty. Welcome to the Last Archive, a place I've
Speaker 1: been coming to for a while now to think about
Speaker 1: knowledge and the history of evidence. I'm Jill Lapoor. I'm
Speaker 1: fascinated by origins, When did something start and why? So
Speaker 1: for this final episode, I wanted to go on a
Speaker 1: quest for my own origins, a trip to the place
Speaker 1: where I first started asking questions about how we know
Speaker 1: what we know. I wanted to try to understand why,
Speaker 1: why exactly. I've gotten so worried about losing those things,
Speaker 1: losing the ability even to know anything at all. Step
Speaker 1: over the threshold to the town where I grew up.
Speaker 1: Long before I was born. The town where I grew
Speaker 1: up was taken apart brick by brick, stone by stone,
Speaker 1: plank by plank, tree by tree. How long does it
Speaker 1: take to build a town? I don't know. Decades, generations,
Speaker 1: clearing fields, cutting roads, building houses, planting crops, setting up
Speaker 1: a grist mill for grinding flower, a butchers, a bakers,
Speaker 1: a candlestick makers, establishing a church, a town hall, town
Speaker 1: common How long does it take for all that to
Speaker 1: be dismantled? I know that answer precisely nine years. In
Speaker 1: the eighteen nineties, the city of Boston was running out
Speaker 1: of drinking water. The Board of Health studied the problem,
Speaker 1: looked all over the state of Massachusetts for solutions. Where
Speaker 1: could they get water? They decided the best solution was
Speaker 1: to dam a river, the Nashua River. They'd create a
Speaker 1: reservoir with the water from the dammed river and build
Speaker 1: aqueducts to bring that water from the reservoir to the city.
Speaker 1: Problem was the place where they wanted to build this reservoir,
Speaker 1: A beautiful valley, a bound to full four thousand acre floodplain.
Speaker 1: It was a town, the town of West Boylston, population
Speaker 1: three thousand. Still, it was the best option, and the
Speaker 1: state decided to go ahead. In the name of progress.
Speaker 1: The state brought in the best engineers, drep plans detailed
Speaker 1: every inch of it, the dam, the reservoir, the pipes.
Speaker 1: The dismantling began in the year eighteen ninety five. Half
Speaker 1: the population of the town was displaced. The state brought
Speaker 1: in immigrant laborers battalions like my grandfather Giovanni Lapoor, to
Speaker 1: do the work. At night, they slept in shanties made
Speaker 1: of old boards and rusty nails. By day, every day
Speaker 1: they took things apart three hundred and sixty houses, eight schools,
Speaker 1: six mills, four churches, nineteen miles of roads, and six
Speaker 1: miles of train tracks. The dam was finished in nineteen
Speaker 1: oh five, and then the valley was very slowly flooded
Speaker 1: with water, its vast expanse swirling round the stone foundations
Speaker 1: of dismantled houses rising higher higher, higher, like filling a
Speaker 1: bowl with sue to the very rim. It was as
Speaker 1: if the town underneath had never been there. When we
Speaker 1: started this podcast three years ago, people kept getting the
Speaker 1: title wrong, the Lost Archive. It sounded so Indiana Jones.
Speaker 1: I had to keep correcting people. No, No, not the
Speaker 1: lost Archive, the last Archive. But I've come to see
Speaker 1: over these three seasons that a lot of the show
Speaker 1: really has been about loss. So instead of trying to
Speaker 1: avoid that title, I decided to jump right into it
Speaker 1: by going back to whist Boilston, the part of that
Speaker 1: town that survived the building of the reservoir. By nineteen
Speaker 1: o eight, half the town had been flooded. The valley,
Speaker 1: or what had once been the main part of town
Speaker 1: that was long gone. But after the reservoir was filled
Speaker 1: the hills that part of town survived. What had once
Speaker 1: been the outskirts became the center. I grew up there
Speaker 1: in the nineteen sixty in nineteen seventies, I can't even tree.
Speaker 1: This giant spruce tree was here when I was a kid.
Speaker 1: Was the weeping so far the only thing the willow
Speaker 1: tree in our backyard. I felt right bringing my producer
Speaker 1: Ben here. We first met, oh more than a decade ago,
Speaker 1: when he was a student of mine. He was one
Speaker 1: of those college students where you say, plainly, I'm the
Speaker 1: one learning here. We'd really gotten to know one another
Speaker 1: when he was working on his senior thesis about orson Welles.
Speaker 1: Ben and I share, among other things, a love of
Speaker 1: old radio and dogs and eb White essays for the
Speaker 1: Last Dart I've We've taken a lot of road trips,
Speaker 1: but for me, the weirdest quest we'd ever undertaken was
Speaker 1: that trip to the house where I grew up, a
Speaker 1: tiny white brick fronted colonial across the street from a
Speaker 1: restaurant called The Manor. Ben got there before I did.
Speaker 1: I was standing out front of the house, and then
Speaker 1: I was like, you know, maybe I shouldn't just be
Speaker 1: can here with those strange Yeah. I hadn't been back,
Speaker 1: probably since the nineteen eighties. You might think a historian
Speaker 1: would like to look back, to go back, but I
Speaker 1: don't like looking back at my own life. I'm also
Speaker 1: the opposite of a hoarder. I threw everything away, photographs, diaries, letters,
Speaker 1: pretty much junked all of it. I love reading other
Speaker 1: people's old male pawing through their archives, but not my own.
Speaker 1: I also never go back. Everything's different in my old
Speaker 1: neighborhood now. The street used to be a sleepy little
Speaker 1: road and something closer to a raceway. Now. Our house
Speaker 1: was kind of raggedy, a little shabby, a vacant lot
Speaker 1: next door for kickball, wild BlackBerry patch in the back.
Speaker 1: None of that's there anymore. What hasn't been mowed down
Speaker 1: has been tarted up. When I was twelve, the night
Speaker 1: before we moved out of that little brick fronted colonial,
Speaker 1: I walked through every room in the house in my
Speaker 1: pajamas in the dark, carrying a flashlight, casting its glow
Speaker 1: from corner at a corner, from floor to ceiling, trying
Speaker 1: to frame within the light and then commit to memory
Speaker 1: every single object within my sight. The yellow laundry shoot,
Speaker 1: the cream and leather world book encyclopedias, the pink flowered wallpaper,
Speaker 1: the shelf of canned soups, the ashtrays in every room
Speaker 1: for my father's wooden pipes, the smell of his brigs
Speaker 1: tobacco everywhere. I wanted to memorize the contents of the
Speaker 1: entire house as if I were shooting a film, to
Speaker 1: keep and etch and preserve it in my mind, an
Speaker 1: archive of my childhood. Nights afterward, I would close my
Speaker 1: eyes in bed and run the film again to watch it,
Speaker 1: so I wouldn't forget it visiting there looking at old
Speaker 1: photographs that would have been crazy to me. Instead, I
Speaker 1: kept it in my head. I can still unspool that
Speaker 1: film and watch it when I shut my eyes. I
Speaker 1: know where the soup should be shelved, the spot on
Speaker 1: the bumpy froumpy couch and the basement where my cat
Speaker 1: had kittens. The proper shade of pink for the bedroom
Speaker 1: above the garage. I didn't like to store things, but
Speaker 1: I like to keep memories. I was always worried about forgetting, mainly,
Speaker 1: I think because I was so distressed by what distresses
Speaker 1: every kid. Grown ups seem to have forgotten what it's
Speaker 1: like to be small and powerless and scared. How could
Speaker 1: they for me. The place to go for answers to
Speaker 1: that question, for answers to every question was the library
Speaker 1: in West Boylston. That place was the Beaman Memorial Public Library.
Speaker 1: He could walk there from our house, and I walked
Speaker 1: there all the time because it was one of my
Speaker 1: chores to bring all the library books back. How did
Speaker 1: you return all these books? I had this little red
Speaker 1: canvas rucksack that with these canvas straps that I really loved,
Speaker 1: and I don't know where I got it or if
Speaker 1: I picked it out, but like I remember thinking, this
Speaker 1: is exactly what a little girls should carry your books
Speaker 1: to the library. And I don't know why I like it.
Speaker 1: I think I God, look at the library. I walked
Speaker 1: from my house to the library went partly through the woods,
Speaker 1: at least the way I took it. You walked across
Speaker 1: our backyard, leapt over a little brook, and traveled along
Speaker 1: a path through a shadowy pine forest. You got through
Speaker 1: the sort of BlackBerry field through you merged out of
Speaker 1: the BlackBerry patch, and all of a sudden you were
Speaker 1: at the town common. There was the Catholic church, our church,
Speaker 1: the cemetery, a skating rink in the winter, a gazebo,
Speaker 1: and then you cut through this park like thing, which
Speaker 1: wasn't as landscaped as now. This is the center of town.
Speaker 1: Door to door. It took all of fifteen minutes. It's
Speaker 1: occurred to me more than once when working on the
Speaker 1: last archive, that this building, this little town library, lies
Speaker 1: at its heart. When I say this thing at the
Speaker 1: top of the show about the place where the known
Speaker 1: Things go, I must be thinking about the Beaman Memori
Speaker 1: Royal Public Library, because that's the place where I anyway
Speaker 1: used to go to know things. Out front of the
Speaker 1: library there's a little monument to the town's revolutionary era founder,
Speaker 1: Ezra Beamon. It's like how in The Simpsons there's a
Speaker 1: statue in Springfield to that town's revolutionary era founder, guy
Speaker 1: who goes by the name Jebediah Obadiah Zachariah Jedediah Springfield.
Speaker 1: So this is the famous Beeman watering trough, because I
Speaker 1: think his name is Jedediah Zachariah Obediahs. You can't get
Speaker 1: water for your horse here anymore, of course, the trough's empty.
Speaker 1: It's just decorative. But back when I was a kid,
Speaker 1: I found it magical, a portal to another world, a
Speaker 1: kind of time machine, to a world where people had
Speaker 1: horses who needed water. And I was always curious about
Speaker 1: this mysterious founder, Guy are Ezra Beamon. In The Simpsons,
Speaker 1: Lisa sets her mind on unmasking Jebba Springfield. This quest
Speaker 1: takes her to Springfield's Historical Society, where she digs through
Speaker 1: the archives and she finds the secret confessions of Jeopardiah Springfield. Know,
Speaker 1: ye who read this, there is more to my life
Speaker 1: than history record. That was exactly my girlhood fantasy. As
Speaker 1: I trudged every day into the Beaman Memorial Library wearing
Speaker 1: my red canvas rucksack stuffed with books, standing in front
Speaker 1: of the historical plaque. I can still feel a little
Speaker 1: bit of that thrill. This watering trough was erected in
Speaker 1: eighteen o eight at the old Beamon Tavern by Major
Speaker 1: as Rabeam, and the founder of was Bolston. This is
Speaker 1: an ingering question. What does it mean to found a town?
Speaker 1: Is it like he showed up here and he was like,
Speaker 1: I like the cut of this valley and you should
Speaker 1: come out, or as Rabamon founded was Bolston in the
Speaker 1: way that most New England towns were founded by seceding
Speaker 1: from another town. The Beamon's settled in New England in
Speaker 1: sixteen thirty five. Ezra was born in seventeen thirty six.
Speaker 1: In seventeen sixty four he built the Beeman Tavern, where
Speaker 1: colonists would laid a rail against British tyranny. Then he
Speaker 1: fought in the Revolutionary War. Starting in seventeen ninety three,
Speaker 1: he lobbied the state, hoping to establish the valley where
Speaker 1: he lived as its own town, separate from the town
Speaker 1: of Boylston. He won that battle in eighteen o eight,
Speaker 1: founded West Boylston and died three years later. How the
Speaker 1: library got started, that's another story. West Boylston opened its
Speaker 1: first library in eighteen seventy eight, mainly with a collection
Speaker 1: of books donated by the writer, abolitionist and suffragist Lydia
Speaker 1: Moriah Child. That library was demolished for the reservoir, and
Speaker 1: so was Ezra Beeman's family farm, and so was the
Speaker 1: Beeman Tavern. Anyway, in nineteen eleven, when the New Town
Speaker 1: Center was just being built, after the reservoir was filled,
Speaker 1: Ezra Beeman's great grandson funded the building of a new
Speaker 1: Town library. It opened the next year as the Beaman Memorial.
Speaker 1: It opened at the height of the progressive era, when
Speaker 1: public libraries represented the vanguard of democracy, These free, beautiful
Speaker 1: places open for everyone, especially for the waves of new immigrants, Hungarians, Jews,
Speaker 1: Italians like my grandfather. You know, probably the stateliest building
Speaker 1: in town. I mean, we're looking at it. It's a
Speaker 1: you know, it's it's not gorgeous. It's a it's a
Speaker 1: sort of very kind of prim brick with white trim,
Speaker 1: two story building with the kind of pitched slate roof.
Speaker 1: It's not imposing, it's not monumental, but it communicates its
Speaker 1: public charter in the way it faces this little common
Speaker 1: and in the way it occupies the tip of this
Speaker 1: long triangle where the two main roads of the town
Speaker 1: are coming together. It just says, welcome to our town,
Speaker 1: and here is our world of knowledge. Ben and I
Speaker 1: headed inside. We walked into a reading room with tall windows,
Speaker 1: long wooden tables equilt on the wall, each square stitched
Speaker 1: to depict an episode in the town's history. And it
Speaker 1: was very very quiet. You know how, It's like every
Speaker 1: library has the sign that says, like, maintain a library
Speaker 1: like atmosphere. Yeah, which is this kind of like very
Speaker 1: circular reasoning. I feel that this is a really clear
Speaker 1: illustration of a library type atmosphere. Upon coming in, you
Speaker 1: feel it. The library was a lot smaller than I remembered. Also,
Speaker 1: it was a lot nicer. I could still close my
Speaker 1: eyes and picture where my favorite books used to be shelved,
Speaker 1: the corner where I liked best to read. Now when
Speaker 1: I go to a library reading room, it's a big library,
Speaker 1: Harvard's widen Air Library or the New York Public Library
Speaker 1: or the Library of Congress. The beam in reading room
Speaker 1: is the size of a living room, and all the
Speaker 1: more magical for at a tiny mystical palace. You see
Speaker 1: all these quotes about libraries. They're penned up on the
Speaker 1: glass the very existence of libraries affords the best evidence
Speaker 1: that we may yet have hope for the future of
Speaker 1: man ts Eliott with u Isabella end a quote that's
Speaker 1: very last archivey. The library is inhabited by spirits that
Speaker 1: come out of the pages at night. We're at the
Speaker 1: beginning of the episode. When I was a little kid,
Speaker 1: I spent most of my time in the children's room
Speaker 1: in the basement, where the librarian was named Missus Noise,
Speaker 1: Missus Noise, who told everyone to be quiet. The children's
Speaker 1: room has since then moved up to the second floor.
Speaker 1: Ben and I headed upstairs. Rugged carpet, hip high shelves,
Speaker 1: pint sized chairs, stuffed animals. This is so cute. I
Speaker 1: love a children's every puppet theater start. Yeah, they have
Speaker 1: a painted puppet theater like a Jella. You graduate from
Speaker 1: the children's room and get set loose in the nonfiction
Speaker 1: and fiction stacks, the reference room, the card catalog, the
Speaker 1: computer terminal. Everything in a library is there just for
Speaker 1: you and also just for everyone else. It's a public
Speaker 1: space for common knowledge and for community. But you could
Speaker 1: also take a piece of it back home in your backpack.
Speaker 1: Every step of the walk home passed the town Common,
Speaker 1: through the BlackBerry patch, winding a path through the pine woods,
Speaker 1: leaping over the brook sneaker squelching in the mud, rucksack
Speaker 1: on my back, walking through the beam in public library.
Speaker 1: I began to think it had been just this all along,
Speaker 1: that I felt I'd lost the giddiness of carrying that weight,
Speaker 1: bringing home a stack full of books, believing they held
Speaker 1: all the answers, spirits seeping out of their pages. Every
Speaker 1: little town library that I've ever been to has its
Speaker 1: own version of a last archive, some tiny locked room.
Speaker 1: Sometimes it's in an attic, more often it's down in
Speaker 1: the basement where they keep old stuff, antiques, a lot
Speaker 1: of it. It's junk stuff people donate to the library
Speaker 1: thinking it's amazing and collectible, but really it's pretty much trash,
Speaker 1: and then the library and has got to keep it,
Speaker 1: or feels obligated to keep it. I've seen very old
Speaker 1: and obscure books in these places, paintings, prints, unwanted bronze plaques,
Speaker 1: chipped marble statues, jewelry, boxes of beads, campaign buttons, moth
Speaker 1: eaten poncho's, ivory, chess pieces, stamp collections, faded photo albums.
Speaker 1: Sometimes it's a treasure, though I found uncataloged invaluable portraits
Speaker 1: in these rooms. I once went to a town library
Speaker 1: where they had a mammoth tusk and preserved in plaster
Speaker 1: dinosaur footprints. I wouldn't be surprised to find a dead
Speaker 1: body in one of these places. Honestly, they're strapped, padlocked
Speaker 1: trunk full of bones. The last archive at the Beamon
Speaker 1: Memorial Library in West Boylstone is a windowless room in
Speaker 1: the basement with metal shelves and a dehumidifier humming. Anna,
Speaker 1: the library director, let us in. There was a wooden
Speaker 1: reading table and a cardboard box filled with tiny white
Speaker 1: cotton gloves. Ben and I stretched them on and began
Speaker 1: pawing our way across the shelves. I always want somehow
Speaker 1: to touch everything, lay a finger across the spine of
Speaker 1: every book. Ben's got the same bug, I thought, watching
Speaker 1: his white gloved fingers tracing in boss titles as he
Speaker 1: read them out loud to himself, whispering, neither of us
Speaker 1: are hardly happier than when in a room like this.
Speaker 1: Dust boars dancing in the light so much in so
Speaker 1: small a space musty. It smells like knowledge. And none
Speaker 1: of it exists online anywhere. Ezra Beamon's family Bible is here.
Speaker 1: Heaviest Stone, the guy who started the Farmer's Almanacs from
Speaker 1: West Boylston. So they've got a complete set of old
Speaker 1: Farmer's Almanacs down here. They've got the whole of Lydia
Speaker 1: Maria Child's Library, the hundred and seventy volumes that started
Speaker 1: off this collection. There are also plenty of records of
Speaker 1: my own family, Photographs of my father, who was a
Speaker 1: public school teacher, in the town's high school yearbooks, smiling
Speaker 1: surrounded by the men's basketball team, or sitting behind a
Speaker 1: desk wearing a bow tie, smoking his pipe and looking shy.
Speaker 1: Then there were also lots and lots of old maps
Speaker 1: and blueprints of the town, the two thousand acres of
Speaker 1: farms and houses and churches and mills that in the
Speaker 1: early eighteen nineties the water board was planning to flood.
Speaker 1: Plan of West Boylston after the survey of the Metropolitan
Speaker 1: water Board eighteen ninety eight, the state had to inventory
Speaker 1: every square inch of land and everything on it to
Speaker 1: pay property owners and to plan the engineering marble that
Speaker 1: was the reservoir in the dam. Each slope and incline,
Speaker 1: the pitch and size of it all. Looking at the
Speaker 1: engineering plans blue with white lines like water and fishing line,
Speaker 1: I pictured what they hid. The farm or somesow once
Speaker 1: had a record number of piglets. Could almost hear them
Speaker 1: squealing the hayloft where lovers met on autumn evenings, whispering
Speaker 1: over the thrumb of crickets. Their whole world had been
Speaker 1: reduced to these blue sheets of paper. And then, after
Speaker 1: the project had been completed, what did the State Waterboard
Speaker 1: do with all those plans? They gave them to the
Speaker 1: town library. On the wall above the bank of drawers
Speaker 1: that held the blueprints, they hung a manuscript, framed and
Speaker 1: under glass, a letter dated nineteen twelve from the town
Speaker 1: Clerk's office, in much faded handwriting. We are deeply gratified
Speaker 1: that we are the recipients of a kindness, the final
Speaker 1: expression of a long cherished purpose, so appropriate and so timely.
Speaker 1: It was a resolution of thanks to Ezra Beemon's great grandson,
Speaker 1: thanking him for the gift of the library. This gift
Speaker 1: will enable us, our children, and our children's children down
Speaker 1: through the generations to reap the rich footage of recorded
Speaker 1: human thought rich? Where is it? It's got to be footage. No,
Speaker 1: it's not footage vintage. I just could not figure out
Speaker 1: this weird old word. Could not see the letters tell
Speaker 1: one from another, could not sound it out. I found
Speaker 1: myself in a library unable to read the word. Is footage?
Speaker 1: Is not the rich footage of recorded human thought? Okay,
Speaker 1: so we had not. I found the equivalent of Jebediah
Speaker 1: Obadiah Zachariah Jedediah Springfield Secret Diary. But honestly it was
Speaker 1: better this tribute to Ezra Beemon's great grandson. This gift
Speaker 1: will enable us, our children and our children's children down
Speaker 1: through the generations to reap the rich. It's a good thing.
Speaker 1: Ben was with me. He's much better at keeping his
Speaker 1: head at a word like footage. I mean, you can
Speaker 1: read fruit, to read the rich fruited. It comes to this,
Speaker 1: the end. This is like, this is the original, This
Speaker 1: is the Incanla, the last dur Guy. We have found
Speaker 1: it here, and yet we cannot have it to read
Speaker 1: the footage of recorded human thought. This is where the
Speaker 1: known things go. This letter, pressed under glass, framed in wood,
Speaker 1: hanging on a wall, fading had been in this little
Speaker 1: basement room my whole life, a fifteen minute walk from
Speaker 1: my house, and I'd never seen it before. It would
Speaker 1: have meant nothing to me when I was ten years
Speaker 1: old anyway, but it's been waiting here for the moment
Speaker 1: I needed it. Reading it, trying to read it gave
Speaker 1: me that same magical feeling I always get when reading
Speaker 1: something written long ago that says something to me, as
Speaker 1: if it had been written and sealed in an envelope
Speaker 1: and mailed to me, mailed to everyone, but we each
Speaker 1: get to open it up when the time is right.
Speaker 1: It's very beautiful. The archives of old podcasts don't have stacks,
Speaker 1: no spines of books, not even any file drawers. Just
Speaker 1: MP three's floating in the ether, episodes about Rachel Carson
Speaker 1: and bird Song, about Pedro Gonzalez and Spanish language radio,
Speaker 1: about the polio vaccine and access Sally, and Soviet propaganda,
Speaker 1: everything from the Scopes trial to January sixth. The idea
Speaker 1: of a fictional archive had been Ben's, but the fictional
Speaker 1: conceit always intersects with something real. That's what we found anyway.
Speaker 1: This love letter to Ezra Beemon's great grandson from the
Speaker 1: town clerk it was like that. I wanted to nab it,
Speaker 1: stick it in my rucksack, head off through the BlackBerry brambles,
Speaker 1: and carry it back into the last archive. But not
Speaker 1: everything lost finds its way to an archive. Not most things.
Speaker 1: Actually most things they just vanish. Ben and I had
Speaker 1: one more stop to the place where the lost things go.
Speaker 1: So see how we're just driving down into You could
Speaker 1: imagine this just as a valley. It we're just really
Speaker 1: gone lower, much lower than we were. But this is
Speaker 1: the Wachuset Reservoir, and it's really very beautiful. When I
Speaker 1: grew up in West Wellston, the same as if everything
Speaker 1: involved around the reservoir, it was just so big. It's fast, really,
Speaker 1: which means that you're forever driving across it or around it.
Speaker 1: It's just a reservoir. Though you take it for granted.
Speaker 1: You don't really think about it, except that I did.
Speaker 1: Maybe when I was six years old, my mother told
Speaker 1: me that under the reservoir used to be the town.
Speaker 1: I remember we were driving over this same causeway, and
Speaker 1: then I got obsessed with it, the drowned town under
Speaker 1: the water, the town haunted, flooded, vanished. I biked across
Speaker 1: here all the time, as a kid, this causeway, and
Speaker 1: I'm going to take a left here and go buy
Speaker 1: this hotdog stand, which is a famous landmark. Well used
Speaker 1: to be Bobs, but I guess it's Roun's now. The
Speaker 1: last stop of this last last archive road trip to
Speaker 1: the watch Us Reservoir. Like when you're a kid, like
Speaker 1: there's your family, and there's your house, and then there's
Speaker 1: your street, and then there's your neighborhood, and then there's
Speaker 1: some sense of your town. It always felt like my
Speaker 1: town was just missing. My town had gone to its
Speaker 1: watery grave below all this water too, where the nipmuck
Speaker 1: dead w U sit. That's a nipmuck ward Nashua, the
Speaker 1: river that was damned to make this reservoir. That's an
Speaker 1: Abanaki word. Maybe there's also something I don't know if
Speaker 1: this is like part of being a historian or I
Speaker 1: don't know if you think this is part of being
Speaker 1: a historian, but if you have to have some kind
Speaker 1: of affect of love of the past, like there has
Speaker 1: to be just an impulse there to feel the sense
Speaker 1: of belonging with it. It was a little scary to me,
Speaker 1: but some sense that it was some kind of purgatory
Speaker 1: where the lost. We're trapped. And it's not as though
Speaker 1: I wanted to go visit them, not least because I
Speaker 1: can't swim. I have more than once come very close
Speaker 1: to drowning. I'm terrified of water, crazy scared of it.
Speaker 1: But I pictured it all the time. I wondered what
Speaker 1: might be down there at the bottom of the reservoir.
Speaker 1: The thing about the past for me is it doesn't
Speaker 1: ever really go away, like stuff that happened generations ago is.
Speaker 1: It's still kind of there, like you can go find it,
Speaker 1: you can look it up, and the evidence that had
Speaker 1: happened is very likely still there. Below this water are
Speaker 1: the foundations of houses that haven't been there since nineteen
Speaker 1: o two, but the foundations are still there. You could
Speaker 1: still put on your scoopa gear and dive under this
Speaker 1: water and you would find you would find the remains.
Speaker 1: It was as if there had been these three places
Speaker 1: growing up that it really mattered to me. My house
Speaker 1: which I loved and knew we were leaving and tried
Speaker 1: desperately to remember the library where they actually kept things,
Speaker 1: stored knowledge so that it wouldn't vanish, and this reservoir,
Speaker 1: which was where all knowledge was lost. Just sunk, disappeared.
Speaker 1: How do you find your way to that stuff without drowning?
Speaker 1: After the break? Ben and I dive in. I remember
Speaker 1: in high school reading Adrian Rich for the first time
Speaker 1: poems she wrote in the early nineteen seventies, especially this one,
Speaker 1: Diving into the Wreck. Here's her reading it. I came
Speaker 1: to explore the wreck. The words of purposes, the words
Speaker 1: are maps. I came to see the damage that was
Speaker 1: done and the treasures that prevail. I stroked the beam
Speaker 1: of my lamp slowly along the flank of something more
Speaker 1: permanent than fish or weed. These lines of riches just
Speaker 1: spoke to me, then cut into my bones. It was
Speaker 1: exactly how I had always pictured diving into the reservoir,
Speaker 1: just going under the thing. I came for the wreck,
Speaker 1: and not the story of the wreck, the thing itself,
Speaker 1: and not the myth. The drowned face, always staring towards
Speaker 1: the sun, the evidence of damage, worn by salt and
Speaker 1: sway into this threadbare beauty, the ribs of the disaster,
Speaker 1: curving their assertion among the tentative horns, The evidence of damage,
Speaker 1: the ribs of the disaster, the wreck, the ruin. Ben
Speaker 1: and I always joke about ruins and remains. How we
Speaker 1: both want to see those places. How that's a big
Speaker 1: part of how we imagined most episodes of this podcast,
Speaker 1: diving into Rex. We had all these trips and where
Speaker 1: we would go to some place where something used to be,
Speaker 1: Like here's where Ralph Allison's barn was. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: this is where West Boylston was. This is where this
Speaker 1: dead body was found. The parking lot where this crime
Speaker 1: was committed. This is where doctor do a little once
Speaker 1: loved at the reservoir. We parked the car near the
Speaker 1: hot dog stand and near the reservoirs. One historic landmark,
Speaker 1: another kind of wreck. Now we're walking down this kind
Speaker 1: of gravel carriage road to the what's called an old
Speaker 1: Stone Church, which was a Baptist church built just a
Speaker 1: couple of years before the state decided to flood the town.
Speaker 1: The town's Baptist church right at this spot at the
Speaker 1: edge of the valley, had burned to the ground in
Speaker 1: eighteen ninety so the Baptists had built a new one
Speaker 1: out of massive stones, unburnable to last forever. It was
Speaker 1: brand new in eighteen ninety two, and then the next
Speaker 1: year the state water Board made its decision to flood
Speaker 1: the valley. The Baptist congregation mostly left, fled to other
Speaker 1: towns like everyone else, but someone decided to leave the
Speaker 1: brand new stone church standing as a kind of monument.
Speaker 1: I guess it was just too new, too beautiful, too
Speaker 1: hopeful to dismantle what had just been mantled. Do you
Speaker 1: want to go inside the church? Yeah, let's going. It's
Speaker 1: gotten so much Nacer. They really did this incredible job
Speaker 1: renovating it. When I was a kid, it was it
Speaker 1: had been just left since, you know, eighteen ninety five,
Speaker 1: and the roof had fallen in. I had been struck
Speaker 1: by lightning a few times, and it was really dangerous,
Speaker 1: and they had just put it like a chain link
Speaker 1: fence around it, and it was kind of terrifying. It's
Speaker 1: also very wholesome graffiti Eric and Tony true love stuff,
Speaker 1: Marry Me. There's no pews in it, there's no altar,
Speaker 1: there's no stained glass windows. There's no windows at all.
Speaker 1: There's just holes it. It's a great looking little church,
Speaker 1: it really is. You can see why you wouldn't want
Speaker 1: to tear it down immediately after completing it. Yeah, it's beautiful.
Speaker 1: Is this the thing we'd come for? In the basement
Speaker 1: of the library. We'd found that letter on the rich
Speaker 1: footage of recorded human thought, common knowledge. In other words,
Speaker 1: the theme of this whole season. I'd wanted to show
Speaker 1: Ben the reservoir because as it's beautiful, but also because
Speaker 1: I thought it m'd hold within its depths some answers
Speaker 1: about the theme of the whole podcast, the slipping away
Speaker 1: of certainty, the rise of doubt. And then we'd come
Speaker 1: to the church, a memorial to another kind of search
Speaker 1: for truth. One thing Ben and I share. We're both Catholic,
Speaker 1: and these holy places make us light headed with the
Speaker 1: sense of the eternal mysteries. It's one thing we've both
Speaker 1: been drawn to puzzle over in this podcast, how the mystery,
Speaker 1: the unknown, what was known only to God, had been
Speaker 1: replaced by this secular idea of the fact, and then,
Speaker 1: more recently, the fact had been replaced by data, a
Speaker 1: wholly new kind of mystery, with its own priesthood, but
Speaker 1: without the love. Water flooding a valley, leaving it a ruin,
Speaker 1: a wreck. We sat inside for a long time, watching
Speaker 1: birds fly in and out, tending to nests in the rafters.
Speaker 1: We heard picnickers outside, popping the lids on soda cans.
Speaker 1: I felt right that we'd come together, the two of
Speaker 1: us with a microphone and a recorder. We are I am,
Speaker 1: You are, by cowardice or courage, the one who find
Speaker 1: our way back to the scene, carrying a knife, a camera,
Speaker 1: a book of myths in which our names do not appear.
Speaker 1: When we were first struggling with what to call this
Speaker 1: podcast the Last Archive, the Lost Archive. For a long time,
Speaker 1: we'd wanted to call it the Evidence Room. Somehow, I
Speaker 1: think that name was already taken. There'd been some talk
Speaker 1: of getting around that by calling the show Jillipour's Evidence Room.
Speaker 1: But I'm glad my name never appeared. It's not my room.
Speaker 1: It never was my room. This podcast started out as
Speaker 1: a kind of murder mystery. Who killed Truth? There's no
Speaker 1: royal answer, or really, if I'm being honest, there are
Speaker 1: only two answers. First, everyone killed truth, the dead, living,
Speaker 1: the old, the young, the left, the right. The evidence
Speaker 1: is everywhere a collapse of trust. And Second, truth isn't dead,
Speaker 1: even though very often it's buried. A lot of it
Speaker 1: is floating around in archives and libraries and laboratories and
Speaker 1: classrooms and city halls and town commons and old churches.
Speaker 1: It's a question of finding it, saving it, deciphering it.
Speaker 1: Who killed truth? I wish I could offer up a
Speaker 1: tidy ending, a big reveal, gather all the suspects into
Speaker 1: the conservatory, tell the story of my investigation, explain my methods,
Speaker 1: list every clue, and then in a flourish unmasked the murderer.
Speaker 1: But I can't, Ben and I left West Boylston and
Speaker 1: the Old Stone Church and the Beaman Memorial Library and
Speaker 1: trudged back into the Last Archive. We've met so many people, teenagers, scholars,
Speaker 1: dog scientists, archivists, artists, farmers, hypnotists, naturalists, poets. We'd been
Speaker 1: so many places, We dived into so many wrecks and
Speaker 1: come up mainly only with more questions. Cleaning up the
Speaker 1: Last Archive, we got to talking about where we'd been
Speaker 1: and what we'd found out, trying to put the place
Speaker 1: in some kind of order. Yeah, theater tickets. Was there
Speaker 1: ever an organizing scheme or like, these are things that
Speaker 1: fit in this drawer? Yeah, Well, it's an archive without
Speaker 1: an archivist, so that's always been sort of a problem.
Speaker 1: Oh wow, Look, it's all the episodes, every single episode
Speaker 1: of the Last Archive. How did those get here? That's
Speaker 1: weird for the birds? His first bird walk, I guess,
Speaker 1: And I'd like to have had a movie. Lstran LaVita
Speaker 1: Hobby was a lady in complete commerce. Repeat after me.
Speaker 1: I'm going to turn back through time and space? Did
Speaker 1: you turn the light on over there? I didn't touch it.
Speaker 1: I don't think that doesn't even that doesn't look like
Speaker 1: artificial light. Ben, is that glowing? What's that sound? It's
Speaker 1: almost like did you hear that? The Last Archive is
Speaker 1: written and hosted by me Jill Lapour. It's produced by
Speaker 1: Sophie Crane, Ben Natt of Haffrey and Lucy Sullivan. Our
Speaker 1: editors are Julia Barton and Sophie Crane, and our executive
Speaker 1: producer is Mi Lobell. Jake Gorsky is our engineer. Fact
Speaker 1: checking by me Games. Original music by Matthias Bosse and
Speaker 1: John Evans of Stellwagen Symfinett. Our full proof player is
Speaker 1: Robert Ricotta. Many of our sound effects are from Harry
Speaker 1: Janette Junior and the Star Jennette Foundation. Special thanks to
Speaker 1: Anna Shaw and Steve Carlson at the West Boylston Beamon
Speaker 1: Memorial Library. The Last Archive is a production of Pushkin Industries.
Speaker 1: If you love this show, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus,
Speaker 1: offering bonus content like The Last Archivist, a limited series
Speaker 1: just for subscribers, and add free listening across our network
Speaker 1: for four ninety nine a month. Look for the Pushkin
Speaker 1: Plus channel on Apple Podcasts or at pushkin dot Fm.
Speaker 1: If you like the show, please remember to rate, share
Speaker 1: and review. To find more Pushkin podcasts, Listen on the
Speaker 1: iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 1: I'm Jill Lapour. I've had my share of magic Archives,
Speaker 1: but this place isn't done with us yet. I left
Speaker 1: my keys with Ben. He went back to check out
Speaker 1: that freaky light. Nobody's seen him in weeks. I think
Speaker 1: that's a good sign.