Why Old Buildings Matter and What We Lose Forever When They Get Torn Down

 There is a house in your town or your neighborhood that is old enough to have stories.

Maybe it was built in the 1800s. Maybe it was the first commercial building on a street. Maybe it was a church that served a community for a hundred years before the congregation moved away. Maybe it is just an ordinary house that has been standing since before anyone alive today was born.

That building is a physical historical document. And it is probably in danger.

What Buildings Carry That Nothing Else Does

An old building tells you things that no written record can fully capture.

It tells you about the technology and materials available when it was built. The craftsmanship of the people who constructed it. The economic conditions of the people who commissioned it. The way people understood space and light and function in that era.

It tells you about how a place changed over time through the layers of renovation and adaptation that got added to it over the decades. The doorway that was added. The room that was divided. The facade that was updated to look modern and then became old itself.

It carries in its walls and floors and foundations the physical evidence of every person who ever lived or worked or worshipped or gathered inside it.

Once it is gone none of that can be recovered. Not from photographs. Not from architectural drawings. Not from any written description. The physical thing itself is gone.

Why Buildings Keep Getting Demolished

Old buildings cost money to maintain. They often do not meet modern building codes without expensive renovation. They sit on land that developers want for new construction that will generate more revenue.

Local governments often approve demolition permits for historic structures without requiring documentation. Owners who want to demolish a building for development sometimes move faster than preservation advocates can organize a response.

In poor communities especially, historic buildings get demolished routinely with minimal public attention or opposition.

What You Can Do Before a Building Is Gone

Photograph every old building in your area that looks like it might be at risk. Exterior and interior if you can get access. Document the details that make it significant. The architectural features. The age. Any history you know about who built it or lived in it.

Upload those photographs to archive.org or to the Library of Congress Built in America collection which accepts photographs of historic structures.

If a building in your area is threatened with demolition, contact your local historic preservation commission. Most cities and counties have one. They do not always have the power to stop demolitions but they can sometimes slow the process long enough for alternatives to be found.

At minimum, document it fully before it is gone. A building that has been thoroughly photographed and described has left something behind even if the physical structure is lost.

An old building is not just a building. It is a container for everything that happened inside it. Treat it that way.

Robert Lee Beers III is a writer and digital preservation advocate based in North Charleston South Carolina.

The Old People in Your Town Are Walking History Books and They Are Running Out of Time

 There is an old man in your town or your neighborhood or your family who remembers things that no book records.

He remembers what the main street looked like sixty years ago. What businesses were there and who ran them. Which buildings got torn down and what replaced them. Which families were prominent and which ones struggled. What the big events were that shaped the community and how people felt about them at the time.

She remembers what it was like to be a young woman in this country before certain rights existed. What work was available to her and what was closed off. What she had to do to raise her kids. What the hardest years felt like from the inside.

They remember names. Faces. Stories. Details about how life actually worked that never made it into any official record.

And when they die all of that goes with them.

This Is the Most Urgent Preservation Problem There Is

Books can be reprinted. Photographs can be scanned from originals. Documents can be digitized. But once a person who carries living memory of a time and place is gone there is no recovery. No second chance. No way to go back and ask the questions you forgot to ask.

Every day that passes without someone recording these stories is a day of irreplaceable history lost.

How to Do an Oral History Interview

You do not need professional equipment or formal training. You need a phone with a voice recording app and a list of questions.

Start with basic biographical information. Where were you born. What were your parents like. Where did you grow up. What was your neighborhood like when you were young.

Move into specific memories. What do you remember about this town when you were a kid. What did you do for work. What were the big events that happened in your lifetime that you remember most clearly.

Ask about the community specifically. Who were the important people in this community when you were young. What businesses were here. What has changed the most. What do you wish young people knew about how things used to be.

Let them talk. The best oral history interviews follow the person's memory rather than sticking rigidly to a script.

Record the whole thing. Let them know you are recording. Save the file somewhere it will not get lost. And if possible transcribe it or have it transcribed so the information is searchable.

Where to Put What You Collect

StoryCorps at storycorps.org accepts oral history recordings and deposits them in the Library of Congress. Your recording could become part of the permanent national historical record.

Your local library's local history collection will often accept transcripts and recordings from community oral history projects.

Archive.org accepts audio uploads and preserves them permanently for free.

You can also publish excerpts or summaries on a blog with the person's permission. Making the knowledge public is what transforms a personal recording into a historical document.

Pick up the phone today. Call the oldest person you know. Tell them you want to hear their stories. You are running out of time and so are they.

Robert Lee Beers III is a writer and digital preservation advocate based in North Charleston South Carolina.

Social Media Posts Are Primary Historical Sources and Nobody Is Saving Them

 In the summer of 2020 millions of people around the world posted on social media about what they were experiencing during a global pandemic, a major wave of protests over racial justice, and a contentious election season.

Those posts were raw, real, firsthand accounts of what it felt like to be alive during one of the most significant periods in recent American history. They captured things that no journalist or historian could capture. The confusion and fear of the early pandemic. The anger and hope of the protest movement. The way ordinary people experienced and understood what was happening around them.

Most of those posts are already gone or inaccessible.

Why Social Media Is a Historical Source

When historians study a period of history they rely on primary sources. Documents written by people who were actually there. Letters. Diaries. Newspaper accounts. Official records.

Social media posts are exactly that. They are firsthand accounts written in real time by people experiencing events directly. They capture the language people actually used. The emotions they actually felt. The way they understood events before the official narrative got written.

For future historians trying to understand the early twenty first century, social media is one of the richest primary sources available. The problem is that most of it is not being preserved in a usable form.

Why Most of It Will Disappear

Social media companies control their platforms and can change the rules at any time. Accounts get deleted. Platforms go out of business. Posts get removed for violating terms of service that change without notice. Companies decide to limit the archiving of old content.

Twitter, now X, has made repeated changes to its platform that have affected access to historical posts. TikTok videos disappear when accounts are deleted. Facebook has changed its privacy settings in ways that make older public content inaccessible. Instagram has purged accounts for inactivity.

The Library of Congress attempted to archive all public Twitter posts from 2006 through 2017. The project proved so massive and technically complex that they eventually had to scale it back significantly.

The early days of social media are already partially lost. And we are adding more content every day while losing access to what came before.

What You Can Do

Save your own important posts. Screenshot them. Copy the text somewhere you control. Do not assume the platform will keep them.

If you post things worth preserving, post them in multiple places. A blog post is more permanent than a social media post. Text on archive.org is more permanent than text on a platform you do not control.

For posts you want to preserve because they document something important, use the Wayback Machine's save page feature at web.archive.org/save to create an archived copy of any public URL.

Support the Internet Archive. They are doing the work of trying to capture and preserve the web including social media content at a scale that no individual can match.

And keep writing. Keep posting. Keep documenting what you see and feel and experience. The fact that platforms are fragile does not mean the content is not worth creating. It just means you need to be thoughtful about where you put it and how you save it.

The historical record of this era is being written right now. Some of it will survive. Make sure your part of it does.

Robert Lee Beers III is a writer and digital preservation advocate based in North Charleston South Carolina.