A little volume entitled, Stories of Pioneer Days in Killarney, first published long ago by the Oak Ridge Women’s Institute, is special in that it is a collection of first hand accounts. The writers were the pioneers. They saw it happen.

The stories cover the origins of Killarney and the communities surrounding Killarney with factual detail. Names are named, places are described, and stories are told.

You cannot replace the memories once the bearer of those memories has passed on. You can’t bring them back.

What we might do is make use of some resources that were not available to those pioneer writers. The digital revolution has given us access to a wide array of photos and maps that were once not easily accessible. Museums and archives and historical societies have collected, preserved and displayed those resources and more.

The goal of this project is to reproduce highlights from this excellent account with additional stories, photographs, and maps.  Many of these additional stories come from records created prior to the publishing of Killarney’s excellent local histories and carefully preserved by the J.A.V. David Museum. While these may not all have been first hand accounts, they were submitted by the close relatives of those early pioneers and have the ring of authenticity about them.


Ken Storie
2021