In one sense, defining a primary source is pretty easy. A primary source is direct evidence of the nature of a time, place or event. It must have been produced by participants in the event, situation, or time period being investigated or by witnesses to it. In science, a primary source can be produced by nature itself.
Secondary sources are descriptions or accounts of events or situations that are created by people who were not participants or witnesses. They are based on primary sources and can be anything from a newspaper article written at the time to a history book written a hundred years after the event.
Considering how simple that definition is, it’s interesting how confused people can be about whether something is, or is not, a primary source. Is a newspaper article a primary source? What about a photograph? A painting?
We’ve written this little story to help you and your students explore these questions. And let’s start by emphasizing that the story is not itself a primary source or a secondary source. It’s fiction. But it illustrates the principles we’ve outlined above.
The Great Juneville Bank Robbery
The town of Juneville is about the same size as Mayberry and just about as quiet. The lone sensation in its entire history was the Great Juneville Bank Robbery. On August 17th, 1956, a black car was parked in front of the First National Bank of Juneville. Across the street, on a park bench, sat Jane Walters. She later gave sworn testimony to the police that she was on her lunch break from the drugstore where she was cashier and was eating an egg salad sandwich. “As I put my sandwich down on my brown bag so that I could take a sip of lemonade from my thermos, “she said, “Pete Mason came out of the bank with the Friday payroll for the cheese factory. A man got out of the passenger side of the car, grabbed the payroll from Pete and jumped back into the car just as the driver speeded off.” According to the bank records, the robbers made off with $5,642.
Within minutes, Juneville’s sheriff, Nealie Stone, arrived on the scene. He questioned both Pete Mason and Jane Walters and then asked them to come down to the police station when they got off work to make formal statements. He also questioned the bank staff, but none of them had been near the door when Pete left. They hadn’t seen anything. In the meantime, Rose Thomas, from the Juneville Gazette, appeared on the scene to write a story about the robbery. Pete Mason, who had been jilted by Rose when they were in high school, told her he was too busy to talk to her and she could just get her information from the sheriff. Jane Walters said she’d talk to Rose back at the drugstore because her lunch hour was over.
The story about the bank robbery appeared in a special edition of the Juneville Gazette the following Monday. In it, Rose revealed what everybody in town had heard already. In Pete Mason’s statement to the police, he had identified the man who grabbed the payroll from him as Ira Wilkins, who had recently been fired from the cheese factory for showing up for work in no condition to drain the curds. Pete did not see the driver of the car, but Jane Walters identified him as Donnie Halvorsen, a fishing buddy of Ira’s.
A few days after the story appeared in the Gazette, a family from nearby Springfield came forward with another piece of evidence. The Dentons had been visiting relatives in Juneville on the day of the robbery. An uncle gave young Ray Denton a Brownie camera, with which he took a picture of his family in the park. When the film was developed, Ray noticed, in the background, a black car parked in front of the bank. The photo also showed the back of a woman on a park bench. Unfortunately, the face of the man in the driver’s seat of the car was in shadow and could not be clearly seen.
The two robbers in the Great Juneville Bank Robbery were never caught, but the story of the robbery was told again and again. Then, about twenty years after the robbery, a librarian in Juneville, Mai Forest, decided to write a history of the town.
What primary sources could Mai Forest use to research the robbery?
- Was the newspaper article written at the time of the robbery a primary source or a secondary source? Was any part of it a primary source?
- What about the police records? Were the statements made by Pete Mason and Jane Walters primary sources? Was Nealie Stone’s account of what happened a primary source or a secondary source?
- Was the photograph taken by Ray Denton a primary source?
- Can you think of any other primary sources Mai Forest might have found and used to write about the bank robbery in the town history?
Mai Forest read the statements Pete Mason and Jane Walters gave to the police and looked at the photograph brought forward by the Dentons. She found the bank records showing the amount of the cheese factory payroll withdrawal and the employee records at the cheese factory showing the firing of Ira Wilkins.
She also had the newspaper account written by Rose Thomas, which was a very good secondary source, close in time to the event and based on eyewitness accounts. Mai Forest wrote in the town history a story that read much like the one above, though without the reference to Pete and Rose’s high school romance or Jane’s egg salad sandwich. It was published in 1975, and the names of Ira Wilkins and Donnie Halvorsen were immortalized as Juneville’s most famous outlaws.
In 1985, the police department digitized its records. Only a few hundred of the thousands scanned were lost, but Jane and Pete’s accounts of the robbery were among them. In 1989, the cheese factory closed down and shredded its records.
Then, in 2002, a new teacher at Juneville high school, Paul Ross, assigned an oral history project to his students. Armed with tape recorders and interview questions, they went into the neighborhoods, to the Juneville Senior Center, and to the Merrill Stone Home for the Elderly. They came back with accounts of life of in Juneville in the previous eighty years. And the oral histories included one by Amos Littleton.
INTERVIEWER: Do you remember the Great Juneville Bank Robbery?
AMOS LITTLETON: Of course I do. Everybody thinks Donnie Halvorsen drove the getaway car, and all because he beat Jane Walters in the tenth grade spelling bee. She knew he cheated, and she never forgave him. If you want to know who really drove that car, it was Donnie’s cousin Lonnie. They looked a bit alike, except for Lonnie being two, three inches taller.
INTERVIEWER: How do you know that?
AMOS LITTLETON: I saw him. Him and Ira in that big black car. They come whizzin’ past my place scaring my chickens. I went out to yell at them, and Lonnie waved at me.
INTERVIEWER: Why didn’t you tell anyone?
AMOS LITTLETON: I didn’t like Donnie much more than Jane did. I guess I would’ve told if they ever tried to put him in jail, but he disappeared before the robbery ever happened, and nobody’s seen him since.
When Paul Ross heard this information on the tape of Amos Littleton’s oral history, he took it to Ellen Rhodes, the current town librarian. Together, they decided to see whether they could find any support for Amos’s identification of the driver of the getaway car.
First, they reread the town history written by Mai Forest. That history told them about Ray Denton’s photograph. They decided to have another look at it. After enlargement and computer enhancement, the photograph showed the driver of the car quite clearly. When they pulled out the 1950 Juneville High School yearbook and compared the photograph to the graduation pictures of the Halvorsen cousins, it was pretty clear that the driver of the car was, in fact, Lonnie Halvorsen. Jane Walters had been wrong. When Ellen Rhodes rewrote the town history later that year, she exonerated Donnie Halvorsen.
This account brings up all kinds of questions about the various investigations carried out over the years. These are a few of the questions it raises:
1. What primary sources did each of the following use in reconstructing the crime—Sheriff Stone, Mai Forest, and Ellen Rhodes?
2. What secondary sources, if any, were used in each case?
3. What primary sources were lost or destroyed before Ellen Rhodes rewrote the history?
4. What kind of source might cause the next librarian of Juneville to revise its history again?