Volume 32, Number 1 - Fall 1992


PRESIDENT'S MESSAGE
by Kathleen Van Buskirk

The historic sites report at the September meeting of the White River Valley Historical Society brought renewed discussion of the Society’s role of recognizing and arranging for the marking of historic structure which have played a vital role in the regions’s life and development.

The old Branson Hotel, which was built while the White River Railroad was being constructed back in 1904 and 1905 and served visitors to Branson for three-quarters of a century, has reopened as a bed and breakfast. The past decade was very hard on the aging structure. However, last spring Innkeeper Ten Margulis renovated the inside, returned its dining room and guest rooms to their turn of the century elegance, and restored the exterior to its original lines.

At Galena the famous Y-Bridge, which had been cut off from automobile traffic and reduced to a crumbling curiosity after completion of a new by-pass highway and a modern James River Bridge, has become a popular project for local history enthusiasts. After WRVHS members successfully nominated the structure to the National Register of Historic, Galena citizens are having considerable success in raising funds to restore the intriguing structure and return it to its intended function.

As Lois Holman embarks on her tasks as Historical Sites Chairman she will be enlisting the assistance of many of our members in fulfilling that aspect of our Society’s mission.

Researchers and genealogists among our members please note that with this issue we are undertaking to make the historic materials in our Quarterlies more readily available. You will find at the back an index covering the four issues of the past year, all of Volume 31. With the change-over to yearly volumes, plans are to publish indexes of future volumes annually in the Quarterly. Work is also underway on indexing the ten volumes published through the Society’s first thirty years. The index of Volume 10, the twelve issues from mid-1988 to mid-1991, is complete, and will be published as a separate volume about the size of the regular Quarterly. Cost and availability will soon be announced. Indexes of the first nine volumes of the Quarterly will be published as they are completed. With all our Quarterlies indexed, they will become much more valuable as research sources.

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