Linfield Archive
By L.M. Archer
Blame it on a storage problem. In 2008, Willamette Valley pioneer Susan Sokol Blosser turned over the reins of Sokol Blosser Winery to her children, Alex and Alison. But to truly make space for the future, she needed help tidying up the past namely 35 years of documents cluttering the winery.
“I was a history major in college, and before we started a vineyard, I worked with private manuscripts at the Southern Historical Collection (SHC), in the basement of the Wilson Library at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill,” explained Sokol Blosser. “My work at the SHC gave me an appreciation for what the papers (personal letters, account books, diaries, photos, etc.) of ordinary folks, as well as prominent ones, could tell us about how they lived and what they thought. That lesson stayed with me.”