The Smokehouse Creek Fire burned through the Texas Panhandle in 2024, eventually making its way to the small, charming town of Canadian. At one point, the entire town was penned in by flames. Laurie Ezzell Brown, the seventy-three-year-old editor and publisher of the Canadian Record, the local newspaper, spent most of her days reporting on the fire, which ultimately burned about 70 percent of the county. As it consumed the rolling hills around Canadian, Brown, whose family has owned the paper since the 1940s, was overcome by a different fear: that the fire would destroy the Record’s archive. “I would have been devastated,” she said. “It’s not just the history of this community. It’s the history of my family. It’s who we are. It’s what we’ve done.”
