ANTIOCH HISTORY WALK Preserving Memories of our Fascinating And Fading Past
	APRIL 2005

by Charlie Bohackel
Photos by Russell Byrne

We should never forget that Antioch got its biblical name because the founder of the city, William Wiggin Smith, objected to the town’s original name. This is truly remarkable because the place was originally called Smith’s Point, named in his honor. It’s difficult to imagine the humility of a person who wished to acknowledge the Bible above honoring his own family name. If they ever named a place Bohackelton, for example, I would never try to get the city fathers to change it to Jerusalem. It’s important to remember that some people in our history displayed such qualities of integrity and devotion.

Antioch pioneers, however, weren’t saints, by any means. The first African-American who lived in Antioch was an emancipated slave named Thomas Gaines. He took care of the alter at the First Congregational Church in Antioch in the 19th century. This was an honor, because he was a black man, but a municipal ordinance, for the same reason, required him to be outside the city limits by sundown.

Very few people remember him, but Thomas Gaines should not be totally forgotten. Perhaps the best thing we historians do is to remind people of important messages: “This is the way we really were!” “This is what we actually did!” “This is our real history!” Many of us — including most politicians, I think — paint the past with brush strokes far too broad to provide the nuances necessary for actual comprehension. For example, we tend to impute to our forebears an innocence that they never actually possessed in the pure degree that we imagine. The fact that more of them attended church than we do today in no way prevented them from committing — apparently with perfect self-composure — the social atrocity of sending righteous Thomas Gaines into nightly exile solely because of the color of his skin.

Uncovering Antioch’s Past
I’ve been fascinated by history since I was a child. My father had a lot to do with that. When we were on trip, for example, dad made a practice of stopping at historical markers along the way so we could try to understand something of the history of the areas we were passing through. He took us to museums and in various ways instilled in me a love for the past and a sense of history.

We moved to Antioch in 1950, while it was still a small town. We didn’t know much about the area, but began talking to old timers who provided us with a virtual cornucopia of information about the past, including enchanting stories about things like old mineshafts, riverboats, and local industries which had disappeared into fading memories. Over the course of seven years I did three school reports about the history of Antioch — in the fourth grade, eighth grade, and eleventh grade. By the time I gave that third report, I had developed a genuine fascination with Antioch’s past.

During the ’40s Albert W. Flarity, publisher of the Antioch Daily Ledger, had his staff produce enlarged copies of pictures from Antioch’s history. Over the subsequent years that set of pictures became known as The Flarity Collection. One day, while I was still a boy, Mr. Flarity, himself, invited me to his downtown Antioch office. He took me through his collection, picture by picture, providing details about each exhibit as we went along. Each photo had a caption and when we were finished Mr. Flarity gave me the entire collection of those captions in a small book.

The really triumphal moment in the visit occurred when he took me into his office and put a small book into my hand. “Here, hold this!” It was the diary of W.W. Smith, the original founder of Antioch. “Someday you will be able to tell people, ‘I held that diary,’” Mr. Flarity said. And the man was a prophet, I guess, because I’m telling this to you. In the 1940s Flarity’s son transcribed the diary. I have a copy of that transcription, but the original has apparently disappeared beyond the possibility of recovery.

Mr. Flarity had taken that time with me because he could tell that I had the passion and temperament of a budding historian. He was fanning the flames of my interest in the subject as he took time to establish connections between the city that he loved so much and a young boy whom he sensed was able to understand that love.

Brick and Board Records of a Fading Past
I believe that old buildings provide one of the most effective channels by which the past communicates with us. The skill and care of long-forgotten workers are visible to our eyes. We come closer to communicating with our honored and forgotten dead in a deserted hallway or in an empty room in an old building than almost anywhere else on earth, I think. We can slide our hand down a railing and feel connected to the innumerable anonymous people who touched that wood before us. We look through an ancient window and feel surrounded by the spirits of vanished men, women, and children who gazed at our side through the long, slow decades of the window’s existence.

Old buildings provide an effective means to understand or at least to imagine an otherwise vanished past. You can look at a 100-year-old structure and can picture in your mind what the world was like before your grandfather was born.

Most importantly of all, the story of each of these old structures becomes part of the story of Antioch itself. An old theater became a store, which became a saloon, then a music store…. During each of these periods the building was a part of the physical anthropology of Antioch, as the city existed during each particular era. Just as a core sample will reveal the history of a tree, a sea floor, or a glacier, the story of an old building will help reveal the history of a community.

Antioch has many of these old buildings, each of them having a story that deserves to be remembered and retold. In an effort to preserve this knowledge before it slipped from our collective community consciousness forever, I gathered information on these buildings and then shared it with others in a series of walking tours that I began to conduct almost 20 years ago.

Learning History by Walking Around
Much of the information I collected about Antioch’s old buildings came from a wonderful man named Victor Parachini, Sr., who had the title “Mr. Antioch.” The man was a fount of information about the city’s past. I was teaching a group of at-risk high school students at that time. Victor would meet with my students and me. The students and I would stroll together through downtown Antioch, walking one block at a time, and listening to Victor talking about the old buildings while I feverishly took notes.

We went walking with Victor for three hours at a time, doing this once or twice a week for three hours. When we finished all the downtown blocks we would start over. We did that for months, and every time Victor Parachini walked down a block again, he had new stories to tell. He carried so much information in his memory about the old buildings in Antioch that he didn’t need to repeat himself.

I conducted my first walking tour in 1983 using my at-risk students to conduct the tour on behalf of invited guests and school personnel. The primary goal of the first tour didn’t have to do with reaching back into history so much as it had to do with reaching out to a my troubled students. I would train the kids and give them information, most of which I had collected from Victor, about the places on the tour, which they would share with the people who took the tours.

Their role as ad hoc tour guides instilled self-confidence in the students. They were able to show members of the community and school officials that they weren’t losers, and were able to participate intelligently in helping preserve our heritage.

History is always sliding down the drains of progress. Every year that I conducted the walking tour I noted the loss of a few old buildings that had been featured on the tour the year before. I developed a real passion to promote the remaining buildings before they forever vanished into the past. I would tell adults, “Bring your young children, this is the way to develop a sense of history.” And, in fact, the longer I did those tours the more children there would be following along, and looking, and wondering.

Finally, the walking tours became too popular. We had as many as 260 people show up, which were more than we could effectively serve; the walks were dying from their success. I finally retired from teaching high school in 2000 and conducted my last walking tour following 18 years of annual history walks. I’m planning to conduct one more of these and then quit forever.

I’m also planning to publish a Coloring book adapted from my A Walker’s Guide to “Old Town” Antioch, which I am also preparing for publication. It is a self-guided tour book of Old Antioch, which will cover the area from 10th street to the river and along the waterfront.

We study history for two purposes. The first, and most obvious, is to learn from the past about ourselves. We don’t really understand ourselves unless we understand something of our extended story. The other purpose is to help preserve the links between our past and ourselves. In this way, our knowledge of history provides important social payoffs by promoting genuine patriotism and a sense of identity and of belonging to a place. Problems arise for everyone if our students graduate with abilities to read and do math, but lack any realization of the story of our collective experiences that brought them to the point at which they are now living and working.

Wonderful things in our past should be embraced and preserved; awful things should be acknowledged and lamented. In both cases we should be aware of our history. The memory of W.W. Smith’s humble and noble efforts in renaming the city should be preserved. The daily exile of Thomas Gaines is a part of our story that we must neither deny nor evade.

For information or comments contact Charlie at LMC, 925-439-2181 X832