Down in that chamber, sealed in three layers of heavy plastic and set on a pallet of bricks, were four metal ammunition cans. Army surplus, painted over in white. Each one had a year range written on the lid in black marker. 1952 to 1960. 1961 to 1968. 1969 to 1975. 1976 to 1984.
The fella who hired me, a retired teacher named Frank, helped me lift them out.
Inside were negatives. Thousands of them. Strips of film in glassine sleeves, every one labeled in the same tiny handwriting. Mill shift change, 1954. Christmas parade, 1958. Flood on Main Street, 1964. Little League champions, 1971. Every sleeve had a date and a name.
There was a note taped inside the first lid. It said the photos were taken by Walter Kasprzak, who ran the camera shop on Main Street in Follansbee for thirty years. It said he had photographed every wedding, every graduation, every parade and every tragedy in this town. It said the basement was the only place dry enough, cool enough, and dark enough to keep them. It said, this is Follansbee. Please do not throw it away.
One man with one camera had kept thirty years of a whole town in the dark under a basement floor, waiting for someone to bring it back into the light.
Frank called the Brooke County library that afternoon. The librarian, a woman named Donna, drove over within the hour. She held one strip of film up to the window and started crying. She said she recognized her own parents getting married in 1959.
Walter Kasprzak died in 1989. His shop closed the year before. His family had searched for his negatives for years and assumed they were lost in the 2004 flood.
The library applied for a small grant from the state. A team of volunteers spent the whole next year scanning every negative. Retired mill workers. High school kids. Frank himself, two days a week. They put the photos online, searchable by name and year.
Within a month, more than two thousand people from all over the country had looked themselves up. People found their first communion. Their grandparents at the Fourth of July. The last photo ever taken of a father who died at the mill.
One woman in Arizona wrote to the library to say she found the only picture of her mother as a girl. She had never seen her mother young before.
The library held an exhibit in the spring. They printed two hundred of the best photos and hung them in the old high school gym. Half the town came. People walked around pointing at the walls and laughing and crying and calling their kids over to see.
His granddaughter came up from Charleston for the opening. She stood in front of a photo of her grandfather in his shop in 1962, holding up a camera and grinning.
I put a new sump in the right corner of that basement. It works fine. But Frank asked me to leave the old chamber open, with a little plaque over it.
Nineteen years chasing basement water. That is the first basement I ever pulled a whole town out of.