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One man’s work is preserving Fort Dodge history

Kudron has tackled the challenge of 12,000 negatives

The yellow cardboard boxes of negatives fill multiple shelves in the Webster County Historical Society’s room in the Fort Dodge Public Library. Inside those boxes are about 12,000 photographic negatives.

There are years written on the boxes. But what’s really inside them – what images are to be found – remain a mystery until someone digs into them.

Joe Kudron has become that someone. Over the course of about 10 years, he has been steadily opening up those boxes and scanning the negatives into a hard drive.

There is no profit in this undertaking for the Fort Dodge native who lives in Boone. Finding an old train photo is the biggest reward for the lifelong rail fan and retired locomotive engineer.

While the whole project sprang from Kudron’s quest for train photos, his steadfast work is paying off for all residents of Fort Dodge and Webster County.

He is preserving in digital form a photographic record of Fort Dodge spanning from 1944 to 1985, the dates that Harold Bergeman’s photo studio was in business. Bergeman captured the images that are found on all those thousands of negatives. Some of those negatives are about 75 years old. They may well be vulnerable to the ravages of passing decades. But thanks to Kudron’s work, there is a backup to those old negatives.

His work is also enabling people to see Bergeman’s photographic work for the first time. He has posted some of the images he has scanned in to Fort Dodge history -related Facebook pages and has received very positive responses.

Kudron’s effort is remarkable. He is an individual spending his own time doing meticulous work for free. There is not a cent in it for him. But he keeps plugging away, plucking negatives out of boxes and putting them on his flatbed scanner. What may seem like a mind-numbing chore for many, has become something that he enjoys.

He is playing a key part in preserving the history of Fort Dodge. We thank him for that.

We also think he deserves to find some really neat old train photos.

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