Photo by Deb Gau Gordy Bossen, Darlene Keifer Schultz and Cindy Schultz Garnas looked at some of the items on display at the Russell Community Center on Saturday afternoon. The displays at “Bulldog Memory Days” included models of the Russell Bandwagon and the old Russell liquor store, as well as photos from Russell’s past.

RUSSELL — It was part local history exhibit, and part all-school reunion.

On Saturday, a crowd of current and former Russell area residents came and went at the Community Center, socializing and browsing tables of memorabilia. In one corner of the room, a line had formed for people to claim old school records saved from the attic of Russell’s school building before it was demolished last year.

Bruce Buckbee and Lottie Fae (Seaton) Buckbee took a closer look at an elementary school record card dating back to 1930.

“This is for my aunt Edna Mae Seaton, so this is quite old,” Lottie Buckbee said. “They’re in such good shape for being stored so long.”

Organizers of Saturday’s “Bulldog Memory Days” hoped the event would help build support to start a nonprofit group.

“We’re in the process of trying to do some things to preserve the history of Russell,” said Gary Erdmann. While Saturday’s event was a long time in the making, Erdmann said the discovery of a time capsule and old records in the 1919 Russell school building was just the thing to draw people out.

Russell High School’s last graduating class was in 1981. After that, Russell’s public school became part of RTR. When the new K-12 RTR School was built in Tyler in 2021, the Russell school building was torn down.

However, Russell area residents saved a lot of items from the old school building. That included a 1919 time capsule recovered from a stone on the school’s second story by Erdmann and Brad Johnson. Some items sealed in the time capsule didn’t survive — an envelope of photographs had turned to “confetti,” Erdmann and Johnson said. But other items, like a copy of the Russell Anchor newspaper reporting the end of World War I, were in good shape. Russell students had also sealed in tokens of their own, like a bone comb, a match holder and a Red Cross pin.

An unexpected find was a trove of old records in the school’s attic, Erdmann said. There were a couple of shoeboxes filled with permanent record cards from the school, and a lot of file folders with records from Russell’s Veterans Farm Management program.

The Veterans Farm Management program ran through the Russell school from 1949 to 1958. About 95 veterans of World War II and the Korean War received agricultural training through the program. Erdmann said he had started a similar farm management program in Tracy in the 1970s. So when he saw the Russell records,

“I knew what this meant,” he said.

Organizers of Bulldog Memory Days said they wanted to help give Russell community members and their families a chance to claim their old records — especially the veterans’ records.

“This was probably the draw we didn’t anticipate,” Erdmann said. The event attracted some local sponsors and a good crowd, he said.

Bulldog Memory Days brought together Russell school alumni and community members. Although he lives near Cottage Grove now, Gordy Bossen came back to Russell with a model of the city he built for Russell’s centennial in 1988. Bossen said coming to the event brought back memories.

“How often are you going to see this?” he said. He even brought old photos he shared as he spoke with former classmates.

Cindy (Schultz) Garnas, a 1979 Russell graduate, said it was good to be able to come and visit with old classmates.

“It’s really been fun,” she said.

Erdmann said organizers of Bulldog Memory Days hoped to form a historic preservation group for Russell. The first couple of major goals for the group will be to form an official nonprofit, and to find a building where historic items can be displayed.

“We’ve had some people who have done some things already, and made donations,” he said.