Our Storied Past
Our history. Our Place.
House histories of the American West
Your house, your home, your history. Presenting: Our Storied Past. Our team researches the complete history of your house or building as it relates to your family, your neighborhood and the history of Missoula, Montana, and the American West. We conduct a full title history, architectural description, alterations over time, historic photography, and contemporary photography. We go above and beyond title companies and online genealogies. We produce a narrative. Our Storied Past investigates occupations of house owners, family trees, history of style & architecture, and compiles a thorough history of the building, the neighborhood, and how it interacts with our larger, shared history. We produce an articulate historical narrative of your home, from the day the land was platted, to the date your house was built, and publish a documentary book, hand crafted, researched, designed, written, and delivered to you by a team of fellow Missoula residents. As a group of local historians, we believe our history should be shared, and passed on to future generations. If you so choose, we'll print additional copies of your documentary book for free and will donate a copy to your choice of the Montana State Archives, Missoula Public Library, Missoula Historical Society, University of Montana, among a long list of others. Our Storied Past was created to expand upon our past, cultivate our shared heritage through documentary history, and improve upon our shared meaning, identity, and sense-of-place as western Americans.
A personalized book, all about your place.
Meet Us
Emy Scherrer, Director
With a Masters of Science in Historic Preservation and a Bachelors of Arts in Art History and Anthropology, Emy is highly literate within the cultural resource and historic preservation fields. Her graduate work has given her a broad lens in which to view historic preservation. As a Cultural Resource Specialist, she focuses on including a cross-pollination of disciplines within all her projects, with an emphasis on place-making, identity, and communicable design. Emy specializes in the history of the American West, with a focus on environmental history, industrialization and resource extraction. Emy has conducted historic preservation with the Virginia City, MT National Historic Landmark, North Cascades National Park, City of Bellingham, WA, City of Eugene, OR, and a variety of consulting projects in and around Missoula and the intermountain west. She has served on governmental historic commissions, and has written a book about historic industrial landmarks and the former Georgia Pacific pulp mill on Bellingham Bay. Emy also served as Editor-In-Chief of the Associated Students for Historic Preservation (ASHP) scholarly journal. Her academic career paired with her professional past has made her exceptionally experienced in architectural and art history, interpretation, historic architecture and landscape surveys, inventories and evaluations, and NRHP nominations. Her greatest passion is getting people excited about their history, and the shared meaning that all local history has the power cultivate.
More soon!