FORT MILL, S.C. — For David Ward, the history of his hometown is something very dear to him.
“Oh, I've got very much skin in the game,” he said, chuckling in the study room of the Fort Mill History Museum.
Ward is the chair of the museum’s board of directors. Their mission: To preserve Fort Mill’s history for generations. There’s plenty of it, from the town’s roots with the Catawba Native Americans, to its growth with textile mills, and now as a bustling township of about 18,000 people.
Fort Mill is just a quick drive down Interstate 77 from Charlotte, but Ward wants people to understand it’s not just a suburb of the Queen City.
“A lot of times, people think that we're just a bedroom community to Charlotte,” he explained. “ I like to say that Fort Mill’s unique in of itself. It's always been a unique, unique town.
The museum, tucked away on Clebourne Street and just off Main Street, houses a variety of exhibits, from model sets and plaques describing notable figures to high school band memorabilia. Ward, like his fellow board members, is tasked with making sure the town’s story is still told. But there’s a question following that charge: Who will continue to tell Fort Mill’s story when it’s time for the current leaders to step down?
Enter Olivia Deer. She’s one of three students at Fort Mill’s trio of high schools who is also on the board as school representatives. That might seem like a lot of responsibility for a teenager, but the Fort Mill High School junior said she’s up for the challenge.
Deer and her two peers got involved when the museum recently launched a program in collaboration with the Fort Mill School District. Three high school juniors were picked by their principals at the start of the spring semester to serve a one-year term as student advisors to the museum’s board. The students participate in board meetings and offer feedback on anything ranging from events to exhibits.
“I actually started doing research with the museum about six months ago,” Deer said. “I started talking to David, and he asked me about the program. We thought it’d be a good idea.”
Working with the museum aligns perfectly with Deer’s goals. She wants to study history in college and is aiming to go to school overseas, like at the University of Oxford in England. During her research time with the museum, she took an interest in learning more about the stories of previous Fort Mill residents.
“I’ve done some transcriptions for interviews, for documentaries, and that’s been one of my favorite things to do, because you just get to learn about the individual people that have lived here and their own story,” she explained.
Speaking in broader terms, Deer also took an interest in digging into what Fort Mill was like in the 1970s.
“It was all just affected by everything else that was going on in the United States at the time: The Vietnam war,” she outlined. “And if you get a little bit later, the AIDS crisis. Racial relations were a huge thing, the civil rights movement, you know, all of those things. They impacted Fort Mill. They impacted everyone here. And when you find those individual stories, you can see what it was really like to go through those things.”
Those are topics Deer said her generation is interested in, and it’s a perspective Ward appreciates as the museum looks at how it can continue to not only enhance its own exhibits but keep the next generation engaged with their hometown’s history.
“It is one thing in a lot of communities to have history museums or organizations that are very good at having some of the archives or some of the things that town or that city may be known for,” Ward explained. “But if you just stop right there, to me, you're not sustaining something. And this is… one of the reasons that we the board decided to create the program.”
Deer agreed and said, beyond being a history buff herself, there’s a need for her generation to keep looking to the past.
“I've lived here my whole life, and I've seen it grow from just that span of 16 years,” Deer shared. “I've seen it grow from a relatively small town to this kind of sprawling suburb, and it's still somehow managed to maintain this sense of community. I just want people to understand kind of where they come from, what this town is really all about.”
As advocates for the museum, both Deer and Ward have been tossing around ideas about what they can do to bring more people inside. Deer had plenty of thoughts.
“We’re trying to host a history competition between the three high schools to help get the young students involved and help them sort of learn what the history museum is about,” she said. “A gala kind of thing, like, hosting more events here to get people to come in, and possibly putting in new exhibits that might be more appealing to the younger generation.”
It’s exactly what Ward said he and the other members of the board need to hear, and it helps them to learn what needs to be in the museum.
“I don’t want them to feel like, you know, they’re just a flower on the wall or anything like that,” he said. “No, we need to hear what they think, we need to know that.”
Ward said the board had its first meeting with Deer and her fellow representatives recently, and the program is already off to a strong start. They’re paving the road for future representatives to travel on while also keeping their hometown history alive.
“I’m so proud of them, being the first class of 2022, being the first ones,” he said. “And we’re going to learn some stuff. I’m sure like anything else, I always believe that we need to continuously improve. I can’t imagine where we’ll be a year from now, three years from now, five years from now, based on where these three are just laying the foundation for that.”
Ward said he’s appreciative of the time they’re committing to this effort and is grateful the schools and history museum teamed up.
The museum is open from 10 a.m. until 4 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday.