Local Historian Hats

Every town has one: the person who knows what every building used to be, runs the old-photos group, and has written to the state about the typo on the historical marker. Rough estimates put local historical societies and small museums at more than 10,000 in the United States, run largely by volunteers. Facebook groups called Old Photos of a place have become the modern town square: Old Photos of Northern Kentucky grew past 22,000 members by 2018, and Hawkesbury History Photos went from a few hundred members to about 3,800 in the pandemic summer of 2020. These local historian hats are for that role. The badges say LOCAL HISTORIAN and HISTORICAL SOCIETY, and one calls out the local historic landmark. The sentence designs carry the group-admin voice: old photos as the wearer's thirst traps, the depot that should never have been torn down, the letter to the state about a historical marker, and the comment-section answer that dates a photograph by the Buick. Every design is custom embroidered on an unstructured dad hat. Wear one to the next historical society meeting, or give one to the person in your family who already knows the year of every photo.