Longmeadow, Massachusetts, settled in 1644 and incorporated as a town in 1783, was long effectively divided into two communities known variously as “The Street” or the West Village, and what was at first called “Inward Commons” and later became known as the East Village. The East Village, more populous and industrial, hosted a dozen quarries that made the area famous for the “. . . reddish brown sandstone used to build the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., along with brownstone tenements in Boston and New York.” In 1894, the East Village split off and became the town of East Longmeadow. As such, it is a relatively young town from a historical perspective; elderly residents have parents or grandparents who were actually born before the town existed as a distinct entity. Perhaps this timeline, underscored by its sense of the recent, is why aggressive efforts have not been previously directed at identifying, organizing and preserving artifacts associated with the history of the town of East Longmeadow. This digitization proposal therefore hopes to achieve multiple goals, by cataloging, organizing and digitizing critical materials in order to make these available online to a wider audience, as well as to target preservation before the materials are lost forever.
This exercise created a sample grant narrative for digitizing materials in East Longmeadow, the town where I currently reside. Click on the link below for the complete grant narrative:
Stan Prager Online Portfolio 