A tie to a president who served over a century ago has been discovered in Washington, Iowa. Local historian and retired history teacher Mike Zahs has been the keeper of many area artifacts, and one collection has included a moving picture and an audio file of a speech of President William McKinley. Recently the audio files of the president were digitized and heard for the first time in decades, if not a century.

Zahs shares how the audio files came to be, “We also had 23 concert wax cylinders which are quite large, they look like drainage tile. I never wanted to touch a needle to something that is 130 or 140 years old, I didn’t know what would happen. And so I talked to them at the Library of Congress and they didn’t want to touch them with a needle. And they had no way of getting the sound off, but they said if you can wait we think eventually they’ll be able to take the sound off with a laser.”

So they waited, and they found a man in California who meticulously worked to transfer the audio files from the wax cylinders to current formats. Of the 23 cylinders, rescued from a basement in Washington on South Avenue C, they included music and speeches.

Today, Presidents’ Day, is the first time they’ve been shared publicly outside of the 2024 Annual Ainsworth Film Festival. Zahs explains McKinley was the first president filmed, and some of the wax cylinder audio included the speech McKinley gave in Buffalo, New York on September 6th, 1901. Following the speech, McKinley was shot and died eight days later. Vice President Theodore Roosevelt then assumed the presidency.

The audio files and wax cylinders are now housed in the University of Iowa’s Special Collections, as part of the Brinton Collection. Hear more of the story on In Touch with Southeast Iowa on air on KCII Radio or at kciiradio.com.