Vanessa Mitchell and Susan Watkins listened with rapt attention as Esta McCleese shared with them her wealth of memories of the Great Depression of the 1930s one afternoon this summer. As the 92-year-old spoke in the living room of her home near Olive Hill, an audio recorder and digital video camera captured her recollections as the teens took notes and asked questions.

In fact, McCleese recalls the Great Depression as if it were yesterday. Things were tough all over, especially in rural Carter County, Kentucky.

“I was 17 years old . . . I recall my mommy waking my daddy, saying, ‘Wake up! They’ve locked the banks’ — so it was locked up in Olive Hill,” McCleese told the pair about the start of one of the darkest events of the county’s past century.

Families without the benefit of food and income generated by their own farms would go more than three weeks at a time without bread or much else to eat at all, she added. Those lucky enough to be able to afford food and supplies often would travel into Olive Hill for essentials like flour and sugar. Much of what was bought, though, was often given away to those in greater need along the way home.

Those vivid memories are just a small sample of what people will get when they dive into the oral history of Carter County created as a summer work project by four participants in the Northeast Kentucky Area Development Council’s (NEKADC) WIA Year-Round Youth Program.

Vanessa, Susan and fellow participants Freda Stacey and Amanda Grubb this summer completed the extensive project, which utilizes a multimedia format to document interviews like the one conducted with McCleese. Included are audio cassette and videotape recordings of that interview and others the group did with eight other longtime area residents and local history aficionados, as well as detailed typed transcripts of the encounters. A PowerPoint computer presentation and slide show ties the project together with still photos of the interview subjects, information on them and their comments, and a traditional Appalachian music soundtrack.

“We’ve had to work fast since we only have five weeks,” Vanessa said as she sat before a laptop computer in the NEKADC headquarters in Olive Hill during the project’s waning weeks. While she keyed in handwritten notes from one of the interviews, Susan sat nearby scouring through a stack of Kentucky history magazines and jotting down more notes. Amanda manned a stereo in the room, starting and stopping a tape of an interview repeatedly in order to transcribe it. Freda worked at another computer to pull together digital photos and music for the PowerPoint presentation.

“It’s not going to be perfect, but that’s because we’re still learning,” Vanessa said with a smile. “But if it wasn’t for this program, I definitely would have never been involved in anything like this.”

Exposing the participants to an intense dose of teamwork, learning and socialization they might never have experienced otherwise was a key objective of the project, said Joletta Morgan, youth coordinator for NEKADC. The group split interview responsibilities equally, with each having a turn as the interviewer and as operator of the digital video camera and photographer. Supervisors Troy Criswell and Becky Keaton helped them learn how to local history operate all the equipment and also helped Morgan guide their research and compilation efforts.

The format followed for the questions participants asked and the transcripts is patterned after the official style of the Kentucky Oral History Commission. The commission is the arm of the Kentucky Historical Society responsible for collecting and archiving interviews for oral history projects. While many local historical societies which do such projects send their tapes to the Kentucky Oral History Commission to transcribe, Morgan said the youth did that painstaking work themselves just as they did the rest of the package.

“This way, it’s all the students’ work,” she said.

The thorough format allowed the youth to get details on numerous topics of local interest, including: McCleese’s account of the effects of the Great Depression on Carter County; the history of Carter Caves and how the area became a state park; the development of the Camp Webb conservation camp near Grayson Lake, and the Lawton Limestone Mines that featured a cave in which church services were held for workers. The group also got additional history about the 1920s and ’30s in Olive Hill from other subjects, along with stories about local traditions such as quilting.

The diligence of the participants and the NEKADC WIA Youth Program staff even allowed them to get the jump on the Olive Hill Historical Society’s local oral history project. That work was just beginning as the youth were winding up work on their version. Still, Morgan said pulling the project together was very much a collaborative effort between the WIA staff and members of the local historical society, who shared ideas on interview subjects and topics. NEKADC handed the complete package over to the historical society for filing once work concluded.

The significance of the project wasn’t lost on the participants. “I’m just happy that I can give people information on things that I never knew,” Vanessa said. “To know more about where you grew up, and to learn things you didn’t know is a great feeling.”

While the participants learned about the history of their home county during each encounter, they also learned how to better socialize by speaking face-to-face with people who were complete strangers to them prior to the interviews.

“All in all, I’m totally confident that they were totally capable, and that they actually learned and enjoyed doing so,” Morgan said. “We feel like they accomplished something different and innovative, and we’re very proud of them.”