"Williams Mills" in the War of 1812

I've been on the Town of Amherst Historic Preservation Commission for about 2 1/2 years now. We've made a lot of progress during that time, and I feel good about what we've been able to do, although we have a lot more to do. I wish that this could be my job and I could work on preservation issues all day, but I've got 3 little people and 1 big person who need me to do other things, too.

Anyway, our big event this last weekend was a presentation by the town historian, David Sherman, about the war of 1812 in Amherst. Since this year is the 200th anniversary of the start of the war, I thought this would be a good chance to have a presentation about it. I did most of the coordination work, and the rest of the commission was a huge help.

I think it's been since September that we've been working on coordinating with Dave to get a date set, and then working on the venue and publicity. We arranged to hold it in the Williamsville Meeting House, which is an old church on Main Street built in 1871. It's no longer a church, but is owned by the Village of Williamsville and they rent it out for weddings and other events. We partnered with the Williamsville HPC and the Williamsville Business Association, and they waived the $100 fee for us and provided refreshments afterward. We got the event mentioned in the Buffalo News and in the Amherst Bee and lots of online calendars. There were actually 2 articles in the Amherst Bee, our little local newspaper, and I was quoted in both articles, on pages 2 and 4. That was a first and very exciting. Ron, a member of our committee, put together a flyer for it, which looked awesome and we tried to post and email out as much as we could.

After all the planning and preparation and media stuff, on the day of there was really nothing else to do besides go and hope that people showed up. (Well, there was lots to do in terms of bringing my laptop, tablecloths, clipboard, camera, etc.), and the mayor was running all over gathering the refreshments and setting up the microphone. I got there about 12:35 and there were already people there for the talk to start at 1:00. And they kept coming! The final count was around 130 people. I was hoping for 100, so I was thrilled with the turnout. And the response was so positive - people were very complimentary, had lots of questions afterward, and seemed very glad they had come. And we gave out a lot of our commission's brochures, which was another one of our goals with the presentation.

Here's a picture of our commission chairman, Kevin Madoo, talking and introduction David Sherman.

And here are a few pictures of David during the talk:

It was a big deal for our Commission, both in terms of the information that we were able to get out to the community, and in terms of the partnerships that were formed or strengthened with Dave Sherman, who is the town historian and the managing editor of the Bee (which will be important for future events and things that we do as a commission), the Williamsville HPC, the Williamsville mayor, and the Williamsville Business Association. The chairman of that association sought me out and gave me his business card and is anxious to work together again. Awesome! We already have some preliminary ideas for a talk in June that I think will be very interesting to a lot of people, as well.

I feel like I put a lot of time and energy and thought into this event, and I was so happy that it went well. I maybe would have changed his talk a little to discuss more about what actually was in Williamsville during the war. He touched on it and discussed it some, but I'm not sure how much he really knows, honestly - the records are somewhat sketchy. But he talked a lot about events throughout Western New York during the next couple years that got people very excited.

All in all, it was a great event.