Rutherford County Archive
Ribbon Cutting, August 2006
We enjoy many such opportunities -- large and small -- to serve our local communities. During the summer, we responded to an inquiry from Jerianne Thompson at the Smyrna Public Library regarding local immigrant history. We were able to provide some interesting items documenting some of Murfreesboro's early twentieth-century immigrants, the Goldstein, Meshotto, and DeGeorge families. Here's what Ms. Thompson wrote in response: "Smyrna library would like to thank you for providing us with images related to Murfreesboro-area immigrants. With your help, we were able to create a fabulous display for our month-long 'Becoming American' celebration." (See article on "Murfreesboro's Early Twentieth Century Immigrants").
An on-campus collaboration resulted in a new collection of war letters for the Gore Center. Early in the semester, Dr. Jim Williams's Honors History 2020 class visited the Gore Center to learn about letter-writing in war time and to read examples from our collections. They subsequently gathered letters written by soldiers from World War I to the current war in Iraq and presented them to the Gore Center to add to our holdings.
Collaboration, on and off campus, is at the heart of the Gore Center's mission. If you have ideas for collaborative projects related to the history of MTSU, Murfreesboro, or Rutherford County, please give me a call at 898-2632 or email me at lpruitt@mtsu.edu.
Lisa Pruitt, PhD, Director
William Goldstein Naturalization Papers, Rutherford County, 1894