This story originally appeared in The Centre County Gazette.
BELLEFONTE — Local Historia, a business run by Matt Maris and Dustin Elder to connect residents with local history through content, walking tours and experiences, launched its first episode of “Journeys with Local Historia” on July 1 at a viewing party at Big Springs in Bellefonte.
The documentary series, presented by WPSU, aims to share the rich history of the region.
“I started Local Historia in 2019,” Maris said. “As a high school social studies teacher, I began giving community walking tours in the summer and just fell in love with the process of learning and sharing local history.”
In addition to walking tours, Local Historia shares the history of the region in a wide range of ways, including a regular monthly column in Town&Gown magazine, videos via the Local Historia YouTube channel and the Hidden Happy Valley series with the Happy Valley Adventure Bureau.
“We believe that one of the most meaningful ways to connect with a town and its people, past or present, is by learning and preserving local history,” Maris said. “Dustin and I were both teachers and friends, so we partnered up early on. Local Historia gave us opportunities to do what we love, explore, educate and nerd out as historians. Over the last five years Local Historia has grown to include walking tours in other historic towns like Altoona.
The first episode of the new Local Historia series, “Into the Vaults: Pennsylvania Beer History and Culture,” investigated the role German immigrants had in developing the Pennsylvania beer industry. In the episode, Maris and Elder visited three historic German American breweries, exploring the lagering vaults and sharing more about the history of lager.
“The series had an interesting start,” Elder shared. “Matt and I have a YouTube channel where we filmed our own vignettes and stories, and one of those stories was about the Walter L. Main Circus Train Wreck near Tyrone.
“Around the same time that we were creating that content, WPSU was filming a documentary about railroading and asked if we could provide content for a segment on the circus train wreck. We provided some of the content from our video, and thus our relationship really started. A few meetings later, we were making a TV show.”
Elder went on to share that the current series is comprised of four episodes, including the first episode on the beer industry. However, future episodes will not be filmed until funding is secured for their development.
“Matt and I have always loved the ‘how we got here’ discussions, ancestry and locals who — sometimes literally — built towns. Immigration always plays a major role in that, and we aimed for a topic that focused on immigration, but with a modern and engaging spin,” Elder said, sharing how topics for episodes were developed.
“The team — Local Historia and the WPSU producers/film crew — gave a lot of thought to which topics might be interesting and engage the widest group of people, while still remaining true to our local roots. We also wanted to expand our reach across the state, so the topic needed to have broad appeal and links to the rest of Pennsylvania. The idea of German heritage and lagering became a natural fit to accomplish our goals,” Elder explained.
And for both Elder and Maris, the series is one way to continue to promote the importance of the history that made the region what it is today.
“We believe that helping folks engage with the past will help motivate them to work to keep history alive,” Maris said when discussing the challenges of preserving and presenting local history. “We are not only losing physical historic structures, but also are at risk of losing knowledge and culture, ways of life and stories that should not be forgotten. Local history can help you better understand and connect with regional, state and national history.”
The first episode of the series, as well as information on future episodes and how to support, can be viewed at pbs.org/show/journeys-with-local-historia.
More information on Local Historia can be found at localhistoria.com.
