Week 6: West Virginia State Archives 13th, 14th & 15th

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 ) 

Archival Practicum Week 5:
13th through the 15th of July 2015
13th: 7.5 hours
14th: 7.0 hours
15th: 5.0 hours
Week 5 Total Hours: 19.5

   This 2nd and final week working with Debra Basham was bittersweet.  I learned so much within a fortnight, yet don't want to leave.  I'm consoled to be able to return to my friends at Eastern Regional Coal Archives, though.
   Working directly with an archives gives first hand experience of challenges addressed...things that can be read about but only understood through actual experience.  Being able to train with the Assistant Archivist for the State of West Virginia is priceless!  Only in WV is where I could call her up, set up a practicum, work directly with her for the entire time, be on a first name basis with the State Archivist and staff, and feel accepted into the archival family...I love this state!
   This week got dirty and gritty with the addressing of some fire and water damaged blueprints.  Last week, I alluded to the Frampton Architectural Collection, and now I'll specify.  This architectural firm was practicing up until the early 2000's, based out of Huntington, Cabell County, WV.  At some point, some of this collection of rolled architectural drawings was subjected to fire and water.  State Archivist Joe Geiger found out about the collection and personally brought it to the archives for safekeeping.  Debra has rough sorted some of the rolls into metal shelving compartments and the two of us continued that work this week...rough sorting by county, churches, and schools.  Some of the most damaged rolls were brought out into our work area to attempt to salvage as much as possible.  The picture below shows one of the lesser damaged pieces, which is still monumental in effort and time to address.  The heat and/or water sealed the sheets together in places.  Some rolls seemed to have sucked the fire right up the open core of them.  Carefully, Debra pulled the individual sheets apart, and, in certain safe cases, charred paper was trimmed off...the actual ash being an acidic agent that could compromise the preservation of the surrounding paper.  We talked extensively about what and why she was making such invasive treatments of the materials.  She stated that there are purists out there that would condemn the cutting off of paper materials.  I responded that perhaps there could be a restoration process in the future that could reconstitute partially ashen paper.  We both agreed that this was not an archives that preserved and restored paper/parchment/writing sheets from antiquity, with the technology/expertise allowed for such organizations.  For time issues, we salvaged much of the materials, especially the ones that had no copies.
   The architectural drawings came in several materials:  a extremely thin onionskin tracing paper; a similar onionskin paper with a glossy back; matted finished blueprints; resilient glossy pages referred to as Mylar; and, the early 2000's brought about transparent plastic sheeting, also a form of Mylar.  The different forms of Mylar tended to anneal themselves to each other in the heat of the fire, while the onionskin type browned/tanned with heat, but did not stick together much.  The onionskin tracing paper fights against unrolling the most; after being flattened for five years, the edges still struggle to roll back into a cylinder shape...most inconvenient for researching purposes.  When nicely and neatly flattened, architectural drawings are easy as can be to navigate through, but when curling at every flip, two people are needed to manage any kind of research or processing.  When I was studying at the archives at Michigan Technological University, the employees there used a large, shallow humidification chamber to allow mining maps to flatten.  I bet a similar process could be used to finally flatten some of the most contrary plans.

Asst. State Archivist Debra Basham carefully seperates the annealed sheets of Mylar

(Photo taken by author with asst. archivist's permission)

   Another part of my archival practicum at the WVSA was to go through drawers of previously flattened (or somewhat flattened) architectural drawings and record pertinent information about them to enter into the database that Debra has done such a Herculean job in assembling/building.  She currently has a list of what roughly exists within each map drawer; as each drawer's arrangement is gone through and described, that information is put into the master list.  That was the current theme between smaller odd jobs that I did for my two weeks at this archives.  I recorded the data onto paper and then later into the computer database, but Debra and I also had the privilege of being able to partner on part of it, with one of us reading the info and the other typing...this made the process much faster.  Each item on the list contains the following information:

Drawer #; Accession #; Folder #; Town; Building/project/brief description; Date; Architect; # of pages; Type of project; Commission #; County

This was much more detailed information than we recorded at ERCA, but the most telling bit that I would like to see recorded with the Mahood Collection would be the individual projects' commission number...this allows for a chronological view of projects which can sometimes be confusing due to additions and alterations done after the initial construction.

Corcoran adding information into the database as Basham reads off pertinent info

(Photo taken at author's request by Kyle Campbell, County Records Digitization Specialist)

   This final week with the WVSA was not disappointing in the least, because I was able to locate, describe and input into the architectural database a dozen or more residences designed by Welch architect Hassel T. Hicks.  Every new entry we have on his work, represents that much more of an intellectual and physical control we citizens have over the growing body of known work that this prolific early-to-mid 20th Century McDowell County architect designed.  Knowing Hicks buildings can aid in the historic preservation and restoration throughout central Appalachia.  Finally, another jewel within this collection is a set of pages representing the World War I Memorial Building in Welch, which burned to the ground, and is a site of a parking lot now.  These plans, which don't even seem to exist in the Mahood Collection at the ERCA proves beyond the shadow of a doubt that it was a renovation to a previously occupied school...that point had been up for debate until now.  Debra's son was kind enough to scan these unique blueprints for me and they will be printed out and saved multiple places for posterity.

WV Division of Culture and History Logo 

(Retrived from http://www.wvculture.org/images/logo1.gif )