George Orwell wrote “The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.”

These are chilling words. And that’s what makes the Butler County Historical Society’s Echoes From Our Past historical cemetery tours so important.

For nearly a decade, historical society researchers and actors have joined together to present figures from Butler County’s past discussing their lives and the events that shaped them.

Visitors to the North Side Cemetery overlooking downtown Butler walk from grave to grave to hear actors in period costume tell of their lives and the era in which they lived.

These aren’t mere ghost stories. Months of research go into selecting the ancestors to be portrayed and the words that will be spoken at the graves to the visitors.

Once the research is completed, the historical facts are boiled down into a six-minute script which are given the re-enactors, whether a Civil War veteran or an Eastern European immigrant who sent five sons to serve in World War II.

The re-enactors, through their voices and gestures, strive to make the past come alive, if only for the length of their presentation. The goal is to make history appear more than a dry recitation of facts and dates spread across the pages of a history text.

The walk is a collaboration between the historical society, the area theater community and the North Side Cemetery Association.

All involved are to be commended for their efforts at staging this annual event.

The researchers spend countless hours poring over historical documents, diaries and contemporary accounts and then distilling them into a script.

The actors spend weeks memorizing the scripts, selecting period-appropriate costumes and working to make their chosen individual a living, breathing person. They have to repeat their performance 12 times as the different tour groups pass by, often in heat or cold or rain.

It’s a big task, but preserving and passing along Butler County history is an important undertaking.

— EF