High school history retold through Hempfield Project archive
A Spartan pennant from the 1960s, rescued from between the pages of a yearbook. A school handbook from 1962. A seat cushion from the 1970s. A mug from the Cotton Bowl, where the district’s band performed in 1971, and a football program from the 1980s.
Hempfield Area teacher and English department chairman James Steeley’s efforts to archive the history of Hempfield Area Senior High School started from humble beginnings.
“I was handed a cardboard box that had 5 things in it,” he said. “Lots was lost in the renovation in the ’90s. I made it one of our purposes to recapture all that stuff.”
Today, Steeley’s collection of Hempfield memorabilia has grown to upwards of 2,000 items and includes a plethora of pieces, from uniforms and tchotchkes to film, photos, newspaper clippings and beyond.
Through his “Hempfield Project” course, which began five years ago, high school students contribute to the archival and organization of the collection and conduct research and interviews of their own to help document the story of the school.
“We’re taking oral histories of all the alumni we can get, trying to capture their memories of being in the building, getting that on video and audio and taking photos,” Steeley said. “Everything we’ve been doing along those lines has been designed to keep moving the history along and maintaining it.”
Once the upcoming interior revitalization project at the high school is complete, Steeley hopes to put the Hempfield Project’s collection on view in a special archive room.
“We’re going to display a lot of it in the new building, once we’ve established the building itself,” he said. “The whole idea behind it is to kind of make sure we maintain the history of the building.”
Spartan archive
The items in the Hempfield Project archive are as varied as the school’s 68 years of history. A trophy from the district’s basketball team that was stashed away in the corner of a closet, program pamphlets from early prom celebrations, and a film reel documenting the first Greensburg-Hempfield football game all share space in the collection.
“The intent was to gather the history of the district through the building,” Steeley said. “(It’s) to get a sense of this place the kids grew up in, where they went to school and where their parents went to school.”
While working with and expanding the collection, Hempfield Project students get hands-on experience with the ins and outs of archival research, and also develop life skills, Steeley explained.
“What it forces kids to do is to talk to people. Everybody in that class has to interview people. Sometimes it’s family, sometimes it’s alumni they’ve never met,” he said. “It’s a lot of project work. They have to be able to communicate with other people, within the group they’re working in in the room, but also be able to reach out and even know how to send an email to somebody professionally to ask for an interview or ask for material.”
Steeley sometimes challenges his students to longer-range quests to find the original owners of an item. One of his newer hopes is to find all four previous owners of a Hempfield cheerleader jacket that was passed down through the grade levels of the team.
Four people wrote their names on the inside of the jacket, he said, and his students’ goal will be to contact each one and document their story.
“I’m going to say, ‘Find those girls. I want you to research and find them and interview them about their stories as students at Hempfield,’ ” he said. “It’s that kind of research, but almost forensic type of stuff, too — you’re given one little thing and you have got to figure out where to go with it.”
Student contributions
Last year, Hempfield Project students helped to organize a gathering of 40 former Hempfield homecoming queens to celebrate the 50th Homecoming at the district.
“I read the biography of every single one of those past queens and saw what they are doing now, and saw how (far) they have come from where I am standing right now, just graduating high school,” said Karina Mellon, a 2023 high school graduate who participated in the Hempfield Project and the homecoming event last year.
“I feel like there is a lot to learn. To see all those success stories, it’s very inspirational,” she said. “It was just very nice to talk to people who have gone through that school.”
Mellon praised the course for focusing on “people skills” like interviewing.
“(It was) how to talk to people, how to work together with other people, a lot of group projects,” she said. “It was a lot of good life lessons.”
Jayme Flock, another 2023 graduate who participated in last year’s Hempfield Project class, said she traced her own family history through Steeley’s collection of yearbooks.
“Hempfield was the home of almost every single one of my family members. When we were doing this project, I did a lot of research on my own family. I interviewed my dad and my pap, and we went back and looked at all the old yearbooks,” she said. “I basically learned to never stop looking at things, and always keep stuff. People in the future will probably want to go back and look at things, too.”
The Hempfield Project already is looking ahead to recording present-day history at the high school. Mellon described the process last year of documenting the current interior of the building, which will look entirely different after the revitalization project is complete.
“We took pictures to archive what the school looks like now, since it’s going to be changing, so people in coming generations can see what it used to look like,” she said. “With it being the last year until the big construction, we took a lot of pictures, and we did a lot of stories about different parts of the buildings.”
Steeley’s collection is proof that recent memory is just as much a part of the story of Hempfield Area High School as items from the past.
Pressed between the plastic slide pages in one of his archival binders are two bright blue covid face masks, emblazoned with the Spartan logo.
Julia Maruca is a TribLive reporter covering health and the Greensburg and Hempfield areas. She joined the Trib in 2022 after working at the Butler Eagle covering southwestern Butler County. She can be reached at jmaruca@triblive.com.
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