Time is a wall we all know and we can never cross.
I grew up in New England, where stone walls appear in the middle of forests, built by hands that are gone, marking boundaries nobody remembers, standing in fields that became woods long before I was born. I used to trace them as a kid and wonder: how did this get here? What did this place look like when this wall meant something?
That question never left me. I spent years trying to answer it — backpacking across continents, studying anthropology, working alongside communities whose histories existed just beneath the surface of the world most people see. Every place I went, I was looking for the same thing: what happened here, and who remembers?
The feeling I kept coming back to was this: standing somewhere ordinary and sensing there were layers I couldn't access. The strip mall that used to be a battlefield. The parking lot over someone's home. The road that follows a trail nobody remembers naming. The neighborhoods named for what they paved over. The ground is always telling a story. Most of us just don't have a way to hear it.
Misplaced Histories is that way. A tool for anyone who has ever stood somewhere and felt the pull of something deeper — the commuter driving the same road every day without knowing what happened there, the traveler who wants to know a place the way locals never think to say, the curious person who just wants to see the world as it actually is: deeper, stranger, and more alive than the surface suggests.
— Sarah Philbrick, BFA, M.Ed
Founder, This Human Experience, LLC
Asheville, North Carolina