Published in the June 24 – July 9, 2015 issue of Morgan Hill Life
By Marty Cheek
Marty Cheek, publisher Morgan Hill Life
Time intrigues me. Maybe that’s why I love learning about historical events. And photographs from America’s yesteryears can serve as a kind of time travel picture window looking out at the past. The camera is a time machine that can let us, through the power of an image taken by some long-ago photographer, become long-distance voyeurs of a moment a century or so ago.
Photo courtesy Morgan Hill Historical Society
Children ride on a float during a Fourth of July parade in 1894. A special exhibit sharing people’s memories is being held at the Villa Mira Monte House sponsored by the Morgan Hill Historical Society.
The Morgan Hill Historical Society is now holding a special exhibit at the Villa Mira Monte’s Hiram Morgan Hill House sharing local people’s photos and memories of our town’s Independence Day Parade over the decades. Among the exhibit’s artifacts is an 1894 photo of a group of children sitting on a horse-drawn flat-bed wagon. The youngsters are dressed in pageant costumes with an American flag waving in the wind over them.
The photo started me wondering what was happening in other parts of the world on that Independence Day as the people of Morgan Hill were preparing for the pomp of their annual parade. I did some Internet web-surfing to see what historic events might have taken place.
On July 4, 1894, Grover Cleveland was in the White House considering the big question of reforming civil service rules with a ground-breaking series of executive orders. Elwood Haynes successfully tested one of the first automobiles in the United States, venturing to an astonishing speed of six miles per hour. And with the overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaii, the Republic of Hawaii was proclaimed on that day, with Sanford B. Dole serving as its president until the mid-Pacific islands were annexed to the United States as a territory four years later.
Next week exactly 121 years after that 1894 photo was taken, we’ll be keeping our patriotic traditions alive with the July 4 community commemoration of America’s birthday. No doubt there will be children riding along in flat-bed trucks powered by diesel engines and singing patriotic songs in similar celebration to the children in the historical society’s photograph.
What might the young people in that historic exhibit photo think of Morgan Hill 12 decades later if they might be able to take a detour through some portal in the space-time continuum and wind up riding in the 2015 parade? The cultural and technological differences between their world and ours would seem miraculous to them. They lived in a world where the telephone and electricity were only just barely coming to the village of Morgan Hill. They would certainly be impressed with the number of modern day citizens along the parade route holding smart phone devices and taking images that they can instantly send to virtually anywhere in the world. And these pocket-sized devices also allow modern Morgan Hill residents to dive into an ocean of information in the Internet that would be far more extensive than all the libraries in the world in the 19th century.
The span of time separating 1894 from 2015 contains a parade of historic events as the American experiment evolved. The outcome of those years would no doubt amaze those 19th-century youngsters.
What was once the Valley of Heart’s Delight with its cornucopia of orchards that fed the United States with prunes and other fruit became Silicon Valley with its harvest of digital technology that now feeds the world’s appetite for electronics. The children would be amazed that the technology developed in this region now sends space probes to the various planets of the solar system — including remote control vehicles guided by scientists back on Earth coursing over the desert of Mars. And they would be astonished by how we have recently sent a probe called New Horizon on a journey of 4.7 billion miles to the dwarf planet Pluto to discover more about that ice-cold world.
Most of the children of that 1894 photo saw the world change 20 years later with the June 28, 1914 assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife that launched the nations of Europe on a great global conflict. The United States would be swept into the violence of the First World War in April of 1917. A few decades later the Japanese would attack Pearl Harbor on the territory of Hawaii one Sunday morning in December 1941, causing America to enter the Second World War. With the Cold War that followed, Silicon Valley grew into the hub of technology development for the world.
Imagine what might happen in the next 121 years of American history. I’d like to think that on July 4, 2136, the people of Morgan Hill will still hold the tradition of marching in our annual Fourth of July Parade. Maybe the children of that 22nd-century world will think nothing of riding on anti-gravity hover-trucks that float along Monterey Road, Main Avenue, Peak Avenue, and West Dunne Avenue, the streets of the parade route. No doubt they’ll be singing songs of American patriotic pride which have still to be written.
On that Independence Day 12 decades hence, the people will have a knowledge of many of the historic events now in our future. With those events in their own past, the children in that parade will study in school to learn about the next stage in the odyssey of the American story.
Perhaps at that parade they will be using advanced technological gadgets engineered in the Silicon Valley such as holographic video-recordings to take three-dimensional images of the people and floats.
And who knows? Maybe those hologram videos and images will be shown as part of a special historical parade exhibit at the Hiram Morgan Hill House by local residents another 121 years later in the year 2257. The people in that far-off future will then witness the continuing saga of our parade and how photos and videos of its participants connect the parade of generations of Morgan Hill’s America.
