By Chris Frost
Eagle Times News Editor
MERIDEN, NH — American buffalos were the stars of a recent Ken Burns documentary about their travels across the vast Western wilderness.
The movie, which Kimball Union Academy hosted Monday and Tuesday, October 16 and 17, at Flickinger Arts Center, had a local angle as Ernest Harold Baynes, a naturalist at Corbin Park and one of the men credited with helping save the Buffalo, was featured. During this time in history, buffalo were brought to the brink of extinction, then rescued by people like Buffalo Bill Cody and President Teddy Roosevelt, who created natural habitats, signed orders protecting the Buffalo and returned them to roam the wilderness.
The movie included 25 images from the Plainfield Historical Society’s collection of Baynes; glass negatives.
Meriden Bird Club President Margaret Drye said they’ve known for a long time that Earnest Harold Baynes, who founded the Bird Club, played a significant role in revitalizing the American buffalo.
“We have his scrapbook from the early 1900s and all the letters he wrote to Teddy Roosevelt and scientists,” said Margaret Drye. “There are lots of pictures, correspondences and lots of articles.”
She hoped Ken Burns would do something about Baynes someday and found out he was doing something on buffalo.
“We offered all our artifacts to them to see if they could use them,” she said. “We sent all the pictures that were in the buffalo scrapbook, and their office came up and took pictures of things they were going to use in the film. Even more will be used in the book that goes along with the documentary. It’s a real dream come true.”
Drye said Baynes took thousands of glass slides that the Plainfield Historical Society cataloged.
The film is important to her because when someone looks at the normal history of preserving the American buffalo, they’ll see people like William T. Hornaday (who ran the National Zoological Park) and others were involved, but they didn’t see Baynes’s name.
“We believe Baynes played a pivotal importance in the restoration of the American buffalo, and he is finally getting his due,” Margaret Drye said.
Chris Wright, a mutual connection, collects Burns items and used to live in Meriden. Wright knows the company and connected them to the Plainfield Historical Society and Meriden Bird Club. Drye wants to preserve the buffalo scrapbook, which she said was in “horrible condition” after spending 100 years in an attic.
“It’s chock full of history, and it’s not replicated anywhere else,” she said. “We’d love to get that in the hands of researchers and historians.”
Plainfield Historical Society President Jane Stephenson called the movie part a great night, which took a lot of work to scan the images. She said the Plainfield Historical Society had 5,200 images, and the Burns people chose 24.
“The pictures of Baynes with the animals and some buffalo pictures will stand out, I’m sure,” Stephenson said. “He was an obscure figure, but he’s not going to be obscure anymore.”
The book about the documentary is available at Amazon, and the movie and book are available at pbs.org. To support the Meriden Bird Club, a 501©(3) organization, mail check donations to The Meriden Bird Club C/O David Grobe, P.O. Box 203 Plainfield, NH 03781.
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