Blair County: A People's History Premieres at Mishler Theater

On April 18, the Blair County Arts Foundation hosted the Blair County Historical Society for the grand premiere of Blair County: A People’s History.

This film traces the cultural influences of the county through interviews, reenactments, photos and archival footage to tell stories of the past.

Executive Producer Julia Plummer Schokker said that her job was to find the money and to find the director.

“I had very few requirements for the director — one he had to be local and would be a great historian and a visionary,” she said.

That described Mark Frederick to a tee, Plummer Schokker said.

He hired the writer, his brother Jared Frederick.

“I knew that we wanted someone who understood the area and loved the area as much as I do and wanted somebody whose visionary work I have already seen,” she said.

Plummer Schokker saw Mark’s work that he had done for Fort Roberdeau and for Baker Mansion.

“I also wanted somebody with a passionate vision of what story we were going to tell­ ­­­— Mark and his brother Jared fit that bill completely,” she said.

Plummer Schokker continued by saying that in 2018, she wrote a book about Altoona on behalf of The Blair County Historical Society.

“We said on the back cover of the book that we would produce a DVD of the book,” she said.

That was in 2018 and the DVD was suppose to come out in 2019.

“When I started talking the project over with Mark Frederick and his brother Jared, we expanded the scope.”

Instead of doing just Altoona, they said it had to be Blair County, Plummer Schokker said.

It took them awhile to get off the ground because of the pandemic but once they did, it was a wonderful project.

When writer Jared Frederick thought about what stories to highlight for the film, he thought back to his childhood and what were the most important places to him.

He also thought of the places he enjoyed exploring.

“We had a lot of creative conversations from the outset — at first, we were going for a comprehensive history of the county that would go chronologically,” Jared said.

However, they came to the realization if they followed everything that way, it would be like a pinball journey across the county, he said.

“What we decided to go for was like the kite’s view of the county — where we would kind of float from town to town and get some perspective on each community,” he said.

Mark said that probably the hardest thing about this project was finding photographs.

“You had to really know the right people — you needed to know where to go,” he said. “Thankfully, we had so many partners out there.”

Mark said he was able to go to local history museums and organizations for help, but that was also difficult because the county was constantly changing.

Jared said that some of the topics that they wanted to cover but could not find enough material on were first and foremost early Native American History.

Not many of these societies maintained written records by the same standards that we do. So, a lot of it is based on archaeological evidence, which can sometimes be hard to find.

He said that believe it or not, something that was difficult to find was primary source information about the construction of the Horseshoe Curve.

“You would think that there would be bountiful information on that,” Jared said.

They didn’t start calling it the Horseshoe Curve until the 1870s, he said.