The tale of the fire, the community and the missing history book, as told by Temora Salvation Army leader, Caleb Smith

A few weeks before Christmas 2012, The Temora Salvation Army office was broken into, burgled, and burnt down. All of our Christmas hampers, community Christmas Day lunch supplies and school breakfast program supplies were either stolen or destroyed. To make the timing even trickier, it was The Salvation Army’s turn to run the town's Carols in the Park that year. Over the next couple of weeks we had a huge amount of help from the local community to get things up and running again. Generous businesses, churches, families and individuals donated enough goods to fill the hall that the local Uniting Church lent us. We even had some local primary-school kids go busking to raise money for our christmas hampers. The community of Temora is awesome! With everyone’s help, the Carols in the Park was a success, featuring a band made of volunteers from Temora West school, Griffith and Wagga Wagga. One of the down sides of the whole incident was that we lost all our records in the fire. So when we started researching our local history in the lead-up to this year’s 150 Year Anniversary of the worldwide Salvation Army, we were devastated to realise that our 128-year-old history book had been lost. However, a year down the track, when Salvation Army leaders from West Wyalong, Alan and Doreen Smith, were going through a cupboard at their church, they found an old box labelled Article of War – West Wyalong. Inside were old photos, the registers of weddings, Sunday school attendances, dedications, and ... Temora's original 128-year-old history book! Owing to the advanced age and fragility of the pages, the book is now kept safely at Temora's excellent Rural Museum.