I recently relocated to a quiet cabin nestled pretty deep in the Santa Cruz mountains of California.  This place is a night and day difference from the urban hustle and bustle of Brooklyn, NY.  In Brooklyn, during my final days there, I remember sitting on my stoop with my buddy from the Brooklyn Public Library interlibrary loan department watching police chase a crazed, shirtless troublemaker out of the park, down the street, and eventually cuffing him and hauling him away.  This morning I sat on my “stoop” here and watched a deer interact with my cat and wrinkled my nose at the smell of my dog who tangled with a skunk last night.  I’ve taken fun pictures of both events.

I’m a big fan of Flickr Commons, and I think it is great to see public libraries with local history collections participating in it.  Its interesting how different characters use Flickr and think about their photos online.  Myself, as of recently I just dump everything up there and think of it as a good way of backing up my photos.  Others take their photography much more seriously then I do.  They only share pictures that they consider exceptional, and they are protective of their rights as the creator of a unique work.  After all, a photographer has to make a living, and that doesn’t happen by giving it all away.  But what about the right to photograph places, events, and people and then share them unfettered online?  What if I shared my picture of the police chase in Brooklyn on Flickr and either the cops, the pursued man, or the Park Department told me I shouldn’t post that material?  Likewise, what if my landlord didn’t want me to share a picture of my cat and a deer on his property?

I’d argue that allowing on site photography and encouraging sharing it online almost always contributes to the public good.  Here’s the story of how these kinds of questions led to the creation of California’s first state park, Big Basin Redwoods State Park.  The story is excerpted and paraphrased from “Valley of Redwoods: A guide to Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park“, which I borrowed from the Santa Cruz Public Library.

The 19th century saw a lot of destruction of old-growth redwood forests in California.  There was big money in it.  Huge areas were logged, and the San Lorenzo River Valley and Santa Cruz mountains were among the industrial hotspots.  There was one particularly famous tree in this area though, the Fremont tree, which John Fremont and his men actually camped in the fire-damaged base of when they were exploring California for the US government in the 1840s.  That tree, and the public interest it generated made it a tourist destination.  As long as these redwood trees were making someone money standing up, they didn’t get logged.  I’ve read that the tree was even used as honeymoon suite at times.  The area became known as the Felton Big Trees Grove and it brought tourists in from all over.

The next phases in the grove’s history are a little bit more bleak.  First a local judge named Edward Stanley owned it, and he announced his intentions to log the whole place.  While that sounds like an atrocity now, I have to imagine that back in 1860 when he was considering doing this it was a pretty natural moneymaking kind of thing to do.  Its hard to read this history and not judge peoples actions by today’s standards.  Similarly I was just reading in “A Trip Through Time and the Santa Cruz Mountains” of the bullfights on Sundays in front of churches where bulls were pitted against the now extinct California Golden Bear in brutal fights to the death.  The practice was abolished eventually, but it must have seemed like the most natural form of entertainment at the time.

Stanley didn’t end up logging the grove, because a a dairy farmer named Joseph Welch thought he could make some solid cash off this land without logging it.  He bought it up and developed it into his own roadside attraction- railroadside attraction that is.  People flooded in on the trains and he made a killing off of admission, souvenirs, concessions and probably anything else he could dream up to sell the visitors.  The place boomed.  According to the books, all kinds of other saloons and hotels opened and campers and salmon fishermen frequented the place.  It was vacationland USA.

Enter the hero, Andrew P. Hill, a photographer from San Jose.  Hill came to Welch’s Big Trees Grove to take a picture for a British magazine called “Wide World”.  Hill took the pictures, but Welch demanded that he turn over the plates immediately; the trees are his property and he would not allow them to be photographed.  Of course Welch was selling his own postcards, so he wanted his pictures to be the only pictures.  The men fought but Hill stayed his course and wouldn’t give up the plates, and in the heat of the argument Welch told Hill that he planned on logging the whole place for railroad ties anyways.  Here’s what Hill wrote in his notes after leaving the grove.

“I was a little angry and somewhat disgusted with my reception at the Santa Cruz big trees.  It made me think. There were still fifteen minutes until train time. Just as the gate closed, the thought flashed through my mind that these trees, because of their size and antiquity, were among the natural wonders of the world, and should be saved for posterity. I said to myself ‘I will start a campaign immediately to make a public park of this place’”.

There’s a lot more to this story, and in fact the area of Welch’s Big Trees is now Henry Cowell State Park. Hill’s efforts and energies led to the creation of the Sempervirens Club and Big Basin Redwoods instead.  I trust that if I got any facts wrong in here, a more astute historian than I will offer correction.

I believe the images of the trees that Hill created and more importantly his intentions of sharing and publishing those images contributed to the public good and the beginning of a crucial conservation effort.  There’s no question in my mind that Flickr Commons and Creative Commons licensing takes this a step further in a digitally mediated, networked environment.  Furthermore, because of that, I’d argue that it is essential that public libraries need to be instrumental forces and the greatest contributors to these forums.  It is not optional, it is part of our core mission: public library photo archives need to be a part of this pool. To take it a step further, I’d argue that librarians should be working with their communities to organize and create the photo archives of the future.  Archiving and publishing happens simultaneously online (ok, only kind of) so librarians should be out in their communities putting this together….