The Kent County Council for Historic Preservation (KCCHP) was initially formed in April 1968, in response to the proposed demolition of the old Grand Rapids City Hall. Although the Council's participation in the "Save the City Hall" program was not able to prevent demolition, the Council helped make the community aware of the need for historic preservation. Other programs in which the Council became involved were the opening of the Voigt House in 1972 as a "living museum," the preservation of homes in the Heritage Hill area, and restoration of the Sixth Street Bridge.

At the January 27, 1975 meeting of the Kent County Council for Historic Preservation, a motion was sustained that the Council become involved in a county-wide oral history Bicentennial project. The purpose of the project was to locate existing oral history interviews in Kent county and copy them, for addition to this central collection at the Grand Rapids Public Library.

Then Council president W.D. Frankforter, was asked to request project approval from the Grand Rapids Bicentennial Commission. Initially delayed because no project coordinator could be found, the oral history collection began to be created in 1977 with the hiring of Nancy Tietema as the coordinator. Tom Genson of the Grand Rapids Public Library was Chairman of the Oral History Committee.

A rough draft of a brochure describing the project is included here, but no final versions have been found to date. As a requirement of the project, an index, including subjects, was to be prepared. It appears that this was done, but has been subsequently lost. New subject indexing is now available in the Microsoft Access database table set up to control the items in this collection, June 2000 and June 2002.

The tapes were compiled, copied and indexed by the Council in 1978, although taped interviews continued to be added until 1982. Letters were sent to the interviewee telling them that the tape was being added to the KCCHP Collection, but no signed permissions or releases have been found. At least one tape, #50, is known to have been destroyed due to the lack of permission. Many of the individuals interviewed were already deceased at the time of the project, however, so interviewee permissions in most cases may no longer be an issue. Inquiries from some individuals originally involved in the project suggest that other interviews may have been done that never made it into the GRPL collection.