LOOKING AT ALL the old pictures in The Gazette’s sesquicentennial Profile editions last week, one word sprang to mind: quaint.
The oldest photos were of people posed stiffly in quaint old clothes, in front of quaint old buildings on quaint old streets. Children could be excused for thinking that the founders of Emporia had gone to the state fair and dressed up as cowboys, school marms and pioneers for some of those old-timey gag photos.
Life was so different in 1857 that the people in the pictures cannot help but look as if they are playing at being pioneers.
But of course, they weren’t.
The people in the photos were wearing their own clothes and were in the Emporia they had built, from the first raw wood shacks to the first elegant brick buildings. They were holding very still for a few minutes (cameras were slow then) in the middle of busy lives — lives that, technology aside, were very much like our lives today.
Our forefolks caught colds and hacked and coughed and sneezed. Their feet hurt when they stood up for too long. They got headaches and toothaches and just plain aches. They worried about money.
They fell in love and married, loved their children and worried about schools. Like the idolators in Paul, they “sat down to eat and drink and rose up to dance.”
Sometimes, they broke each others’ hearts.
Whatever they were, they were not the aged idols of frozen rectitude their photographs make them appear to be. They were people just like the people you pass on the street today — just like the person staring back from the mirror.
Look at that picture of Preston Plumb in his hairy hat. Ignore the hat and the rest of the antique clothing and just look at his face. He looks exactly like what he was — a 19-year-old boy.
Emporia was founded by people just like you.
At the city’s birthday party Tuesday, keep that in mind.
Party like it’s 1857.