FVM was APL’s first digital library of local history information, created and managed by APL staff. See APL’s Appleton History page for more regional history resources.
The Fox Valley Memory Project began in 1999, initiated by the Appleton Public Library (APL) and the History Museum at the Castle. The Project’s mission was to increase local history resources and awareness through collaboration, communication and web publishing.
The Library had already completed several online efforts such as the Post Crescent index and Edna Ferber web pages. The first significant collaborative effort was built around a grant received by the History Museum at the Castle from the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, which enabled them to contract for conversion to searchable PDF format of the entire text of one of the most significant historical accounts of the area, The History of Outagamie County, Wisconsin by Thomas Ryan. APL was awarded a grant from the Appleton Library Foundation for a scanning and digitizing workstation. The Library and the Historical Society each assembled a collection of historic photographs from their collections, and these were scanned and stored. The Library also created an image database; images in the database that corresponded to text in Ryan’s history were linked to from the text.
The Fox Valley Memory Project website is hosted by APL.
For information about how to acquire rights to use photos from the collections, contact the individual or agency listed as owner of the photograph. Photos from the Appleton Public Library collections are not available in hard copies.
Find Images
Browse local, historical images in the public domain or for which we owned or were granted rights to publish.
Find Text
Link to historical, local information from publications in the public domain.