presents
Notes and Thanks
Welcome! I am Andrew Turnbull, a librarian and archivist
from London and Thunder Bay, Ontario by way of Athens, West Virginia. This project took over 20 years to create. Its
objective is to document an important, yet seldom-discussed aspect of local history.
Resources
- The genesis of this project was a piece of notebook paper that I
kept in my binder as a geeky high school student circa 2000, jotting
down the fleet numbers of the buses I rode and their specifications.
- The single most useful resource of information was the archive of
the Bluefield Daily Telegraph, which yielded a vast trove of
historic schedules, auction lists, and contextual information.
- Another useful resource, particularly for photographs, were historic
Athens, Bluefield, Bramwell, Matoaka, Montcalm, and Princeton High School
yearbooks. A surprising number of these rare publications have surfaced in digital form from Athens
We Knew, the Princeton Public Library, or impersonal websites like Ancestry and Classmates.com. (Classmates has a notoriously scummy reputation, as does Ancestry to a lesser degree, and you'll notice the lack of a hyperlink to them.)
People
- A big thanks to my collaborator Adam Ross, fellow transportation enthusiast in Huntington, West Virginia. Adam contributed the vast majority of post-2013 photographs to the site through his diligent fieldwork, enabling the chronological scope of this project to be extended forward from 2003 all the way to the present day!
- Thanks also to Ryan Dunn, Supervisor of Transportation at Boardman Local Schools in Boardman, Ohio. Ryan provided much of the inspiration and encouragement (as well as a few photos) that allowed this project to get off the ground.
- A begrudging acknowledgement to Fred Scott of the Mercer County Board of Education, who gave me permission to visit and photograph the bus yard only to do an about-face and angrily escort me off the premises hours later. Scott's actions had a chilling effect, and nearly caused me to scrap this project altogether.
Contributions
I'm highly interested in any photographs of older Mercer
County school buses that might exist, especially from the 1980s and early 1990s.
Contact
Linky.
This is not a Mercer County school bus. I wish it was one.
