Dust, Decay, and the People Who Won't Let Small-Town America Disappear

Dust, Decay, and the People Who Won't Let Small-Town America Disappear

The smell hits you before anything else. Walk into Dennis Halverson's basement in Fargo, North Dakota, and you get it immediately — that sharp, vinegary tang that film preservationists call the "vinegar syndrome." It's the smell of acetate breaking down. Of time winning.

Dennis retired from the Cass County fairgrounds in 2011 after nearly three decades running their projector booth. When the grounds switched to digital, someone handed him fourteen cardboard boxes full of 16mm reels and said, essentially, good luck. Nobody else wanted them. Nobody else knew what they were.

"I opened the first one and it was footage from the 1962 fair," he says, carefully lifting a reel onto a light table. "Kids on carnival rides. A pie-eating contest. A man with a prize-winning hog. I watched twenty seconds of it and I thought — if I throw this away, nobody ever sees this again. Ever."

He didn't throw it away. He's spent the last twelve years figuring out how not to.

A Problem Nobody Planned For

Across the United States, an enormous and largely invisible archive is quietly rotting. Regional films — not studio productions, not anything you'd find in the Library of Congress — but the genuinely local stuff. Footage shot by county agricultural boards, civic clubs, church groups, local TV affiliates, and amateur filmmakers who just wanted to document what was happening around them. Parades down Main Street. Factory openings. Little League championships. Town meetings that changed everything.

Most of this material was shot on acetate-based film stock, which, when stored improperly (and it almost always was), begins to off-gas acetic acid as it degrades. Left unchecked, the deterioration accelerates. Reels that were perfectly watchable in 1990 can become brittle, warped, and unplayable by now. And once they're gone, they're gone in a way that a deleted digital file simply isn't.

Large institutions like the Library of Congress and the UCLA Film & Television Archive do incredible work, but their focus is necessarily broad and national. The footage of a 1974 Elks Club parade in Muncie, Indiana, is never going to make their priority list. That's where people like Dennis come in.

The Network That Barely Exists

Call it a network loosely. It's more like a constellation — individual people, spread across the country, doing similar work in almost total isolation until they find each other online. Forums, email chains, the occasional conference hosted by regional historical societies. Nobody is coordinating this. Nobody is funding it particularly well.

In Tucson, there's a retired schoolteacher named Gloria Reyes who has digitized over 400 reels of footage shot by a local Spanish-language television station that went off the air in 1989. The station's owners didn't preserve anything when they closed. Gloria found the reels in a storage unit being auctioned off.

"There were quinceañeras in there," she says. "Neighborhood festivals. A segment about a family that had been in Tucson since before Arizona was a state. That family still lives here. I called them when I found the footage and the grandmother cried for ten minutes."

In rural Vermont, a man named Carl Beaumont has been scanning reels of locally produced agricultural documentaries from the 1950s through the 1980s — films commissioned by the state's dairy industry to document farming techniques. Dry subject matter, on paper. But watch ten minutes and you're completely absorbed. You see how people talked to each other, how they dressed, how they held their bodies. You see a whole world.

"People think history is the big events," Carl says. "But it's not. It's how someone holds a pitchfork. It's what a barn looked like before it burned down."

What Preservation Actually Looks Like

The process is painstaking and expensive for people doing it without institutional backing. First, you have to assess the reels — check for vinegar syndrome, mold, shrinkage, brittleness. Some reels need to be "baked" in a food dehydrator at low temperatures to temporarily re-plasticize the acetate enough to run through a scanner without snapping. It's a technique that sounds alarming and kind of is.

Then comes the scanning itself. A decent film scanner capable of handling 16mm footage runs anywhere from $3,000 to well over $10,000. Most of these volunteers either saved up for years, bought secondhand equipment, or pooled resources with others in their loose community.

After scanning, there's color correction, audio restoration, and the unglamorous work of cataloging — logging what's in each reel, timestamping significant moments, writing descriptions that will make the footage findable to future researchers or the descendants of people who appear in it.

Dennis estimates he's put in over 4,000 hours of work on the Cass County collection. He's digitized 340 reels. He thinks he has maybe 200 more to go.

"I don't do it because someone's paying me," he says, with a laugh that's also kind of a sigh. "I do it because nobody else is."

What's Actually at Stake

There's a philosophical argument these preservationists make, sometimes explicitly and sometimes just by the way they talk about the work. The argument goes something like this: American cultural identity isn't just stored in the things we chose to preserve officially. It's in the stuff that fell through the cracks. The local, the specific, the unremarkable-seeming.

A Hollywood film from 1962 tells you something about America. But footage of an actual county fair in 1962 tells you something different — something grainier and more specific and, in its own way, more true. You see what people actually wore, not what costume designers thought they wore. You hear how people actually talked. You see the faces of people who were never famous and never wanted to be.

Gloria puts it plainly: "When communities lose their images of themselves, they lose something about who they are. They lose proof that they existed in a particular way at a particular time."

There's also something to be said about who gets preserved and who doesn't. The footage Gloria is saving is of a Spanish-speaking community in the American Southwest — a community whose history has been systematically underdocumented in official archives. The reels she's rescuing are, in some cases, the only moving images that community has of itself from that era.

The Clock Is Running

The preservationists are uniformly clear-eyed about the urgency. Film that's already degraded past a certain point can't be saved. Every year, more reels cross that threshold. The vinegar syndrome doesn't pause while someone finds funding or figures out the right scanner settings.

Dennis has started training a younger neighbor — a community college student named Avery who got curious after seeing the basement setup — in basic film assessment and scanning technique. He's not sentimental about it.

"I'm 71," he says. "I need someone who'll still be doing this in 2040."

Avery, for their part, is already hooked. They pulled up a reel last month that turned out to be footage from a 1978 high school basketball game. Watched the whole thing. Looked up the school. Found out it had closed in 1993.

"Those kids on that court," Avery says. "They're in their fifties now. And there they are, seventeen years old, running plays. That footage is the only place that version of them still exists."

That's the thing about this work. You start doing it for historical reasons, or technical reasons, or because someone handed you a box and you didn't know what else to do. And then you watch a reel and understand, in your bones, why it matters.

The images were always worth saving. Someone just had to decide to do it.