A group of Binghamton University administrators, professors and students are digging through Binghamton’s past in order to uncover the history of the Southern Tier.

The Past 2 Future project is seeking letters, diaries, videos and any other forms of documentation that depict the culture and history of the area. The project, directed by Mountainview College faculty master and former human development professor Kevin Wright, started last semester. They have recently begun collecting and processing documents, which have been solicited from the community.

“There is so much interesting history in this area,” Wright said, “and I know students who come from other places are surprised to hear that, but it is true.”

As an example, Wright cites Willis Sharpe Kilmer, who was one of the first to use print advertising as way of marketing his liver diuretic.

“The first local entrepreneur to market his product nationally was from Binghamton,” Wright said. “He took out ads in a Philadelphia newspaper to advertise a medicine called Swamp Root.”

Kilmer was also the owner and breeder of several horses that won the Kentucky Derby in the 1910s and 1920s.

The project is also researching previous occupants of buildings that many students frequent, but don’t know the cultural history.

“Around the turn of the century, there was a cigar factory underneath one of the bars down on State Street where men and women were paid an equal wage,” Wright said. “A key part of the job was licking the cigars after rolling them in order to seal them up, which resulted in many cases of oral cancer among workers.”

The project represents a confluence of several high-level university goals. The interdisciplinary nature of the research, which includes English, classics and mechanical engineering, coupled with the involvement of undergraduate research opportunities and local community engagement, has elevated the status of the collection endeavor within the University.

The documents are being digitized and stored on BU’s servers. They are then returned to their owners after processing. Owners of the documents sign a transfer of rights, but the University cannot profit off of the documents. Documents have come from a variety of sources, including Wright’s personal community connections.

“Some of the first films we received come from a friend I play poker with, whose uncle just so happens to have unprocessed film from the ’40s lying around,” Wright said.

Undergraduates have the opportunity to get involved in the collection and digitization process. According to Wright, opportunities to conduct undergraduate research in the social sciences are often tough to come by and students are pleased to find options available.

Jonathan Lanz, one of the eight undergraduate researchers and a freshman majoring in history, has been researching the Johnson City building that is slated to become the School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences.

“As a history major, it is difficult to find research opportunities in the social sciences,” Lanz wrote in an email. “But I was happy to find out that Binghamton began this project.”

The project is open ended, and the collection’s database will be publicly accessible to be used in further research. Currently, Wright is focusing on long-term goals for the data.

“Eventually, we are looking to string these documents together and develop overarching themes,” Wright said. “The obvious ones are entrepreneurship, innovation, immigration and the environment, but maybe more will emerge as we keep going.”