Staff photos / Andy Gray Gwen Shavers talks about her uncle, Ted Toles Jr., who played in the Negro Leagues in the 1940s, at the Braceville African American Heritage Museum.

Braceville is a small community with a lot of history.

It produced famous athletes, such as boxer Earnie Shavers, who fought Muhammed Ali and Larry Holmes for the heavyweight championship, and Ted Toles Jr., who played in the Negro Leagues, as well as many state champions. But it also produced doctors, nurses, engineers and authors.

That history is celebrated at the Braceville African American Heritage Museum, which opened in December, and in the documentary “History Forgotten and Now for All to See,” which will have its premiere at 2 p.m. Feb. 16 at the Robins Theatre in downtown Warren.

The 70-minute film was culled from about eight hours of interviews with some of the township’s oldest residents, a process that started in 2016, according to Terry Shavers, project manager on the museum and a cousin of Earnie Shavers. His wife, Gwen Shavers, a niece of Toles, is secretary of the Braceville Historical Society and was involved in doing the interviews.

“We were trying to focus on ‘Great Migration’ families that came from the South and established this community,” she said. “And we also wanted to focus on and integrate the Underground Railroad, because we have Underground Railroad (connections) in this community.”

Ron Hughes, a Braceville native, created the documentary from the collected interviews and used photographs from the historical society’s collection to illustrate those commentaries.

“I wanted to get away from the talking heads and use a lot of photographs to coincide with what they were saying,” Hughes said. “We used that method throughout the whole video.”

However, featuring the reactions of the people talking also was important.

“What I enjoyed the most was the passion that each one of the presenters exhibited,” Hughes said. “It was just overwhelming. The expressions they had on their face as they told the stories, they just lit up. It kept drawing me into it.”

“He did a fantastic job with it,” Terry Shavers said of Hughes. “We had it produced just for the residents, and it got a lot of traction, so maybe we should share it.”

That’s how the idea came about for the public screening at the Robins. Tickets are $10, and the event will serve as a fundraiser for the museum.

Shavers said Hughes also is working on a shorter version of the film that could air on PBS, and the historical society also plans to make the film available to area schools to use in their history curriculum.

Terry Shavers said one of his favorite stories in the film is about a former constable in Braceville who also was a shortwave radio operator.

“People during the Vietnam era used to go to him, and he was able to contact people overseas with his shortwave radio so that families could talk to their family members that were in the Vietnam War,” he said.

Nelson Toles, one of Toles’ sons, said hearing these stories from the people who were there and were a part of them makes them resonate differently than if a person read them in a history book. That’s something he benefited from growing up.

“You’ve heard stories of Jackie Robinson and Larry Doby and Monte Irvin, but when you hear from someone that actually lived with them, played ball with them and against them, you really start to be able to live the story yourself. He would tell us stories, and we’d just sit there with our mouth agape going, ‘Really? That is amazing.'”

Terry Shavers said he believes those success stories inspired others, and by sharing those stories in the documentary and at the museum, they can continue to inspire new generations.

“Because there were some great athletes in the community, they challenged each other,” he said. “I really think that what happened is, all the young kids were coming up with that, they saw these other athletes being top performers, and they wanted to be top performers as well. So I think that that’s part of the challenge.

“They set a really high bar for the folks from the community, and I think that’s why there’s so many high achievers. The people that came before them were high achievers, and they just thought that was the way it was supposed to be, so they all strived to achieve.”