Our Ridge in Reflection: History Comes to Life!

Join our guest Lisa Payne for this first session of Our Ridge in Reflection, a monthly on-line program focused on bringing history to life!

Lisa will share stories about her work with Blue Ridge StoryCorps as we explore the value of preserving oral history. We will follow her example in subsequent sessions of this series: collecting personal knowledge, experience, and recollections about Friends Wilderness and this area, covering geology, ecology, forgotten inhabitants, evolution of the land and population from occupation, through conflict, to conservancy...

If you have a story or personal memories you would like to share in future sessions of this series, please contact center@friendswilderness.org

Purpose: We can look back in time and identify events in the history of Friends Wilderness and the Rolling Ridge area, but these tend to reflect very specific incidents or broad shifts. The dates of battles, land transfer, births, and deaths are often officially recorded. Ecological changes like clear-cutting to fuel the local iron forge, transition to farming, eradication of top predators, shift to forest conservation...can be accurately attributed to particular periods.

All of these collectively populate a timeline that provide a historical context for the region's transformation, but the depth and spirit of these changes, the heart and intention of the actions behind them, the emotional response and consequences cannot be inferred by dates, eras, or epochs.

Oral history brings Light into the timeline. Personal recollection and shared knowledge connect human experience across time and space. Our understanding of a single event expands and deepens when we learn about rationale for the action taken, the doubts and concerns beforehand, the celebration and/or regrets after.

About Our Guest: Lisa Payne is at home in wilderness. She grew up outside of Philadelphia on an old farm in a heavily wooded area where there was a wonderful swamp in the front yard. She lived most of her life in Pennsylvania and Virginia, where she and her husband raised their two children and were she worked as a special education teacher. She now lives on the Blue Ridge Mountains in West Virginia, a few miles north of the Friends Wilderness Center. She served on the board of the Friends Wilderness Center and the Rolling Ridge Conservancy. A birthright Friend, Lisa is a member of the Goose Creek Friends Monthly Meeting in Lincoln, VA.