57 Spraker's Tavern as seen by Rufus Grider 100 years ago. Click image to enlarge Since then, for another hundred years, more and more of these once important pieces of our cultural landscape have slipped away, out of our sight and out of our memory. Some, like Spraker's Tavern, were saved and rest quietly in the care of local historians - settings for remembrance and contemplation. Others, like Keator's Rift, clung perilously to survival, narrowly escaping the impacts of the modern age they helped create. Still others, like Kane's Store, teetered on the edge of oblivion, at risk of never being found nor remembered.
Archeological sites can be, of course, sources of information.
But they can also be monuments, in two meanings of the word. First, like historic monuments they immortalize, in a visual way, the importance of a place. They trigger our collective memory, and by remembering, we perpetuate the knowledge of what was once here that now is gone. Historic markers point to historic landscapes where the past is preserved. In that fashion, they point to the future and to new beginnings as much as to the past and what has already been completed.