By Madelyn Fisher, Contributing Writer
White gloves, torn photo edges, and handwritten descriptions on the backs of black-and-white prints: this is what Shan Watkins has been sorting through inside the Eaton Area Historical Society’s carriage house museum. A handful of photos are clear, as if taken yesterday. Others are unrecognizable. Yet each photo holds a piece of the history of Eaton, a small farming town in the northern plains of Colorado, about 35 miles from the Wyoming border.
Watkins sits at an antique table among file cabinets and stacked boxes of photos, carefully numbering each one: “PH 0147, PH0148.” She works with a soft-leaded pencil that is archival safe to ensure that the photos will not sustain damage from identification. Each image gets a specific ID and description while Watkins documents the date, names, and size of each document, preparing it for digitization.
“We want to make sure that anything that’s written on the backside, we have listed so we can catalog it,” Watkins said, holding a photo of a school dated 1880.
The museum has collected archives since the society formed in the early 1990s. Documents and artifacts have been donated by local families. Photos, scrapbooks, household furnishings, and other items represent Eaton’s schools, agriculture and pioneers. The town’s history has been boxed up for years, inaccessible to the public, until now.
This intricate process marks the start of a major transition for the historical society. The digitization project aims to preserve generations of donated photos and make them accessible beyond the walls of the house museum. For decades, members talked about digitizing photos, but Watkins says the staff didn’t understand the process.
Overflowing archives force organization
Carolyn Prior, the historical society’s president, said the push to organize photographs became unavoidable once the basement and every spare room could no longer hold the stacks of boxes.
“We went through file cabinets and thought, look at all these photos and documents,” Prior said. “What are we going to do with it? How are we going to preserve it?”
Prior said the society has faced several challenges in the last year. A lack of museum volunteers and know-how to get the historical photos online.
“Everybody has things going on. If we could be here every day, we would probably show a lot of progress,” Prior said.
Public library grant opens doors
The project gained traction after the society was granted $5,000 in 2024 by the Eaton Public Library. Nomi Ketterling served as a library board member for 20 years and secured the grant.
“The library staff came over and helped us originally with processing what kinds of things could be digitized, scanned, and saved,” Ketterling said. “And then how we would get it out there on a server that would be accessible from anywhere.”
Through local connections, the society found a digitization specialist who helped them figure out how to showcase the photos for public access.
“I was feeling quite frankly a little hopeless,” Watkins said. “We could scan all day, but how were we going to get it out there?”
Then the society learned about a digital cataloging platform called CatalogIt that Watkins says costs about $500 a year.
“That is when I really got excited,” Watkins said. “I was like, we can do this.”
Picking one hundred photos
This is not the first time the Eaton Area Historical Society has taken on a sophisticated project. In 2020, its board and staff members raised funds and oversaw the construction of the carriage house to restore the museum’s property to its original look. The digitization project is working along similar lines; committing to starting somewhere, trusting that the solutions will come.
“We are going to do this,” Prior said. “We do not know what we are doing. But the right people always show up.”
To move the project forward, Prior and Watkins were advised to pick 100 photos, any photos. They will worry about organizing them later.
Preserving Eaton for the next generation
Ketterling says the project is making Eaton’s history available to the public.
“For a long, long time, we have stored our information and it’s not accessible,” she said. “If it is stored in a box and no one can see it, that’s not helpful. We want it to get out there, to keep new generations interested in the past and honor our ancestors.”
For now, the sorting, identifying, numbering and categorizing continues. A time frame for completion has not been set.
“Accessibility is just a wonderful thing,” Watkins said. “I am anxious to share all these with the world.”
