 Though we can learn a lot about an artifact by using our five senses to engage with it, and by conducting archival, material culture, or oral history research, there are always gaps in our knowledge. Aspects of the artifact reside in the imagination or in cultural or collective memory. Some stories are grounded in the ways through which they have been passed along, and some stories are grounded in the in-between spaces that form between a person and an artifact. This door embodies over 100 years of multi-generational mining history in the Abitibi Gold Belt. Made in the early years of mining operations, circa 1910 to 1915, the door is a site of inscription. We can see marks of the makers. For example, the metal was likely made by local blacksmiths, and the marks of use, for example, a dent that shows where the door may have been kicked possibly in an emergency. The door came to ingenium in 2018. It was past midnight and minus 39 degrees when I landed in Timmins on February 5th, 2018, but I was excited to be there. Gold Corp gave me permission to visit the dome mine on the very last day before it closed after 108 years of continuous operations. I was there to select mining artifacts for the national collection. A few miners who wanted the last walk through the drifts joined me. We walked slowly underground, they told me stories, and I tagged artifacts. And then someone remembered the door. The door was upstairs in a warehouse, and when I saw it, I thought to myself, this is an artifact every curator dreams of. It is metaphorically the history of the 20th century as seen by the miners in Timmins, Ontario. Once in our care, ingenium curators and conservators were determined to learn more about the door and about the inscriptions upon it. We brought the door to the Canadian Conservation Institute to scan it. The infrared and ultraviolet fluorescence revealed more inscriptions than are visible to the eye. The oldest dates to 1910. However, though we were able to use technology to discover more about the mining door, our curiosity about the people who wrote on the door persisted. We imagined who they were, and we wondered about their lives at the mine. When Anna shared her story of the dome mine door and its many inscriptions with me, I thought this would be a perfect opportunity to explore how objects tell stories with my graduate seminar on Narrativity and Performance in Public History. Each student was randomly assigned an inscription and tasked with researching and coming up with a backstory for the person who wrote it. Creating a script, they then performed it. The aim was not only to animate the inscription, but to create an imagined scenario of its making. Doing history in this way allows us to explore how one might capture something authentic about the past in the absence of direct evidence, such as the interviews with miners who wrote those words on the door. Performance-based strategies such as this encourages historians to think through the relationship between accuracy and authenticity, between lived experiences and the stories we tell about them, between history and memory. And while these stories are fictional, they are grounded in research and on the object itself. Connected to something that really happened, the students created what we might call storied realities about the door and what it can tell us about life and work at the mine. The evocation of context and world produced during the Carleton University Public History MA students monologues gives us interesting insight that material culture analysis would not have been able to convey on its own. Even though to this day we are unsure as to why or how something rose to the level of being inscribed on the door. In this first story, Emma Gillies explores the mindset of a miner who felt compelled to inscribe major world events on the mining door. Bill asked me why I'd take into writing down big events on the mine door. Who's going to see that stuff down here anyway he said. I couldn't tell you, but this morning I noticed for the first time in a long time that back in 63 I'd scribbled down when JFK was killed. I can't remember what made me think to do that. Like Bill said, who's going to see it? But then I thought well with everything that happened yesterday maybe I should keep going. I still can't believe they'd shoot Martin Luther King Jr. I don't get it, him being peaceful and everything. And I understand what he was about I think. I mean he was just trying to organize those garbage workers so they could get better pay. My wife tells me to call them sanitation employees. More proper she says. I told her in that case she better call me a goldsmith. Anyway, if there's one thing I get it's wanting honest pay and return for honest work. Anyway it's funny. I wrote the King stuff down on my way through the doors but then on my way out for the day I had this thought that maybe I should slap Pearson's retirement on there too. I mean he said he was stepping down back in December but yesterday was the start of the liberal convention and it was all made official. Lester B. Pearson. A pretty good guy I think. When I got this feeling that him stepping down it's going to be something we remember. Well, wherever things are headed as long as this mind's got gold we'll be okay here. But not all of the moments inscribed on the door rose to the level of world significance as Kate Jordan's story demonstrates. Oh Oscar oh god yeah Oscar oh yeah yeah yeah yeah no of course yeah Oscar yeah yeah no he didn't really go by Fred no has he heard that one? Oh that's that's a good one that's a good one oh god yeah okay well Fred Freddy was from Toronto you know uh well no he wasn't from Toronto he was from Denmark but you know he moved to Toronto because he was looking for adventure you know so uh so he shows up in Toronto and he doesn't fight adventure steadians of living with a zamp so uh you know it's a little too close for uh for Oscar's taste so he decides to come up here and uh you know it's hard when you first start out it's it's tough because you know you get a lot of time right? It wasn't time to think and you know he's he's missing the family time he's missing the meals and he's really missing the sausages you know we got sausages here right like dailies got sausages got got Polish and uh well not only by Polish so uh anyway uh but he walks in first day and he asks for these sausages they got some kind of crazy Danish name lady behind the counter is no clue what he's talking about right just like no idea she just stares out of goes home tells her husband of course at the end of the day everyone in Timmins knows that Fred's coming to this dailies looking expecting it to be some fancy fine food Toronto store so all the boys start chirping him about this right like one guy god forget who he decides to call him Oscar Meyer you know like Oscar Meyer wieners like you know if I were an Oscar Meyer wiener anyway yeah so lucky for him that's the one that sticks yeah Fred uh never did figure out how to get those sausages up there so he learns how to start making them right by some guy's sausage grinder he's bringing these amazing sausages until one day when a sausage grinder breaks you know he shows up he hasn't got these sausages and he's choking back the food right but it's okay because they haven't served him bologna steaks yet but sure enough Friday comes around the one thing Fred can't abide sees bologna steaks so he gets up that's it he goes I said I'm leaving I'm getting right out of here I'm on strike union bedan so he just walks right out of there sometimes the inscriptions bring the macro and micro scales of global politics and daily life at the mine together as conveyed by Nick Lecky's monologue okay from the top I'd put in what I guess four to six hours of overtime in the main with my buddy Mario as usual we didn't talk much to each other during the shift so at the break most of us went up to the surface breathed some fresh air talk a bit light up of course it took longer to go up that's for sure but my father always told me that he regretted not doing it more often it was a lot harder to leave the dome in his day but as long as still trouble him the shift boss let us have a little radio in the smokers corner for the news because the journal and the door they're always late in 68 you think that blowing up bombs in mailboxes will really save a nation that killing a black preacher will bring eternal peace seems to me that to have civil rights you need to be civil right it's a shame we have to use violence to get across what we mean as kennedy said about king replace that violence with an effort to understand with compassion and love that's why it was so hard to believe that someone shot rfk and then even after he was shot his first words were asking about others around him what a guy that's why I decided to write his name on the doors next to mlks to remember their words and their lessons yeah I'd say that 68 was a crazy year because even here at porcupine you could feel the loss in our final monologue max kronkite tells the story of how change can be technological as well as political god damn it did you know that earl and pierce and got laid off today just found out this morning that must be over 30 in the past month or so gold standard has been dropping and all the timmins minds aren't doing so well so you know what the head office decides to go and do computerize they're bringing these new machines that track only hours who work no more punch cards anymore I'm gonna miss that chunk sound they make now what do I have to look forward to ridiculous and I get to think what's next we're gonna replace the fuse box with the locks on it with a computer what happens when miscalculates one of us and lets an explosion go off when we're down there who knows maybe all miners will be machines in the next 10 years god I'm gonna miss that chunk it's what I look forward to you know every morning every evening mine is perfectly fine the way it is I know I'm probably overreacting but if I can't see my card use my card hear that chunk I don't know what I'm in control of god help me everything will be a computer I guess it's a changing world the only god knows if we'll be better for it these four performances breathe life into the inscriptions and evoke grounded yet imagined context for the emotion that underpins the writing the decades worth of inscriptions appear to us today as a palimpsest or layers of text upon text or a modern-day medieval chronicle where all events from the first snow to a political assassination are weighted equally this way of recording events challenges conventional notions of writing and understanding history which favors major events or everyday life but rarely moves between the scales