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Documentary On Fredonia History To Be Sown Thursday

FREDONIA — A new historical documentary about Fredonia, which more than 80 residents had a hand in creating, is set for a preview screening this week.

“Among the Hemlocks: Fantastic Stories from Fredonia” will be shown at 6 p.m. Thursday in Westfield’s Patterson Library, 40 South Portage St. The event is free and open to all.

Roslin Smith, assistant professor of communication at SUNY Fredonia, created the film by utilizing historic photographs and newspaper clippings and bringing them to life with re-enactments and voice-overs.

“I’ve been making documentaries for 30 years and it’s always been about people. A lot of stories were being told to me about Fredonia. No one had done a documentary about Fredonia before so I decided to do that,” Smith said in an interview.

The name of the 29 minute film comes from Canadaway Creek, which flows through the village. Canadaway is derived from a Seneca word, Ganadaweo, which means “among the hemlocks.”

“We start with the creek and kind of end with the creek,” Smith said.

The process of putting the piece together began last winter, when Smith scoured the Barker Library’s archives and museum for material to use.

She also did research online and looked at the material of local historian Doug Shepard.

“By February and March I started to write the script, and in the summer I started filming,” she said. “When we started the fall term, that is when we did the re-enactments because I had students helping me.”

The professor estimated she put in more than 570 hours of work on the project.

Besides SUNY Fredonia students, Smith got help from fellow college faculty and members of the North Shore Arts Alliance, which she is involved with. “Through my contacts in Fredonia, the word kind of got around,” she said.

The documentary covers Fredonia happenings from prior to the settlement of whites until about 1935. Stories shared include William Hart’s creation of the first natural gas well in the U.S. in 1821, and the visit of the Marquis de Lafayette, a Frenchman who gave famous and heroic service to the brand-new United States during the Revolutionary War.

There are also darker tales. Included is the story of the first and last public hanging in Chautauqua County in 1835, of a man who beat a woman to death with a fireplace poker. According to Smith, the first attempt at the hanging was botched, and despite the man’s vehement protests he was strung up a second time, this time successfully. Smith said there is only “no overt violence, just implied” in the film and neither the murder nor the hangings are directly shown.

“There was going to be a ghost story regarding the White Inn but the White Inn is closed now so I couldn’t do anything regarding that,” she said.

The project was made possible with a grant from the Decentralization Program, a regrant program of the New York State Council on the Arts administered locally by Tri-County Arts Council. A grant for the summer work was also received from SUNY Fredonia Provost Terry Brown.

A stipulation of Smith’s grant agreements was that she had to screen a finished product by Christmas. That’s why “Among the Hemlocks” is premiering in Westfield and not the village it profiles: She couldn’t find any venue in Fredonia available to show it by then, but fellow North Shore Arts Alliance member Nancy Ensign-Nixon, who works at Patterson Library, was able to squeeze her in.

Smith does intend to show the film in Fredonia. It’s set to be screened at SUNY Fredonia in March, and she thinks it will also be shown in the Opera House and at Lily Dale.

She’s also putting a DVD of the documentary in the Barker Library collection — ensuring that her history of the village will be enshrined in the village’s history, itself.

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