Creative History

  February 25, 1866--two men, James Mattson a gold miner and John Scribner a commissary store owner, Wells Fargo employee and part time miner himself, at a place called Angel’s Mining Camp in Calaveras County, California, are looking-- just like thousands of others among them who have recently headed west over the past decade and a half--to strike it rich by finding gold. As the men dig their mine down deeper and deeper beneath a layer of hardened lava from an extinct volcano and reach a depth of approximately 130 feet below the surface of the earth, Mattson’s pick hits something hard in a side wall of the mine.  At first, he thinks it’s simply a fossilized tree root, but the two men consider the item oddly shaped enough, and interesting enough, to bring it up to the surface anyway. At the end of the day, this hard and oddly shaped object is brought to the commissary store that is owned by John Scribner.  For days it sits in the store on a shelf and is largely ignored...

  The evening of December 22, 1909 was clear but definitely cold enough to snow as temperatures dipped well below freezing once the sun set that afternoon in Worcester, Massachusetts. Worcester at the end of the first decade of the 20th century despite being known as a statewide transportation hub, and the largest city in central Massachusetts, was still predominantly a walking city.  Some automobiles had already begun to clog the newly paved streets of the city and illuminate passersby with their headlights on the night of December 22, 1909 but as workers rushed home from factories and offices and headed out to the shops in Worcester’s busy downtown to buy last minute Christmas gifts for their kids, the majority of them still travelled by foot and the sidewalks that night were packed with pedestrians. At exactly 6:45 just as the holiday shopping crowd was at its peak on that cold winter’s night in Worcester, over a thousand of the city’s inhabitants looked up in the nightti...

            Explosions shake the earth.  A fiery object falls from the sky and crashes through the roof of a farmhouse.  Flames leap skyward as a small New Jersey town burns. On the radio a newsflash interrupts a broadcast of popular dance music with an urgent bulletin.  It is 8 pm on October 30, 1938--the night before Halloween. The news bulletin reports, “Professor Farrell of Mount Jenning Observatory has detected explosions on the surface of Mars,” and then abruptly switches back to playing orchestral dance tunes.   But within moments, listeners to WCBS Radio, the northeast’s largest and most powerful station at the time, are informed that a large meteor has crashed into the small town of Grover’s Mill, New Jersey. Around 9 pm the radio broadcast cuts to a reporter live on the scene in Grover’s Mill who frantically retracts his previous statement and says that it was not a meteor which crashed in town, but rather i...