The Knuths continue to use the barn to work livestock and store hay and grain. Meanwhile, the Knuths and their clan are planning another barn painting shindig this summer. The Knuths' barn is one of the admirable endeavors to restore treasured slices of our history. On the local level, the Hall County Historical Society is involved in refurbishing the old Burlington Railroad depot and saving the Stolley House. The Howard County Historical Society is rescuing historical structures, too, and has inaugurated an aggressive effort to battle cemetery thieves and vandals.
Cemeteries are perhaps our most cherished and emotional links to the past.
Some are even vandalized and destroyed, like the burning of the historic Merrick County bridge last fall and the never-ending, mindless desecration of our cemeteries. We can move on, however. In an editorial last fall, Amy Mancini-Marshall of the Elkhorn Valley Historical Society lamented the vandalism of the oldest standing building in Norfolk the night before Halloween. The result is a community without a sense of its past. Without visual reminders of the past, public memory only allows us to understand the community as it looks now.