LOCAL SPOTLIGHT
BIG FISH, SMALL POND
Meet Mr. Moulton LOCAL HISTORIAN ERNIE NOVOSAD TALKS MOULTON HISTORY, WORLDLY TRAVELS, AND TALL TALES by Michelle Banse Stokes, photos by Emily Henderson
Affectionately known as Mr. Moulton by the locals, Ernie Novosad is the de facto local historian in these parts. There are not too many people in the area that he doesn’t know and, similarly, there are not too many people in Moulton that don’t know this smiling man. You see, Ernie was a driving force behind documenting the history of the area for the benefit of many generations to come. To properly tell this story, we have to go back in time for a bit. Ernie is happy to share with anyone with the time to listen and recounts his early life in Moulton with a smile. “I think Moulton is interested in history and, years ago, I became the area’s historian,” Ernie said. “Back in the 1970s, I returned to Moulton after college and started teaching here. We’re a small school, so I taught chemistry and sometimes AP chemistry if there were enough students. I later taught science in upper middle school. I hold both bachelor’s and master’s degrees in history and chemistry but, the funny thing is, I’ve never taught a history class in my life. History classes are usually the purview of coaches and not too many people can teach chemistry. So that’s how it happened.” Ernie would soon come in contact with a lady that would put the history portion of his degree to good use. “In the 70s, there was an elderly lady named Mrs. Anita Richter, who I consider to be my unofficial mentor,” Ernie shared. “She approached me about Old Moulton Cemetery
and some of Moulton’s historical markers. One of our senior classes took on the project of writing down all the names of the people in the cemetery and creating a rough map of where each tombstone was. Believe it or not, that map is still the one they use today. That got me going in it and I always liked history. On top of that, I was kind of a military nut. In fact, military history is my specialty. Put all of these things together and I was hooked on it.” Hooked he was. Soon Ernie was a part of a project that would prove to be bigger than he could have imagined. “Moulton didn’t have anything officially on record,” Ernie added. “Together with other local historians, we scratched together a history of the community. We decided to start the project of putting together a book. We didn’t know what we were doing and we didn’t have a business model. We just said that we were going to write a history Above, Ernie Novosad poses with a copy of book and, if we had known how a book on Moulton’s much work it was going to be, we history, of which he probably never would have done it. was the editor. But we got help from all kinds of
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