Emily Fritz | a&e editor

In celebration of the Gilded Age, the Sewickley Valley Historical Society (SVHS) hosted its second annual “Winter Tea” event at the Allegheny Country Club, complete with high-tea service and a healthy dose of local history-makers.

Members and non-members alike settled into a delicate selection of assorted sandwiches, scones, Chippewa soup and various Harney & Sons tea selections on Saturday, before listening to the family history of local author Eliza Smith Brown.

Smith Brown, granddaughter of local suffragist Eliza Kennedy Smith, analyzed decades worth of love letters, tax returns and receipts to piece together the story of Eliza and her sister Lucy Kennedy — women who had passed by the time Smith Brown was eight years old.

“My family hasn’t thrown away a piece of paper in 100 years,” she told attendees.

After Pennsylvania became the seventh state to ratify women’s suffrage, the Kennedy sisters tackled political corruption, exposing corruption on both sides of the aisle.

For SVHS Executive Director Amanda Schaffer, the recency of their feats hit home.

“The image that struck me most was [Smith Brown] sitting on the lap of a woman who could not vote when she was born,” Schaffer said.

SVHS focuses primarily on preserving the local history of its namesake, but several members stressed the importance of everyday artifacts being enshrined for the future.

“All history is local history,” she said. “Even when you’re looking at a global scale, it’s happening here at the local level in some way, shape or form.”

But in a digital age, it can be difficult to cut through what is going to stand the test of time and be revisited when the greater public is exposed to a high volume of information.

Verna Corey, the program committee chair of SVHS, this record keeping often takes the form of journals and diaries. After her husband died, she began to wish she had done a more thorough job of writing down his stories.

“History is not just the past, it is the future as well,” Corey said. “We tend to, I think, undervalue family stories and always assume … ‘well, there will be some other fool in the family who will remember to keep telling this story.'”

In traditional history, the layman becomes aware of figures like Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick, but often aren’t exposed to the tales of “ordinary people,” said SVHS administrative assistant and Duquesne alumna Deanna Berryman.

To Berryman, the ecosystem of history creates a “trickle down effect” from the movers and shakers to the laypersons of the time.

“For a long time, [history] was focused on … white men who shaped the world, or were big thinkers,” she said. “Now we’re getting more toward this idea where it’s like, ‘actually the ordinary people and their lives are almost more important.'”

In an open Q&A session, one question stuck out among the rest: “As we look at women’s suffrage in tandem to today’s current events, how concerned should we be about the alleged Project 2025 playbook?”

The question was met with a grumbling murmur across the audience.

“Why did we have to make things political? I can’t believe she asked that!”

For Smith Brown, history and politics can’t always be separated.

“I think anytime you are dealing with people trying to live together, work together, get along together, it becomes political,” Smith Brown told The Duke.

As a board member, Schaffer couldn’t speak to partisan themes, but having booked Smith Brown as a speaker before the election, she wasn’t certain what the tone of the event would feel like.

Regardless, the history that exists does not exist in a vacuum. Even Lucy and Eliza Kennedy came with their own set of faults, sometimes characterized by Smith Brown as “unfair and unforgiving,” but human.

In order to give the most objective lens, audiences must be aware of their biases and misinformation.

“There is so much information out there, it’s hard to determine what information is accurate and believable,” she said.

As SVHS looks for the next chapter on a local and national scale, Corey encourages people to study the past in order to effectively create the best future.

“What we are doing right now is going to become history very soon. It’s not just the incredible major stuff, it’s the small stuff you don’t quite know right now,” Corey said. “You cannot judge what is truly important [but] for God’s sake, write it down.”