West Virginia State Archives
@ The Capitol Complex's Culture Center
Charleston, Kanawha County, West Virginia
http://www.wvculture.org/history/archivesindex.aspx
WV State Culture Center Building in which the WV State Archives Reside
(Photo retrieved from
http://www.wvencyclopedia.org/assets/0001/8532/080402culturalcenter_069hdr2p_medium.jpg?1309982987 )
http://www.wvencyclopedia.org/assets/0001/8532/080402culturalcenter_069hdr2p_medium.jpg?1309982987 )
Archival Practicum Week 5:
6th through the 8th of July 2015
6th: 7.5 hours
7th: 6.5 hours
8th: 6.5 hours
Week 5 Total Hours: 20.5
So, I began my archival practicum with the West Virginia State Archives this week. The experience, as with ERCA, is a dream come true. Debra Basham, Assistant State Archivist, who has been my sponsoring contact through this process, met me on Monday and took me around for introductions to staff and general tour. Everyone is very nice and encouraging. Three Hattiesburg, Mississippi connections were made off the bat, since Debra was born there, another employee got his masters in history from University of Southern Mississippi (as a resident student), and now I'm going to school there on this online masters in library and information science, with certificate in archival studies...truly a small world.
Joe Geiger, State Archivist, was very supportive of me being here and encouraged me to find some materials to digitize for my final presentation. This definitely sparked great excitement in me! I already have some architectural blueprints in mind...and the state archive's has a humongous scanner that can accommodate!
Debra and I hit the ground running by going up to a dark corner of the top floor of the Culture Center Building. Cheekily referred to as the 'penthouse suite', this 4th floor has absolutely no windows, so, perfect for an archives, not-so-perfect for living space! Despite this, I did live in that corner for my first week and I intend on doing so next week too...for it is filled with thousands upon thousands of architectural drawings ranging in size from a legal sized piece of paper all the way up to 8 feet long and 4 feet wide. This is only the range I saw, so there could easily be bigger or smaller examples.
Over and over, I'm seeing how archives are a continual process of processes. Projects are done only to be tweaked further down the road. At WVSA, there are collections of architectural drawings that are still rolled up and uncatalogued, while many others are flattening in one of the many map drawers on this floor. This area is packed with map cases of all colors and styles. Debra tells me that they get all the hand-me-downs from all the state agencies...I love how purveyors of history are such scavengers for materials...after all, it's green, man!...probably out of necessity for our former industrial society's estrangement from preserving the present for the future...too busy trying to grasp and manage the physical world then to attempt learning from their actions. Anyway, despite this diatribe, the state archives had bought a bank of new glazed metal map cases, so they do have somewhat of a budget for such things.
Debra is visionary from the standpoint of painstakingly creating a living Microsoft Access spreadsheet, which catalogs a building list of the architectural drawings held at this repository...several different firms spanning the 20th Century. My mission, which was completely integrated into the archival experience due to the flexible, laid back, yet industrious and appreciative staff, was to work with architectural drawings of southern West Virginia.
A Brief Overview of The West Virginia State Archives
(Retrieved from the WVSA YouTube page: https://youtu.be/LJ2m5MnJdEc )
After the initial tour of the archival space, we settled into the 4th floor where blueprints/maps/etc. are stored. Debra showed me the current projects: naming, describing and entering materials into the Access program; and, flattening rolled and trimming damaged materials, as well as Debra's personal priority of weeding duplicate copies from drawers that had been placed in drawers to flatten. This latter project of Debra's takes a lot of experience and patience, since she's basically the only one who can perform it. Her memory is impeccable in that she remembers what is generally in each drawer (which she superbly rough sorted prior) and puts scattered architectural projects together from the Frampton Collection. This collection, like many others, was donated with no discernible order, although, this one was added to the archival challenge by being a more contemporary collection (up until the early 2000's), therefore, there are many multiple copies, as opposed to earlier 20th Century architectural firms, in part, due to technological ease of large-scale printing. This produces a space issue...for indeed, how many copies of the same blueprint does one archive need? Throughout the week, Debra was able to consolidate projects and weed redundant materials. This case of multiple copies actually worked well for this collections since some of the materials had been damaged by fire and water. Debra was able to find the best copies of particular projects and discard the damaged copies. Next week, I may be able to help out with the preservation efforts of these damaged pieces.
Also, for my next and final week at the WVSA, I hope to find more of my pet project subject, Hassel T. Hicks, architect from Welch, McDowell County, WV. After about a decade of fruitless searching, I've finally found that the WVSA has the only known collection of HTH's architectural drawings. I was able to talk with Debra about this and she is quite glad too, that, through a fluke of luck, those drawings were preserved. They represent the boom-time development of an area of central Appalachia that has been living in the bust-time since the Baby Boomers started having kids...me being one of them. Now, McDowell County remains underrepresented in many ways, so these architectural drawings of a resident of Welch, the county seat, represent a way of providing proof of what once was. The power, wealth and opportunity, so foreign to those of us Gen Xers and Millennials, is encapsulated and protected in the WVSA. At the end of this week, I did find one of Hicks' residential projects in Williamson, Mingo County, WV. I remain optimistic that I'll find more of his work next week.
WV Division of Culture and History Logo
(Retrived from http://www.wvculture.org/images/logo1.gif )
