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They should found some preservation society, possibly a museum. It might not be curated and staffed from people cut from the same cloth, but antiquarians would see value here.
I doubt it.
I visited my hometown last weekend to meet a friend at a board game tavern. Across the street was the local museum. When I was a kid, they had some arrangement where you could donate, and they'd engrave your name on a brick. There was one there with my grandfather's name on it which I had wanted to find.
Or at least there was. At some point they had renovated it into some god awful post modern monstrosity and thrown them all away.
It also used to be a civil war museum, and it's been completely repurposed away from that as well.
If they had repurposed the museum into a board game tavern, there might be a clear-cut case that progress had been made. As it is, you describe and ebb and flow of human existence that is more melancholy and bittersweet.
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