Listening Party: Sharing Audio Recordings from the Past

By Will Hamilton

As an intern at the Heritage Winooski Mill Museum, I got the opportunity to help realize a collaboration between the museum and Vermont Folklife through a "listening party" held April 17th, 2024. A listening party is when a curated selection of clips from oral interviews is played for an audience and accompanied by group discussion. Vermont Folklife has used this format to bring historical records out of archives and into engagement with communities. This particular event highlights a collection of cassette recordings in the University of Vermont's Special Collections library. The tapes were created between 1985 and 1989 by a Vermont Oral Historian named Roberta Strauss. Roberta was interested in Winooski's labor history and interviewed those who'd been observers or, more often, participators in the unionization of the Winooski/Burlington mills. The goal of the listening party was to offer a glimpse of 20th-century Winooski through these recordings in an environment many of the voices once inhabited: the Champlain Mill. 

My role was to sift through the collection for engaging stories. The main challenge was finding the hidden gems within a collection that contained about 20 hours' worth of tape. Through this unique and valuable experience, I learned about Winooski's history and other things I would have never encountered in a more traditional research project: French-Canadian home remedies, the process of wool carbonization, etc. Furthermore, by the end of my research, I felt I'd gotten to know the voices, particularly Roberta Strauss.

Alongside the museum's executive director, Miriam Block, and Mary Wesley from Vermont Folklife, we decided on 13 final clips. They ranged in subject matter from accidents in the mills to the Great Flood of 1927 and in speakers from Raymond Roy, the former superintendent of the Burlington/Winooski mills, to a "labor priest" named Edward Gelineau. Among the audience were members of the Roy family, along with others who have family who've worked in textile mills. The audience's makeup allowed our discussions to extend far beyond the clips and into other stories of life in Winooski. During these discussions, I felt most grateful to be part of this project. I've spent much of college thinking about how to translate my learning into services to my community, a goal that can feel distant in academia. This project was a great way to connect to a community beyond UVM and learn about local history in the process.

Will Hamilton was the 2024 spring intern during his sophomore year at UVM. He studies anthropology with minors in Eastern European and environmental studies. Next semester he is studying abroad in Adelaide Australia where he will take a course in curatorial studies focusing on aboriginal artifacts at the South Australian Museum.