Transcript:
[Intro]
Lily Kate Witcher: Hi, my name is Lily Kate Witcher, and I am the assistant editor of the Northwood Omniscient. In this podcast, I got the opportunity to interview former Omniscient editor Ella Sullivan on her Girl Scout Gold Award project entitled “A Look Into Chatham’s Past”. “A Look Into Chatham’s Past” is a podcast series and website that seeks to educate the Chatham County community on its history. Sullivan highlights 11 notable historical figures that had an impact on Chatham County and beyond. “A Look Into Chatham’s Past” is dedicated to Ella’s late grandfather, E. Lee Sullivan. You can find the project at chathamspast.wixsite.com/alookinto.
Lily Kate Witcher: What is a Girl Scout Gold Award?
Ella Sullivan: A Gold Award is a culmination of all your years of Girl-Scouting. I started in kindergarten as a Girl Scout, and to get the Gold Award, you have to do a Bronze Award and Silver Award in your younger years. Then you move on to the Gold Award, and it [requires] 80 hours of work. You’re really just creating a project that’s going to impact your community or the wider world in a positive way. I addressed mine on local history which was definitely a more localized project. Some [projects] are a lot bigger or a lot smaller.
Lily Kate Witcher: So you said a Gold Award project is supposed to serve the community. In what way do you think your project is serving the Chatham County Community?
Ella Sullivan: I would say that “A Look Into Chatham’s Past” serves the Chatham County community because it’s really creating a more accessible way to see county history. I think that it is definitely a little daunting when you move to a new place to find local history that is easily accessible, especially in more rural southern towns. A lot of history is just passed on by word of mouth or in a museum like it is Chatham County. [The museum] is a lovely museum but sometimes it’s easier to access stuff online. So I would say that the service the project is giving to the community is definitely easy accessibility to stories that might be less known in the community.
Ella Sullivan: A lot of the process of having a Gold Award is showing why you think the issue you’re trying to address is an issue. I decided that community identity is an issue in Chatham County because there is a big population of people moving to Chatham County that are from other parts of North Carolina or the country. A lot of these people have no idea what community they’re coming into, and even people who have lived in the county for a long time don’t have that connection to the community. They’ve never been to the Chatham County Historical Museum or learned about any history in the county other than just the few things they’ve heard from neighbors. So I think community identity is an issue in Chatham County and everywhere, and I think this needs to be addressed if we want to have one community that shares something in common with each other.
Lily Kate Witcher: How did you use your experience as an editor of the Omniscient to help you with this project?
Ella Sullivan: My experience at Northwood overall, and especially with the Journalism program at Northwood really helped me with this project in so many ways. I wasn’t really interested in journalism at all before I started with the journalism program at Northwood. After I had taken one class with Ms. Brinkley, I knew I wanted to major in journalism in college. I never knew what I wanted to major in before. So it really got me into journalism and then taught me a lot of the technical skills that I used on the project. For making a podcast, I used Soundtrap, which we use in journalism class. I edited all my own work which I learned as an editor of the Omniscient, and I wrote all my own work. So really every single piece of the project I did was all through skills I learned at the Omniscient. It was really cool to be able to put those skills to use in a project that wasn’t for school.
Lily Kate Witcher: Some of the figures you included in your project are more controversial than others. Do you think it was important for you to include history that may not be considered positive by everyone?
Ella Sullivan: Yeah, I definitely think that it’s important to show all sides of history, and obviously history is reported by the side that won the conflict or is looked at as being politically correct today. Obviously, some people did do bad things, but it is still part of history. I think that it’s important to know what bad things happened so we can avoid doing those bad things again. Specifically, James Iredell Waddell was a confederate navy man. I was debating whether or not I should put his story in because I feel like his views [are something] that myself and a lot of other people wouldn’t agree with. But [his story] is a story of somebody from Chatham County, and he did make an impact on the world even though a lot of people wouldn’t consider it to be positive. And it’s interesting history too; I’ve always been interested in the Civil War. I think just giving people access to that history and giving an unbiased view on how that person lived their life gives people the ability to judge for themselves if [they] were good or bad.
Lily Kate Witcher: So what impact do you want “A Look Into Chatham’s Past” to have on the listeners?
Ella Sullivan: So I hope this project helps people who are listening to it know where they’re living better and understand Chatham County better. I think that a big part of community identity is having shared knowledge, and culture and history that everybody in the community knows. I hope that people can learn about at least one person who is from the community and did something that was worth telling a story about. Also, [I just want] to inspire people that even if you’re from a small North Carolina county, you can still do things that are notable and important.You’re not going to be stuck here if you don’t want to be stuck here, and even if [you are], you can still do something really cool and interesting. I hope that people can reflect on both those things: having community identity and knowing that you can do something for yourself even if you’re from a small town
Lily Kate Witcher: How have you been promoting your project to make sure word of it gets out into the community?
Ella Sullivan: I have worked with quite a few different local organizations in Chatham County to kind of distribute my project. I worked with the Chatham County Community Library, the Chatham County Historical Association- which was the sponsor of my project, so [I worked] really closely with them, the Chatham County School Systems, the Pittsboro Kiwanis Club and the Pittsboro Presbyterian Church to present my project to their groups.
Lily Kate Witcher: So you dedicated this project to your grandfather. In what ways did he inspire “A Look Into Chatham’s Past”?
Ella Sullivam: So when I started this project, my grandfather was still alive. He died while I was working on it, but when he died, he was the president of the Chatham County Historical Association which was the [organization] that sponsored [me] that I worked closely with. My project advisor was another lovely lady from the historical association named Beverly Wiggins, and I worked really closely with her. I talked to my Papa about what I was doing. My grandad really loved local history; he was also born and raised in Chatham County and had lived here forever. It was just kind of nice to be able to look into something that I knew he would be really interested in and had already put a lot of time into with the Chatham County Historical Association. So it was really cool to be able to dedicate that to him and also talk to other people after I finished it [who] could tell that my grandfather would have loved it.
Lily Kate Witcher: Thanks for listening to this podcast on Northwood alumni Ella Sullivan’s Girl Scout Gold Award project. Be sure to check out “A Look Into Chatham’s Past” on the website chathamspast.wixsite.com/alookinto. And for the Omniscient, go to nhsomniscient.com for more great content from our student staff.
[End Podcast]
