Latah Legacy Collection
A publication of the Latah County Historical Society
Contents: About the Latah Legacy | About the Collection | Tech
About the Latah Legacy
The Latah Legacy explores past and contemporary events, people, or topics with a connection to Latah County. Additionally, the journal serves as a way for amateur and professional scholars to submit research that may not have previously been told. The publication documents these stories for current and future generations to learn about the local community. 1
The Latah Legacy began publication in 1972 by the Latah County Historical Society. Originally published quarterly, the Latah Legacy is now published once a year. The publication serves as the local historical journal for Latah County and is authored by various community members.
This collection is a collaboration between Latah County Historical Society and the University of Idaho Library to make the back issues of the Latah Legacy openly accessible and discoverable online. It will continue to be updated on an annual basis as new issues are published.
To receive a current subscription and support ongoing efforts, please join the Latah County Historical Society!
The Latah County Historical Society
The Latah County Historical Society’s origins go back to 1891, just 20 years after the first settlers had arrived in the area, when fourteen of those settlers founded the Latah County Pioneer Association. This new organization aimed to “promote community sociability and progress, and to preserve treasured pioneer-day relics.”2
Just a few years later, in 1895, a group of Moscow women established the Moscow Historical Club. As one of their many civic engagement projects, MHC worked alongside the Pioneer Association to preserve Moscow’s McConnell Mansion as a historic museum.2 The McConnell Mansion Historic House Museum is still maintained by the Historical Society today.
During its many years working to preserve county history, the Latah County Pioneer Association went through a series of name changes. Finally, in 1978, members selected the name Latah County Historical Society. This change reflected the organization’s “wider scope of activities in preserving, sharing and celebrating the history of Latah County, in addition to its goal of finding a way to display artifacts telling the area’s history.”3
About the Collection
The copies in this collection begin with the first issue of what would become the Latah Legacy, which was circulated in 1972.
This first issue was a quarterly bulletin which announced that it would be the first of many such bulletins put out by the organization.
Since 1972, issues have included materials such as: book reviews, oral history transcripts, poetry, family histories, and historical photographs. In the 1980s, the Legacy even serially published the memoirs of Alma Lauder-Keeling, a second-generation Moscow pioneer.
Much of the Legacy has focused on the settler history of the Latah County area. Many of the earlier issues in particular contain a good deal of information concerning the early settlement and development of the region, often presented through settler diaries, oral histories, and family stories.
Some later Legacy articles seek to address gaps in the published history of the region. For example, in the Fall 1990 issue, Mary Reed examines some of the reasons many pioneer-era businesses operated by Chinese immigrants have likely been left out of historical records.
Many Latah Legacy articles also reference contemporary events related to local history, like the 2023 issue which showcases the archaeological dig that the University of Idaho conducted at Moscow High School in Fall 2023.
A complete set of print copies of Latah Legacy are held in Special Collections and Archives at the University of Idaho Library. These print editions were digitized in 2014 to form the base of this collection, and newer born-digital PDFs will continue be added going forward.
Related Collection: Latah County Oral History Collection
The Latah County Oral History Collection is the result of a collaboration between the University of Idaho Library and the Latah County Historical Society.
In the mid-1970s, LCHS conducted and recorded over 300 interviews with people who had lived in Latah County at the beginning of the twentieth century. As you read through the Latah Legacy collection, you will find frequent mention of the process and impact of this project, as well as some transcriptions of interviews.
In 2015, LCHS and the U of I Library digitized the recordings and created the digital collection, which allows the public to more easily access and interact with some of Latah County’s oral history.
Sources
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Kaitlynn Anderson, Museum Curator at Latah County Historical Society, email to authors, October 2024. ↩
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Mary E. Reed, “The First Ten Years,” Latah Legacy Vol. 17, No. 3 (Fall 1988): 1-15. ↩ ↩2
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LeNelle McInturff, Steve Talbott, and Denise Thomson, “The Latah County Historical Society: 50 Years of Progress,” Latah Legacy Vol 45, No. 1 (2018): 10-27. ↩
Technical Credits - CollectionBuilder
This digital collection is built with CollectionBuilder, an open source framework for creating digital collection and exhibit websites that is developed by faculty librarians at the University of Idaho Library following the Lib-Static methodology.
Using the CollectionBuilder-CSV template and the static website generator Jekyll, this project creates an engaging interface to explore driven by metadata.