Imagine that you could voyage back in time to the late nineteenth century, walk along the streets in your town, hear your ancestors’ stories, and learn about how they felt, what they experienced, and how they lived. The Warner Historical Society has created precisely that opportunity through their film project “This Morning Broke Clear: Warner NH in the Wake of the Civil War 1860-1900.” which premiers Saturday April 19 at 7 p.m. at the Warner Town Hall.
The documentary has been in development for three years and is a community project in every sense of the word with dozens of residents involved in recording voice-over narration for the film.
The film revolves around a fictional character named Jenny played by Warner resident and actress Mary Morris. “Jenny” left Warner in 1900 after living in town for 42 years and returns in 1910 to finish her personal historical memoir. “We chose to have a woman as a narrator because it is difficult to find women’s voice in history during this time period because they were not voting or writing articles for the newspaper. Their voice just isn’t well documented.” Rebecca Courser, Executive Director of the Warner Historical Society explained. “You would find small vignettes talking about their singing or raising houseplants, or domestic concerns. In order to read between the lines and bring out their voice we created a woman narrator for the film.”
Mary Morris: “Jenny is looking back at her life in Warner just prior to the Civil War through 1910,” Mary Morris stated. “The character is a vehicle to talk about the history of Warner. She is a professional woman who does some photography and is also a writer and decides she is going to writer her memoirs about Warner. This fictional character intermingles with real individuals who lived in town.”
“It’s an absolutely beautiful film,” Morris affirmed. “The voice over becomes a natural part of what your experience is. George Packard used photographs, papers, and archival materials and wove them with live action, original music. Sound effects, all kinds of layering to create a history of the town we live in. it truly is a gift to the town.”
“The movie is organized in chronological order,” the film’s writer and director George Packard detailed. “The movie follows what was happening after the civil war ended. There was good news and bad news. When soldiers returned in 1865 things were not going well. We deal with the economic depression of 1873, the boom of manufacturing, agriculture dying, people leaving for the West. Small towns faced a lot of challenges. The federal government required towns to provide a certain number of men for the war effort. Towns paid a bounty which was a salary for soldiers. As the war progressed, fewer people were willing to sign up for the amount offered. By the end of the war the town was paying a $800 bounty per soldier.”
“The town was faced with $60,000 in debt immediately following the Civil War,” Courser added. “The town got loans from private citizens and it took decades to repay.”
“The themes in this movie are both specifically Warner related but also mirror what was happening in the culture, such as the problem of having to reinvent the local economy. Business people had a modern sense of promoting the town and tourism yet resources were very limited and there were political divisions. Taxes were on the rise, school systems had to change, these three decades were amazing times.” Packard expressed. “We spent two years digging for clues and putting them together for this movie. The experience of learning is exactly the same as moving into a new town. It just so happened that the town we moved into was 150 years ago. So we began to learn the situations, events, issues, different characters and build an understanding.”
“We’re consolidating forty years into an hour and fifty minutes,” Courser said. “It’s a monumental task.”
Packard worked through more than fifteen versions of the script and went through months of condensing, revising, and rewriting. In the end over three hours of film was shot, and a painstaking editing process began. “You’re bringing people back to life and give them their voices again. Its one of the hardest things I’ve even done. I have literally three hundred pieces that I could weave into the narrative but I only have room for twenty. How do you figure out what to include that will be significant to everybody?” Packard reflected.
“A project like this takes on a life of its own and becomes a rollercoaster,” Courser noted. “I think the music and images and story is going to be very emotional for people and give them awareness of the community. When people drive down the road past a certain street or a certain house, they’re going to make positive associations with those places. There are parallels with events that were happening then and events that are happening now. There are a lot of stories within the larger stories.”
“The people in this story are not just the prominent people,” Packard stated. “One story we couldn’t fit into the film was about Constantine the Peddler. He was a Greek man who had a business driving a wagon selling goods. There is one picture of him and Rebecca has a diary of a woman who mentions Constantine and she bought something from him. Because her husband wouldn’t let her go to the store to buy a dress, Constantine lent her the money for the dress. This is one of the ten thousand stories we can’t tell in the scope of this movie but still exist. ”
“She had chickens to sell eggs and bought soap in bulk so she could sell soap to neighbors to make money and become just a little more independent,” Courser added.
All of the music in the film was composed or performed by area musicians including local resident Paul Knudson. “George Packard came to a couple of my Tuesday concerts called Music at 11 at the United Church of Warner and that’s how we connected about the film.” Knudson gave Packard some cassette tapes of his compositions “and the rest,” Knudson quipped, “is history.” Among Knudson’s four works that are featured in the film are a sonata for French horn and piano and a sonata for violin and piano that he wrote for his father. Another theme is taken from the “Folk Quintet” which was recorded by the Manchester Chamber Orchestra. “Although the music was not composed specifically for the film, it blends perfectly,” he said. “I’m thrilled that my music won’t be lost.”
DVDs of “This Morning Broke Clear” will be available for purchase at the premiere on April 19 and afterwards from the Warner Historical Society.
