Adapted from the Organization of American Historians Newsletter for May 2005.
As former chairperson of the little known OAH Committee on Research and Access to Historical Documentation, and a state archivist/historian, I was asked to prepare a short essay on “access to archives, classification, and the Freedom of Information Act.” This is a daunting assignment, one which two major government commissions (one reporting to the president the last week of March, 2005) have generated volumes of opinion and documentation relevant to the question. To paraphrase Ed Ayers in a C-SPAN presentation on his view of the digital future of research and writing, like a fool, I raised my hand.
I first consulted with the members of our committee who were able to participate in a conference call on March 25, 2005 for what I thought would be a half-hour meeting, and which ended after an hour and a half, producing a transcript that far exceeded my proscribed word limit. We were fortunate to have Bruce Craig leading us. He kept us current with the lobbying efforts of the National Coalition for History (NCH)&emdash;a nonprofit organization that represents the historical and archival professions&emdash;while Nancy Berlage, Walter Hill, and I probed with him such fundamental questions as how the “need to know” standard of the courts should be defined, how the right to know is conditioned by security needs (especially after 9/11), how access should be balanced by personal privacy, how and when executive privilege should be permitted, and above all, how does a democracy based upon majority rule, assure the public at large that it is basing its actions on a reliable, accessible record.
Fortunately, we then had a new Archivist of the United States , Allen Weinstein, who articulated a deep commitment to finding answers to these questions. In an interview, Weinstein made it clear that there is a distinction between any scholarly debate that might arise from his own scholarly endeavors (he welcomes the scholarly discussion) and his devotion to access within the context of a dependable and dynamic archival program. As many of us know, he pioneered in seeking documents under the Freedom of Information Act. He worked diligently to bring all presidential libraries under one coherent and accepted policy of access, and will not release any materials now at College Park that are not covered by such a policy based upon a signed agreement. He embraced advocacy for the revival of the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) as a necessary and integral component of what the National Archives is all about. In my opinion, he was the first archivist since the ‘R’ was added to the National Historical Publications Commission to view the Commission as an essential aspect of the total program of the National Archives and to openly advocate full funding for both the records and publications programs. He also made it clear that he seeks broader cooperation among the other keepers of the collective memory of the nation, including the state archives, where a fair degree of entrepreneurial and innovative work has been undertaken to cope with such fundamental issues of access as the creation of permanent electronic archives. Weinstein and at several state archivists openly advocate the management of the flow of permanent electronic information into the archives from the moment of creation&emdash;delegating the advice on who should have access and when&emdash;to thoughtful panels of experts selected by the archives, panels that encompass the broad spectrum of differences that will arise.
While some latitude will inevitably be given to the people we elect to office to make decisions concerning access for the period of time they are in office, we ought not to permit them to do so beyond a reasonably prescribed time limit once they are out of office. Neither presidents nor national security advisers should have the right to close indefinitely, or remove from public view altogether, the record of their work. In the world of HIPPA regulations, we have permitted those who govern to stumble badly in passing laws so poorly written as to ignore that what is private health information for the living ought to become public and freely accessible information at some defined point in the future. That, indeed, is the essential point of all access concerns. In a democracy such as ours, there needs to be a time, a persistently forward moving date, after which all that has been identified as permanently valuable information is totally free and accessible.
Of course, determining what should be retained permanently in the massive rush of information that is generated every day is an even more difficult stumbling block than setting a time for release. In the desire to know what is happening and why, some rush to judgment, and, in the case of some television anchors, find themselves pushed into retirement, obscuring the fact that the questions they raised could not be answered precisely because the records no longer exist for whatever reason, legitimate or otherwise. To have faithful, full, and accurate reporting as history or as current events, a concerted effort must be made to ensure that accurate and complete records are maintained in an archival setting from their inception.
It is worthwhile for historians and archivists to expend some of their energies helping to establish and enforce standards of what we keep and why. If our principal means of communication is currently by Iphone, Blackberry, IPAD and email, then some effort needs to be undertaken to see to it that phone logs and essential electronic communications are both managed well and permanently kept, going directly from the moment of creation to an archival setting that at some defined point is fully accessible to the public.
Historians do need to be sensitive to the fact that Freedom of Information Act requests can paralyze a government agency that is faithfully attempting to do its assigned tasks. Some archivists, including this one, are all too aware of this problem, especially with regard to those requests that appear to be put forward by, or on behalf of, particularly disgruntled individuals who are not necessarily concerned with the best interest of the public at large. It is important that in seeking more rapid and open access to government information that adequate resources are given to the Archives and government agencies to manage, record, and maintain government information in a readily accessible format. It is also important that independent review boards are established to both screen frivolous requests and to provide legitimate guidelines for the release of public information in whatever permanent form it may exist.
If you have a chance, log into C-SPAN’s presentation of Ed Ayers’ March 14, 2005 talk at the Library of Congress on “The Digital Future”. Ayers enthusiastically looks to the future of research in the digital age and the importance of digital archives. It is a thoughtful tour de force based upon his work with the Valley of the Shadow archives and the experiment he did with William G. Thomas III, in writing an article exclusively in electronic form for what Ayers believes is permanent reference on a perpetually authoritative web site (initially funded by the NEH). The problem is that there is currently no such thing as a permanent electronic reference on a perpetually authoritative web site. JSTOR, Google Books, and possibly http://archive.org probably come as close as any experiment in establishing a permanent electronic archives and our efforts to place all land records in Maryland online may prove a viable model. The truth is that the essential records of governance about which historians are rightfully clamoring for access have not been, and are not now, being created in the context of how to make them permanently accessible. To answer the most pressing questions of declassification and access to permanent records requires historians, archivists, librarians, and the public in general to focus on what we currently save and how to save it permanently in a sustainable electronic archives. When we do that, at least, the future of history will be secure. In the meantime we will battle to preserve and make accessible that which by luck and design survives of the archival record.
Reflections
Ezra 6, 1/2
... they searched in the library in which the archives were stored ....
And there was found in a pouch in the citadel ... one scroll, and so was written therein a memorandum
The Koran, Yasin, 36.12. ...We write down what they have sent before and their footprints, and We have recorded everything in a clear writing
by a Maryland Archivist
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
Saturday, March 27, 2010
Celebrating Maryland Day: The Spirit of 1634
As we reflect on this 376th anniversary celebration of the landing on St. Clements Island of those first emigrants to the new colony of Maryland, you might wonder if there is anything new to be said about the lives, the courage, the determination of that first generation, in sum 'The Spirit of 1634.' Those first years have been carefully studied by genealogists, historians, archaeologists and anthropologists. They have been explored and celebrated in hundreds of books and articles. Yet there is always something new to learn, and even retracing the steps of what is known remains an exciting and inspiring adventure.
What is most engaging is the merger of several disciplines as we attempt to get to know and understand what that first generation did and why. Art, a closer look at the surviving documentary evidence, and the analysis of the physical remains in the ground, coupled with a careful study of the word portraits of one of the best known chroniclers of those first years, Father Andrew White, lead in new directions and exciting new finds.
For example, until a short while ago, most scholars believed that we could never know what the first Governor, Leonard Calvert, looked like, although we have long known that he had returned to England long enough to have his portrait painted. Recently we have had two paintings brought to our attention, both of which are now in the State's collection. The first now hangs in the State House. The second we owe to, Mr. Truman Siemans, whose relative had made a copy early in the 20th century. He found the original on EBAY and bought it for the State's collection. Together they provide a face for Leonard Calvert that we once thought we would ever see.
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Another new avenue of exploration is the possible architect of the Chapel whose work has been largely overlooked until recently when I began to catalog my books and found a treatise of his, that I had purchased at secondhand bookstore in New England for next to nothing. It is written by Guillielmi Hesi, a recognized Jesuit chapel architect, and was published in 1636 as the Emblemata Sacra. It is devoted to poems and imagery that would have been familiar to that first generation. We have it available as images on line on the Maryland State Archives web site and when the Chapel is ready for exhibits, the Friends of the Maryland State Archives will be pleased to lend the original for display.
It is not far fetched to make the connection between Father William Hesius and the building of the Chapel at St. Mary's City. While no plans have survived, the paper they probably were drawn on has. The Jesuits brought paper with them that was made in their mllls near where Father Hesius lived and designed the church of St. Michel Leuven, Belgium, built ca. 1650. A number of examples of Jesuit paper with the watermark of a cross, a crown, IHS,and the word MARINAUD, are to be found throughout the Maryland records of the late 1660s and early 1670s when the Chapel was built, upon which are written the inventories of the estates of the Spirit of 1634 generation.
For the Chapel walls, there is a recently identified candidate for the alter, based upon the Peter Paul Rubens painting of the crucifixion that we now know George Calvert had hanging in his private chapel before it was given to Queen Henrietta Maria to hang over the alter in hers. While the original was lost during the English Civil Wars there is a lovely engraving of it that could be used for a suitable reproduction:
In these times of economic turmoil and uncertainty, the Spirit of 1634 well deserves a holiday of its own, yet Maryland Day, with a few exceptions like today, has been slipping from public view. Clearly Maryland Day is worth celebrating, not only for what we know about the Spirit of 1634, but also about the adventure ahead in learning more. Yet, with the recent emphasis on long weekends and rolling several holidays into one, most people seem not to be aware that there is an official State Holiday called Maryland Day. The Baltimore Sun, while publicizing this event in its March 26th edition, following Sue Wilkinson's unflagging efforts to get their attention, failed to mention the day at all on the 25th itself. Recently you could only find scattered references to Maryland Day on the web. Two of the most popular returns from Google and Bing, either missed the day altogether, or were celebrating something else.
There is much to remember and much more to learn from the lives of those who stepped ashore on March 25, 1634, having come nearly 6,000 miles over rough seas to start a new life.
Their journey began on St. Cecilia's Day, November 22, 1633. Driven out by wars and religious intolerance, and drawn by the prospects of prosperity in a new land of abundance, approximately 150 brave souls set forth from Cowes on the Isle of Wight. They disembarked at an island they named St. Clements on March 25, 1634, a day that was sacred to all who landed that day, whether Catholic or Protestant, as the feast of the annunciation. It also signaled the end of the old year and the beginning of the new on a calendar, that would not be changed to ours for another 118 years. Their purpose, after having successfully negotiated an accord with the natives and exploring the lower reaches of the Potomac for some time previously, was to celebrate a mass of thanksgiving that special day in anticipation of beginning a permanent settlement in the new year.
The 150 or so who launched the new colony of Maryland had little but hard work ahead of them with no assurance that they would succeed. They came with cultural baggage of closely held and antagonistic religious views, to be governed by a Charter that carried a hint of representative government, the details of which were read to them for the first time that day. They came with specific instructions on what to do and how to behave which in large measure they would ignore in favor of new ways of living which included adapting to and incorporating the knowledge and skills of the natives they found already living here. Indeed when commanded to build an English town from which they were to go out to work their fields, they instead inhabited an abandoned Indian village, and soon sought scattered farms and plantations along the manifold creeks and rivers that penetrated the interior. It proved to be a hard life in which large numbers would not survive, leaving few heirs to perpetuate their memory.
Still those that did survive labored on, joined by succeeding waves of immigrants until there was a large enough population in which native born would out number newcomers. Fortunately there was a well-educated priest among them who has left more than one version of his account of this migration of English men and women to Maryland. Father Andrew White would go on to translate the bible and familiar prayers into Piscataway, and probably wrote the draft of the 1649 Act Concerning Religion which we refer to today as the act of toleration.
All but a fragment of his translations are lost, but the concept of religious toleration which he wove into an Elizabethan Statute on Blasphemy pointed the way to the much broader concept of the separation of church and state, and religious freedom on which our civil government is based. Father White writes eloquently of the voyage and the landing. His Briefe Relation contains less of his religious piety than later versions, but all present a vivid word picture of the Spirit of 1634. A sample of excerpts from the most recent translation from the latin of what he sent to Rome is typical of his style:
“On the 22nd of November, 1633, St. Cecilia's day, with a southeast wind softly blowing, we sailed from Cowes, which is a port on the Isle of Wight. ….When the wind was failing us, we cast anchor opposite Yarmouth Castle, which is situated toward the northwest of the same island. Here we were received with public cannon salutes; and yet fear was not absent. For the sailors were muttering among themselves that they were expecting a messenger and a letter form London, and for that reason they also seemed to be devising delays. But God destroyed their evil plans. Indeed that very night , when a favorable wind was blowing … our pinnace [the Dove] … hurried out to sea. And so., lest we might lose sight of our pinnace, we decided to follow. In this way the plans that the sailor considered against us were foiled. This happened on the 23rd of November, the feast of St. Clement, who obtained the crown of martyrdom when he was tied to an anchor and plunged into the sea ….”
The voyage to the Caribbean islands was uneventful and the only lives lost were to partying too heavily on Christmas.
“Wine was consumed in order that this day might be better celebrated,”
Father White wrote,
“and those who enjoyed it too intemperately were seized by fever the following day; they were thirty in number, and from those about 12 died not very much later, including two Catholics...”
This is our only solid evidence that the majority on board may have been protestant, assuming that drinking was indiscriminate as to religion. 1/6th of those aboard by this calculation would have been Roman Catholic, and helps to explain why Lord Baltimore's instructions to his brother Leonard who led the expedition so explicitly required all the passengers not to discuss or debate matters of religion.
When they at least reached the Potomac River they found the native population up in arms:
“At the mouth of the river itself we perceived armed natives. That night fires were burning in the entire region, and since such a big ship had never been seen by them, messengers sent from this side and from that were reporting that a canoe similar to an island had come near, and that it held as many men as there are trees in the woods. We, however continued to the Heron Islands, so called from the unheard of throngs of this kind of bird. The first one in our way we named after St. Clement; the second after St. Catherine, the third after St. Cecilia. We first left the ship at St. Clement's Island, to which no access lay open except through a shallow because of the sloping shore. Here the maids, who had left the ship to wash the laundry, almost drowned, when the skiff turned over, and a great part of my linen clothes were lost, no small loss in these parts. This island abounds in cedar, sassafras, herbs and flowers to make all kinds of salads, also in a wild nut tree which bears a very hard nut, with a thick shell and a small but wonderfully tasty kernel. However, since it is only four hundred acres wide, it did not seem spacious enough as a location for the new settlement.”
Instead, Governor Leonard Calvert, with the assistance of Captain Henry Fleet from Virginia who was fluent in the language of the natives, purchased
“such a charming place for a settlement that Europe can hardly afford a better one. Thus, when we had advanced from St. Clement's about nine leagues, we sailed into the mouth of a river ...[that] runs forward from south to north about twenty miles before it is absorbed by the salt water from the sea, not unlike the Thames. In its mouth one can see two bays, able to hold 300 ships of huge size. One bay we dedicated to St. George, the other one, more inward to the Most Blessed Virgin Mary. ...We went up from coast inland on the right side, and about a thousand paces removed from the shore, we gave the name of St. Mary to the designated city. ...in order to prevent any pretext for injury or occasion for enmity, we bought thirty miles of that land from the chieftain in exchange for
hatchets, axes, hoes, and some amount of cloth. ...”
“Is not this miraculous, that a nation a few daies before in generall
armes against us and our enterprise should like lambes yeeld themselves, glad of our company, giving us houses, land, and liveings for a trifle...”
The great adventure had begun with housing and a marketable crop already in place. In fact there was such an abundance of corn that the surplus would be sent to market in Massachusetts, where Marylanders would initiate a reputation for exuberant behavior and found themselves banned from Boston. John Winthrop recorded the encounter in his journal:
“ The Dove, a pinnace of about fifty tons, came from Maryland upon Patomack river, with corn to exchange for fish and other commodities. ...some of our people being aboard the bark of Maryland, the sailors did revile them, calling them holy brethren, … and with all did curse and swear most horribly, and use threatening speeches against us. ...The next day (the governor not being well) we examined the witnesses, and found them fall[ing] short of the matter of threatening, and not to agree about the reviling speeches, and, beside, not able to design certainly the men that had so offended. Whereupon .. a letter [was] written to the master, that, in regard such disorders were committed aboard his ship, it was his duty to inquire out the offenders and punish them; and withal to desire him to bring no more such disordered persons among us.”
For the infant colony of Maryland there would be many years of struggle and near defeat ahead. Many good works have been written about those early years by a distinguished group of scholars including Lois Carr, Henry Miller, Julie King, Silas Hurry, and Tim Riordan, to mention a few. They have documented the determination in the face of uncertainty and economic upheaval that is so characteristic of that Spirit of 1634.
Indeed it has been in the blending of the disciplines of historical research, art, archaeology, and forensic anthropology, that we are continuing to learn more about what the reality of life was like for those who struggled to make a home for themselves and their hoped for posterity in Maryland.
If you have not yet experienced it, be sure to read about the Written in Bone exhibit at the Smithsonian in which the findings in Maryland play such a large part. Under the leadership of Doug Owsley, that exhibit took us on a journey into the lives and deaths of the full spectrum of society, rich and poor, black, white and native American.
One particularly absorbing story in the exhibit is that of Anne Wolseley Calvert, wife of Chancellor Philip Calvert, uncle of the Third Lord Baltimore, whose mansion was one of the largest ever built in Maryland in colonial times.
On December 5, 1990, James Bock reported in the Sun that a team of scientists,
archaeologists, and historians had begun to interpret the remains of three people buried in lead coffins within the foundations of probably the first brick Catholic Chapel in English-speaking North America, one which only recently has been reconstructed on the foundations of the original at St. Mary's City.
The middle of the three coffins contained a woman of 55 or 60 years whose suffering
at the last must have been enormous. She was malnourished and had few teeth. She had been in considerable and constant pain from a spiral fracture of one leg that had only partially healed allowing her to walk with a pronounced limp, but leaving her with two open abscesses that surely made the last two or three years of her life perfectly miserable.
Who was this woman buried with such tender loving care- arms folded and tied with silk ribbon, rosemary, the herb of remembrance sprinkled lovingly over her body? All of the evidence points to Anne Wolseley Calvert, the wife of Chancellor Philip Calvert who lay next to her in the largest of the three coffins. She came with her husband in 1657 and died in St. Mary's City two years before him, in about 1679 or 1680.
We now know that she suffered greatly and we know much about her state of health, but can we also put a face to her memory? From her skull, a forensic pathologist reconstructed the facial muscles and overlaying tissues to produce a striking likeness of a young woman. For the Smithsonian exhibition, Written in Bone, it was decided to reconstruct her face again, this time older, as she may have been at the time of her death. How close these two reconstructions came to capturing the real Anne Wolsely we will never know for certain without a contemporary image.
We do have a clue however, the story of which is interesting in itself. In the
1750s a relative of the Wolseleys came to Annapolis to live. She brought with her a painting of her grandmother the neice and namesake of Anne Wolseley, Anne Wolseley Knipe. When she died the painting passed to her daughter and then to her granddaughter. It then skipped a generation, passing to her great-great granddaughter, the wife of the Honorable George Hunt Pendleton. Pendleton served in Congress, ran as George McClellan's running mate against Abraham Lincoln in 1864, authored the Pendelton Civil Service Act and was rewarded with an Ambassadorship to Germany. Mrs. Pendleton took the painting with her to Germany, removing it from Annapolis where it had been on display for about 150 years.
By 1929 Anne Wolseley Knipe's portrait had disappeared from sight. Because it was of a close blood relative to Anne Wolseley, and might be useful in the reconstruction her image as well as in the hunt for family DNA, two consumate researchers, Jane McWilliams and Elaine Rice Bachmann, were assigned the task of tracking it down. They managed to sort out the innumerable relatives that to whom it could have descended, knowing that in all probability the family tradition of bequeathing it to daughters would have continued. Unfortunately there were a large number of candidates for whom there were no addresses and the hunt ground to a halt.
Then by chance, in the lunch room of the State Archives, Jane and Elaine happened to be talking with a senior member of the staff who had spent her childhood in a small town in Pennsylvania. When Jane mentioned that one of the possible heirs was named Joline and had come from Pennsylvania, the staff person mentioned that her childhood neighbors had had that name and offered to give them a call. They proved to be none other than the descendants of Anne Wolseley's niece. They didn't own the painting, but thought they knew who did, providing the telephone number of relatives in California. The family was so delighted to receive Jane's call and to learn about the interest in the painting that they donated it to the State Archives, returning it again to Annapolis.
From generation to generation the women descendants and close relatives of Anne Wolseley Knipe had carefully preserved both the memory and the artistic rendition of Anne Wolseley Knipe. Now it has a home among the collective memories of our colonial past at the Archives where it joins a revived interest in the role of women who helped formulate what was, and what is Maryland.
Although genetically linked to her name-sake there still remained the question of how much Anne Wolseley Knipe resembled her Aunt? I leave that for you to ponder from two forensic reconstructions and the image of the painting below, but to my eyes there are some striking resemblances, especially given the fact that the portrait was probably a marriage portrait designed to show off the best qualities of the sitter, while the reconstructions were not an artistic embellishment of fact. To put it bluntly, as a contemporary member of the English branch of the Wolseley family explained to Elaine Rice Bachmann, the Wolseleys were known for their big noses.
In many respects, Anne Wolseley Calvert, whose own family had suffered persecution in England for their adherence to Catholicism, represents every-woman of 17th Century Maryland with her strong determination to make her way in a forbidding world filled with travails not unlike those of Maryland's neglected patron saint, St. Cecilia. While the records are for the most part silent about the example Anne Wolseley Calvert set for those about her, we are left with one tantalizing piece of evidence that suggests the devotion she could inspire.
Her husband Phillip spent his life attempting to make the colony of Maryland a reasonably safe and secure place to live, a place where men, who died young and often with minor children, could be assured that the state would properly administer their estates for the benefit of their widows and their children. He did so with the help of a number of devoted clerks, the bureaucrats of their day, often
providing them with lodgings in his own home. When his longtime bachelor clerk, Michael Rochford died in 1679, Rochford chose not to honor his employer, but his employer's wife, Anne Wolseley. Out of a meager estate, he left his most precious possession, his silver watch to Ann, a touching tribute to a woman who had suffered much but who also seems to have been able to have shown kindness to others.
Not everyone agrees that we should go to such lengths as peering into coffins to reconstruct the past. Indeed an individual who may be a Calvert descendant felt compelled to write expressing his concern over what he perceived of as a desecration of a grave. He closed his letter with the familiar blessing "Eternal rest grant unto them O Lord. Let perpetual light shine upon them. May they rest in Peace."
I tried to explain in reply that until we did the historical research there was no connection with the Calverts and that from the remains alone their could not be. Only by linking the scientific evidence secured from many different disciplines with the fragmentary written evidence that survives could identification of the remains be nearly certain. I said nearly, because so much of the literary evidence has been lost. Nowhere in the records available today, for example, is there reference to these graves as being those of Anne, Philip, and an unnamed female child.
Should we engage in such reconstruction of the past from actual human remains? That is a philosophical question which in my opinion is best answered yes. If we had put as much into life for the benefit of others as Philip and Anne did, if we had suffered as much as Anne and that five month old girl did, I think I would like the world to know it and not be forever forgotten in a lead coffin under an oft-plowed corn field.
When Hamlet contemplated the skull of his friend Yorick, he did so for good reason. When with care and good taste we examine the remains of those who gave so much so that we could live the good lives we do, we do so for good reason as well. "Alas Poor Philip" and Ann, we should. Indeed in many respects Anne and the young girl in the coffin beside her represent every-woman and every-child. We owe it to them and to ourselves to pay them respectful tribute, not to ignore them. It is not a desecration so to do, it is a celebration, the final act of which should be a respectful re-interment in the crypt of the newly reconstructed chapel on the site of the earliest Catholic chapel in English speaking North America. But to celebrate we need to understand why, who and how, with whatever evidence remains for us to examine. Only then can perpetual light shine upon them and only then can they truly rest in peace.
In doing so, through ongoing research and interpretation, we also will know even better why we should remember the Spirit of 1634, and pause to celebrate Maryland Day every March.
Explore more of Maryland History at: http://teaching.msa.maryland.gov/.
The images of the Anne Wolseley Knipe portrait and the first forensic reconstruction are courtesy of the Maryland State Archives. The image of the second reconstruction is taken from Douglas Owsley and Karin Bruwelheide, Written in Bone, Minneapolis: LeantoPress, 2009, p. 59.
The quotes from Father Andrew White are taken from White, Andrew, Barbara
Lawatsch-Boomgaarden, and J. IJsewijn. 1995. Voyage to Maryland (1633) = Relatio itineris in Marilandiam. Wauconda, Ill: Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers and Narratives of early Maryland 1633-1684: Ed. by Clayton Colman Hall. 1910. Narratives, Original, of early American history, 11. 1910.
What is most engaging is the merger of several disciplines as we attempt to get to know and understand what that first generation did and why. Art, a closer look at the surviving documentary evidence, and the analysis of the physical remains in the ground, coupled with a careful study of the word portraits of one of the best known chroniclers of those first years, Father Andrew White, lead in new directions and exciting new finds.
For example, until a short while ago, most scholars believed that we could never know what the first Governor, Leonard Calvert, looked like, although we have long known that he had returned to England long enough to have his portrait painted. Recently we have had two paintings brought to our attention, both of which are now in the State's collection. The first now hangs in the State House. The second we owe to, Mr. Truman Siemans, whose relative had made a copy early in the 20th century. He found the original on EBAY and bought it for the State's collection. Together they provide a face for Leonard Calvert that we once thought we would ever see.
Siemans'
portrait of Leonard Calvert, gift to the Friends of the Maryland
State Archives
Another new avenue of exploration is the possible architect of the Chapel whose work has been largely overlooked until recently when I began to catalog my books and found a treatise of his, that I had purchased at secondhand bookstore in New England for next to nothing. It is written by Guillielmi Hesi, a recognized Jesuit chapel architect, and was published in 1636 as the Emblemata Sacra. It is devoted to poems and imagery that would have been familiar to that first generation. We have it available as images on line on the Maryland State Archives web site and when the Chapel is ready for exhibits, the Friends of the Maryland State Archives will be pleased to lend the original for display.
It is not far fetched to make the connection between Father William Hesius and the building of the Chapel at St. Mary's City. While no plans have survived, the paper they probably were drawn on has. The Jesuits brought paper with them that was made in their mllls near where Father Hesius lived and designed the church of St. Michel Leuven, Belgium, built ca. 1650. A number of examples of Jesuit paper with the watermark of a cross, a crown, IHS,and the word MARINAUD, are to be found throughout the Maryland records of the late 1660s and early 1670s when the Chapel was built, upon which are written the inventories of the estates of the Spirit of 1634 generation.
A cherub contemplating his shadow from Emblemata (1636)
For the Chapel walls, there is a recently identified candidate for the alter, based upon the Peter Paul Rubens painting of the crucifixion that we now know George Calvert had hanging in his private chapel before it was given to Queen Henrietta Maria to hang over the alter in hers. While the original was lost during the English Civil Wars there is a lovely engraving of it that could be used for a suitable reproduction:
In these times of economic turmoil and uncertainty, the Spirit of 1634 well deserves a holiday of its own, yet Maryland Day, with a few exceptions like today, has been slipping from public view. Clearly Maryland Day is worth celebrating, not only for what we know about the Spirit of 1634, but also about the adventure ahead in learning more. Yet, with the recent emphasis on long weekends and rolling several holidays into one, most people seem not to be aware that there is an official State Holiday called Maryland Day. The Baltimore Sun, while publicizing this event in its March 26th edition, following Sue Wilkinson's unflagging efforts to get their attention, failed to mention the day at all on the 25th itself. Recently you could only find scattered references to Maryland Day on the web. Two of the most popular returns from Google and Bing, either missed the day altogether, or were celebrating something else.
There is much to remember and much more to learn from the lives of those who stepped ashore on March 25, 1634, having come nearly 6,000 miles over rough seas to start a new life.
The replica of the Dove under full sail. Visit the Dove at St. Mary's City
Their journey began on St. Cecilia's Day, November 22, 1633. Driven out by wars and religious intolerance, and drawn by the prospects of prosperity in a new land of abundance, approximately 150 brave souls set forth from Cowes on the Isle of Wight. They disembarked at an island they named St. Clements on March 25, 1634, a day that was sacred to all who landed that day, whether Catholic or Protestant, as the feast of the annunciation. It also signaled the end of the old year and the beginning of the new on a calendar, that would not be changed to ours for another 118 years. Their purpose, after having successfully negotiated an accord with the natives and exploring the lower reaches of the Potomac for some time previously, was to celebrate a mass of thanksgiving that special day in anticipation of beginning a permanent settlement in the new year.
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| Journey of the Ark and the Dove, 1633-1634 |
The 150 or so who launched the new colony of Maryland had little but hard work ahead of them with no assurance that they would succeed. They came with cultural baggage of closely held and antagonistic religious views, to be governed by a Charter that carried a hint of representative government, the details of which were read to them for the first time that day. They came with specific instructions on what to do and how to behave which in large measure they would ignore in favor of new ways of living which included adapting to and incorporating the knowledge and skills of the natives they found already living here. Indeed when commanded to build an English town from which they were to go out to work their fields, they instead inhabited an abandoned Indian village, and soon sought scattered farms and plantations along the manifold creeks and rivers that penetrated the interior. It proved to be a hard life in which large numbers would not survive, leaving few heirs to perpetuate their memory.
Still those that did survive labored on, joined by succeeding waves of immigrants until there was a large enough population in which native born would out number newcomers. Fortunately there was a well-educated priest among them who has left more than one version of his account of this migration of English men and women to Maryland. Father Andrew White would go on to translate the bible and familiar prayers into Piscataway, and probably wrote the draft of the 1649 Act Concerning Religion which we refer to today as the act of toleration.
All but a fragment of his translations are lost, but the concept of religious toleration which he wove into an Elizabethan Statute on Blasphemy pointed the way to the much broader concept of the separation of church and state, and religious freedom on which our civil government is based. Father White writes eloquently of the voyage and the landing. His Briefe Relation contains less of his religious piety than later versions, but all present a vivid word picture of the Spirit of 1634. A sample of excerpts from the most recent translation from the latin of what he sent to Rome is typical of his style:
“On the 22nd of November, 1633, St. Cecilia's day, with a southeast wind softly blowing, we sailed from Cowes, which is a port on the Isle of Wight. ….When the wind was failing us, we cast anchor opposite Yarmouth Castle, which is situated toward the northwest of the same island. Here we were received with public cannon salutes; and yet fear was not absent. For the sailors were muttering among themselves that they were expecting a messenger and a letter form London, and for that reason they also seemed to be devising delays. But God destroyed their evil plans. Indeed that very night , when a favorable wind was blowing … our pinnace [the Dove] … hurried out to sea. And so., lest we might lose sight of our pinnace, we decided to follow. In this way the plans that the sailor considered against us were foiled. This happened on the 23rd of November, the feast of St. Clement, who obtained the crown of martyrdom when he was tied to an anchor and plunged into the sea ….”
The voyage to the Caribbean islands was uneventful and the only lives lost were to partying too heavily on Christmas.
“Wine was consumed in order that this day might be better celebrated,”
Father White wrote,
“and those who enjoyed it too intemperately were seized by fever the following day; they were thirty in number, and from those about 12 died not very much later, including two Catholics...”
This is our only solid evidence that the majority on board may have been protestant, assuming that drinking was indiscriminate as to religion. 1/6th of those aboard by this calculation would have been Roman Catholic, and helps to explain why Lord Baltimore's instructions to his brother Leonard who led the expedition so explicitly required all the passengers not to discuss or debate matters of religion.
When they at least reached the Potomac River they found the native population up in arms:
“At the mouth of the river itself we perceived armed natives. That night fires were burning in the entire region, and since such a big ship had never been seen by them, messengers sent from this side and from that were reporting that a canoe similar to an island had come near, and that it held as many men as there are trees in the woods. We, however continued to the Heron Islands, so called from the unheard of throngs of this kind of bird. The first one in our way we named after St. Clement; the second after St. Catherine, the third after St. Cecilia. We first left the ship at St. Clement's Island, to which no access lay open except through a shallow because of the sloping shore. Here the maids, who had left the ship to wash the laundry, almost drowned, when the skiff turned over, and a great part of my linen clothes were lost, no small loss in these parts. This island abounds in cedar, sassafras, herbs and flowers to make all kinds of salads, also in a wild nut tree which bears a very hard nut, with a thick shell and a small but wonderfully tasty kernel. However, since it is only four hundred acres wide, it did not seem spacious enough as a location for the new settlement.”
Instead, Governor Leonard Calvert, with the assistance of Captain Henry Fleet from Virginia who was fluent in the language of the natives, purchased
“such a charming place for a settlement that Europe can hardly afford a better one. Thus, when we had advanced from St. Clement's about nine leagues, we sailed into the mouth of a river ...[that] runs forward from south to north about twenty miles before it is absorbed by the salt water from the sea, not unlike the Thames. In its mouth one can see two bays, able to hold 300 ships of huge size. One bay we dedicated to St. George, the other one, more inward to the Most Blessed Virgin Mary. ...We went up from coast inland on the right side, and about a thousand paces removed from the shore, we gave the name of St. Mary to the designated city. ...in order to prevent any pretext for injury or occasion for enmity, we bought thirty miles of that land from the chieftain in exchange for
hatchets, axes, hoes, and some amount of cloth. ...”
“Is not this miraculous, that a nation a few daies before in generall
armes against us and our enterprise should like lambes yeeld themselves, glad of our company, giving us houses, land, and liveings for a trifle...”
The great adventure had begun with housing and a marketable crop already in place. In fact there was such an abundance of corn that the surplus would be sent to market in Massachusetts, where Marylanders would initiate a reputation for exuberant behavior and found themselves banned from Boston. John Winthrop recorded the encounter in his journal:
“ The Dove, a pinnace of about fifty tons, came from Maryland upon Patomack river, with corn to exchange for fish and other commodities. ...some of our people being aboard the bark of Maryland, the sailors did revile them, calling them holy brethren, … and with all did curse and swear most horribly, and use threatening speeches against us. ...The next day (the governor not being well) we examined the witnesses, and found them fall[ing] short of the matter of threatening, and not to agree about the reviling speeches, and, beside, not able to design certainly the men that had so offended. Whereupon .. a letter [was] written to the master, that, in regard such disorders were committed aboard his ship, it was his duty to inquire out the offenders and punish them; and withal to desire him to bring no more such disordered persons among us.”
For the infant colony of Maryland there would be many years of struggle and near defeat ahead. Many good works have been written about those early years by a distinguished group of scholars including Lois Carr, Henry Miller, Julie King, Silas Hurry, and Tim Riordan, to mention a few. They have documented the determination in the face of uncertainty and economic upheaval that is so characteristic of that Spirit of 1634.
Indeed it has been in the blending of the disciplines of historical research, art, archaeology, and forensic anthropology, that we are continuing to learn more about what the reality of life was like for those who struggled to make a home for themselves and their hoped for posterity in Maryland.
If you have not yet experienced it, be sure to read about the Written in Bone exhibit at the Smithsonian in which the findings in Maryland play such a large part. Under the leadership of Doug Owsley, that exhibit took us on a journey into the lives and deaths of the full spectrum of society, rich and poor, black, white and native American.
One particularly absorbing story in the exhibit is that of Anne Wolseley Calvert, wife of Chancellor Philip Calvert, uncle of the Third Lord Baltimore, whose mansion was one of the largest ever built in Maryland in colonial times.
On December 5, 1990, James Bock reported in the Sun that a team of scientists,
archaeologists, and historians had begun to interpret the remains of three people buried in lead coffins within the foundations of probably the first brick Catholic Chapel in English-speaking North America, one which only recently has been reconstructed on the foundations of the original at St. Mary's City.
The middle of the three coffins contained a woman of 55 or 60 years whose suffering
at the last must have been enormous. She was malnourished and had few teeth. She had been in considerable and constant pain from a spiral fracture of one leg that had only partially healed allowing her to walk with a pronounced limp, but leaving her with two open abscesses that surely made the last two or three years of her life perfectly miserable.
Who was this woman buried with such tender loving care- arms folded and tied with silk ribbon, rosemary, the herb of remembrance sprinkled lovingly over her body? All of the evidence points to Anne Wolseley Calvert, the wife of Chancellor Philip Calvert who lay next to her in the largest of the three coffins. She came with her husband in 1657 and died in St. Mary's City two years before him, in about 1679 or 1680.
We now know that she suffered greatly and we know much about her state of health, but can we also put a face to her memory? From her skull, a forensic pathologist reconstructed the facial muscles and overlaying tissues to produce a striking likeness of a young woman. For the Smithsonian exhibition, Written in Bone, it was decided to reconstruct her face again, this time older, as she may have been at the time of her death. How close these two reconstructions came to capturing the real Anne Wolsely we will never know for certain without a contemporary image.
We do have a clue however, the story of which is interesting in itself. In the
1750s a relative of the Wolseleys came to Annapolis to live. She brought with her a painting of her grandmother the neice and namesake of Anne Wolseley, Anne Wolseley Knipe. When she died the painting passed to her daughter and then to her granddaughter. It then skipped a generation, passing to her great-great granddaughter, the wife of the Honorable George Hunt Pendleton. Pendleton served in Congress, ran as George McClellan's running mate against Abraham Lincoln in 1864, authored the Pendelton Civil Service Act and was rewarded with an Ambassadorship to Germany. Mrs. Pendleton took the painting with her to Germany, removing it from Annapolis where it had been on display for about 150 years.
By 1929 Anne Wolseley Knipe's portrait had disappeared from sight. Because it was of a close blood relative to Anne Wolseley, and might be useful in the reconstruction her image as well as in the hunt for family DNA, two consumate researchers, Jane McWilliams and Elaine Rice Bachmann, were assigned the task of tracking it down. They managed to sort out the innumerable relatives that to whom it could have descended, knowing that in all probability the family tradition of bequeathing it to daughters would have continued. Unfortunately there were a large number of candidates for whom there were no addresses and the hunt ground to a halt.
Then by chance, in the lunch room of the State Archives, Jane and Elaine happened to be talking with a senior member of the staff who had spent her childhood in a small town in Pennsylvania. When Jane mentioned that one of the possible heirs was named Joline and had come from Pennsylvania, the staff person mentioned that her childhood neighbors had had that name and offered to give them a call. They proved to be none other than the descendants of Anne Wolseley's niece. They didn't own the painting, but thought they knew who did, providing the telephone number of relatives in California. The family was so delighted to receive Jane's call and to learn about the interest in the painting that they donated it to the State Archives, returning it again to Annapolis.
From generation to generation the women descendants and close relatives of Anne Wolseley Knipe had carefully preserved both the memory and the artistic rendition of Anne Wolseley Knipe. Now it has a home among the collective memories of our colonial past at the Archives where it joins a revived interest in the role of women who helped formulate what was, and what is Maryland.
Although genetically linked to her name-sake there still remained the question of how much Anne Wolseley Knipe resembled her Aunt? I leave that for you to ponder from two forensic reconstructions and the image of the painting below, but to my eyes there are some striking resemblances, especially given the fact that the portrait was probably a marriage portrait designed to show off the best qualities of the sitter, while the reconstructions were not an artistic embellishment of fact. To put it bluntly, as a contemporary member of the English branch of the Wolseley family explained to Elaine Rice Bachmann, the Wolseleys were known for their big noses.
Anne Wolseley Knipe, niece of Anne Wolseley
First Forensic Reconstruction of the skull thought to be of Anne Wolseley, followed by the second reconstruction of the skull which appears in
In many respects, Anne Wolseley Calvert, whose own family had suffered persecution in England for their adherence to Catholicism, represents every-woman of 17th Century Maryland with her strong determination to make her way in a forbidding world filled with travails not unlike those of Maryland's neglected patron saint, St. Cecilia. While the records are for the most part silent about the example Anne Wolseley Calvert set for those about her, we are left with one tantalizing piece of evidence that suggests the devotion she could inspire.
Her husband Phillip spent his life attempting to make the colony of Maryland a reasonably safe and secure place to live, a place where men, who died young and often with minor children, could be assured that the state would properly administer their estates for the benefit of their widows and their children. He did so with the help of a number of devoted clerks, the bureaucrats of their day, often
providing them with lodgings in his own home. When his longtime bachelor clerk, Michael Rochford died in 1679, Rochford chose not to honor his employer, but his employer's wife, Anne Wolseley. Out of a meager estate, he left his most precious possession, his silver watch to Ann, a touching tribute to a woman who had suffered much but who also seems to have been able to have shown kindness to others.
Not everyone agrees that we should go to such lengths as peering into coffins to reconstruct the past. Indeed an individual who may be a Calvert descendant felt compelled to write expressing his concern over what he perceived of as a desecration of a grave. He closed his letter with the familiar blessing "Eternal rest grant unto them O Lord. Let perpetual light shine upon them. May they rest in Peace."
I tried to explain in reply that until we did the historical research there was no connection with the Calverts and that from the remains alone their could not be. Only by linking the scientific evidence secured from many different disciplines with the fragmentary written evidence that survives could identification of the remains be nearly certain. I said nearly, because so much of the literary evidence has been lost. Nowhere in the records available today, for example, is there reference to these graves as being those of Anne, Philip, and an unnamed female child.
Should we engage in such reconstruction of the past from actual human remains? That is a philosophical question which in my opinion is best answered yes. If we had put as much into life for the benefit of others as Philip and Anne did, if we had suffered as much as Anne and that five month old girl did, I think I would like the world to know it and not be forever forgotten in a lead coffin under an oft-plowed corn field.
When Hamlet contemplated the skull of his friend Yorick, he did so for good reason. When with care and good taste we examine the remains of those who gave so much so that we could live the good lives we do, we do so for good reason as well. "Alas Poor Philip" and Ann, we should. Indeed in many respects Anne and the young girl in the coffin beside her represent every-woman and every-child. We owe it to them and to ourselves to pay them respectful tribute, not to ignore them. It is not a desecration so to do, it is a celebration, the final act of which should be a respectful re-interment in the crypt of the newly reconstructed chapel on the site of the earliest Catholic chapel in English speaking North America. But to celebrate we need to understand why, who and how, with whatever evidence remains for us to examine. Only then can perpetual light shine upon them and only then can they truly rest in peace.
In doing so, through ongoing research and interpretation, we also will know even better why we should remember the Spirit of 1634, and pause to celebrate Maryland Day every March.
Explore more of Maryland History at: http://teaching.msa.maryland.gov/.
The images of the Anne Wolseley Knipe portrait and the first forensic reconstruction are courtesy of the Maryland State Archives. The image of the second reconstruction is taken from Douglas Owsley and Karin Bruwelheide, Written in Bone, Minneapolis: LeantoPress, 2009, p. 59.
The quotes from Father Andrew White are taken from White, Andrew, Barbara
Lawatsch-Boomgaarden, and J. IJsewijn. 1995. Voyage to Maryland (1633) = Relatio itineris in Marilandiam. Wauconda, Ill: Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers and Narratives of early Maryland 1633-1684: Ed. by Clayton Colman Hall. 1910. Narratives, Original, of early American history, 11. 1910.
Sunday, February 14, 2010
The future of Archives
"May these be perpetual"
On the Sustainability of Archives
Opening Remarks
Before the House and Senate Budget Committees
of the Maryland State Legislature,
February 17-18, 2010
My name is Ed Papenfuse, State Archivist and Commissioner of Land Patents. With me today are my Deputy, Tim Baker, and Nassir Rezvan, Director of Administration for the State Archives.
Once again, we would like to thank the analyst, Ms. Flora Arabo, for a very fine presentation. As always she accurately and fairly presents an analysis of the budget numbers.
For your reference and further reading, our annual report is provided on our website in the form of the minutes and agenda of the Hall of Records Commission, which we publish electronically following
each meeting at http://www.mdarchives.state.md.us/msa/intromsa/hrc/html/hrc.html.
This budget testimony and accompanying documents of interest are
posted on our website at http://www.msa.md.gov/msa/intromsa/html/budget.html and on my blog, http://marylandarchivist.blogspot.com.
Our major new outreach efforts this past year have been the collaboration with the Maryland Historical Trust on the reinterpretation and restoration of the Old Senate Chamber in the State House, our assumption, without funding, of the State House Tour Office, and an exhibit with the Maryland Historical Society of some of the most valuable artwork owned by the State.
Burt Kummerow, director of the Maryland
Historical Society,with the three paintings by Charles Willson Peale
Historical Society,with the three paintings by Charles Willson Peale
owned by the State of Maryland that are
part of the "Maryland's National Treasures" exhibit.
part of the "Maryland's National Treasures" exhibit.
(Baltimore Sun photo by Amy Davis /
February 9, 2010)]
February 9, 2010)]
As we struggle with one of the worst budget crises in our history, it is time to address directly the reasons and means for sustaining the public memory in a permanent, well-protected environment, forever accessible and perpetually useful to future generations.
There are not enough resources for government to do all that the public and those in public office think it ought to do, from providing public safety, education, and health care to maintaining the infrastructure of our roads and public buildings. We live on borrowed time and massive loans from abroad. Optimists argue that if
we can only get our economy growing again, it will outpace our debt.
Pessimists tell us that poverty is too widespread and there are too many mouths to feed in a world of massive income disparity and a pervasive lack of personal self discipline. It is likely that truth lies somewhere in between, that to weather the crisis, expectations need to be scaled back, belts tightened, and the American ideal of self-reliance redefined in a collective spirit of entrepreneurial activity that produces jobs and a renewed optimism that together we can both maintain and improve our standard of living.
In 1916, on the eve of the first Great War to End Wars, George Creel wrote a flattering piece about Douglas Fairbanks Sr., who along with Enrico Caruso was one of America's first great superstars. He argued that the country should hire Fairbanks and send him over the country as an agent of the Bureau of Grins. “Think what would happen” he wrote, “if we learned the art of joyousness and gained the strength that comes from good humor and optimism!”1
What he wrote then, holds true today, as we cope with budget hearings and snow removal:
We are a young nation and a great nation. Judging from the promise of
the morning, there is nothing that may not be asked of America's
noon. A land of abundance, with not an evil that may not be banished,
and yet there is more whining in it than in any other country on the
face of the globe. If we are to die, "Nibbled to Death by Ducks"
may well be put on the tombstone. Little things are permitted to
bring about paroxysms of peevishness. Even our pleasures have come to
be taken sadly. We are irritable at picnics, snarly at clambakes, and
bored to death at dinners.2
To avoid being nibbled to death by ducks, we need to remember that sensibly investing in the entrepreneurial activities that sustain our memory of the past, can be one of the greatest contributions we make to the future success of the nation, whether it be to help improve our sense of humor or inspire us to re-invent ourselves rather than repeating the sins of the past. With Archives as the central cortex of our public memory, providing the cultural and informational inspiration to explore in meaningful ways what we have done right and wrong, we have a good chance of rising above our current misfortunes. Stifle that entrepreneurial spirit and we are likely to be condemned to repeat forever the same meaningless task of pushing a boulder up a mountain, only to see it roll down again.
In 1796, on the eve of his retirement from the Presidency, George Washington was presented with some mementos of the role the French played in the American Revolution. They will, he wrote, “be
deposited with the archives of the United States, which are at once the evidence and the memorials of their freedom and independence. May these be perpetual!.”3
On another occasion when pestered by historians to make his private papers available, and after agreeing that he would do so at some point, he cautioned:
It ever has been my opinion ... that no Historian can be possessed of sufficient materials to compile a perfect history of the revolution, who has not free access to the archives of Congress, to those of the respective States; to the papers of the Commander in chief, and to those of the officers who have been employed in separate Departments. Combining and properly arranging the information which is to be obtained from these sources must bring to view all the material occurrences of the War.4
Beginning in the 1990s, the Maryland State Archives launched a program of self-sustainability for the public records of the state that was premised on two fundamental principles:
- that the capital resources of the State would provide proper housing for the Archives to prevent their being destroyed by environmental neglect
- that the operational budget of the state would provide salaries for key archival personnel sufficient to not only care for the records as responsible custodians, but also to engage aggressively in seeking out sources of funding that would not impact the General Fund.
As to the entrepreneurial spirit of the Archives, we have managed to work with the Judiciary to preserve and make accessible on line one of the most important of our archival responsibilities, the records of private property ownership and sale throughout the state reaching back to the 17th century and the founding of Maryland. We have done so on initiative of the staff of the Archives, developing a web-based service and electronic archives encompassing 170,000,000 images of land records that are added to daily through the course of real estate recordings at the courthouses throughout Maryland. The service is paid for and maintained up front by those who buy and sell land through a modest fee placed in a dedicated fund generally referred to as the Land Records Improvement Fund, only a small portion of which goes towards the care and maintenance of the records on line at the Archives. In creating the service, with the permission of the Governor and the Legislature, we incorporated an overhead and investment charge designed to partially offset the general reference and research costs of the Archives which enabled us to develop the service in the first place, on the assumption that core management and entrepreneurial staff would continue to be the contribution of the State Government.
Instead, the more we have been able to earn, the less we have been permitted to do, as special fund income was siphoned off to pay for what should be General Fund expenditures, and what was earned above and beyond the immediate cost of service, was drained from our ability to develop additional sources of revenue outside the General Fund. For example, instead of providing adequate housing and maintenance of our collections, including the preventative maintenance of a valuable State art collection, we have been charged rent for the current Archives building and been forced to pay rent for the commercial space housing over half of our archival collections. In addition not only have our general fund allocations been reduced to paying only for salaries, the amount available for salaries has been persistently reduced, making it increasingly difficult to even maintain the services we currently provide, let alone think creatively about providing more efficient ways of preserving and accessing the public memory. In effect, we are being nibbled to death by ducks, instead of being provided with the life support necessary to help educate and inform a public that sorely needs to reflect with good humor and creative spirit on what we can do collectively to solve the problems of today and tomorrow.
Rather than take a further $70,000 from our general fund appropriation, I would request that attention be given to restoring our general fund appropriation for salaries to a level that actually sustains our management staff (approximately $5 million dollars) , removes the burden of rental of substandard space by pushing forward the capital investment in adequate storage, conservation, and educational facilities on site (a capital investment of about $70 million dollars from triple A bonds), and permits us to continue to use the income we generate from fee based services to further support through scanning and placing records on line, employment of a community of challenged individuals that was the hallmark of our land records project. By offering scanning and web-based services to State Agencies, we help economize in the expenditure of public dollars on the creation, storage, and accessibility of public records, employ people who otherwise must struggle for their very existence, and make more readily available the public memory so necessary to the recovery of our economy and the re-inventing of America. By not allocating investment in these goals, we suppress our ability to learn the truth and be inspired by the past, doomed to repeat our mistakes and consigned to a bleak future.
I admit it is one thing to ardently assert the value of an Archives to the future course of our state and nation, and another to prove it. Are we indeed able to reach the public in meaningful ways that can be measured?
When given the ability to hire and reward with benefits a core entrepreneurial staff, the answer is yes. Take the Maryland Archives designed service perpetually maintaining and providing access on line to land records. Even in the midst of the worst snowstorm in our history up to nearly 6,000 patrons a day logged into http://mdlandrec.net, although I will admit that on Wednesday when most of us could not make it to work and the State closed down, only 3,073 were on line that day. The rest were probably shoveling snow.
What this State and this Country needs is a revival of the best elements of the Works Progress Administration focused on its archival heritage. Through law and executive mandate, all state agencies should be required to adhere to records retention and disposal schedules developed by the Archives working with the agencies. Those schedules should require each agency to budget a charge similar to that collected by the Department of Budget and Management for communication that would be paid directly to the Archives for the perpetual care of and access to permanent records from the moment of their inception. In addition, all state agencies would be required to relinquish all scanning of paper and microfilm records to the management of the State Archives, along with any funds appropriated for that purpose. Such centralization of paper and microfilm scanning would reduce by at least 20% the cost of all state agency scanning projects (the amount actually saved during the creation of http://mdlandrec.net) and provide a source of fee derived income for the sustainability of the whole Archives program.
With up to date records retention and disposal schedules, with the Archives as the mandated disaster recovery and security back up for all permanent records of the state, and with the costs of maintaining those records for public access in a pay as you go system, considerably less expensive office space would be required for State Agencies, and the overall costs of managing and delivering records for public and governmental purposes could be drastically reduced.
In these dark days of economic turmoil and recession it is time to think differently about how to move ourselves forward. "Judging from the promise of the morning, there is nothing that may not be asked of America's noon," as long as we do not neglect the very sources of information that help us to think and act wisely. The Archives stands ready to help with recovery and growth, but it cannot without a secure baseline of appropriated funds allocated to a core staff leading the way, adequate archival storage space, and enforcement of new scanning and records management guidelines that generate special fund revenue sufficient to sustain the Archives.
At day's end, setting aside the statistics and the rhetoric of advocacy, preserving our record heritage and conserving with loving care our treasures, are much like the vision of our founding fathers and mothers for this nation. They are acts of faith in the future for those who come after us. Be assured, we will do the very best we can with what we are given in the belief that better times will come . All I can ask of you today is that you turn aside the recommendations to cut further into our General Fund budget, and approve the Governor's allowance as it now stands.
Notes:
1Everybody's Magazine, 1916, p. 730 ff. Available from Google Books: http://books.google.com/books?id=nazNAAAAMAAJ&dq=everybody's%20magazine%20george%20creel%20douglas%20fairbanks&pg=PP11#v=onepage&q=everybody's%20magazine%20george%20creel%20douglas%20fairbanks&f=false
Friday, November 20, 2009
The "Chesapeake School" past, present, and future
In June of 1974 a small conference sponsored by the Maryland State Archives entitled grandly "The First Conference on Maryland History" was held at St. John's College in Annapolis. It was meant to be a tribute to the long time State Archivist, Morris Radoff, and it contained some of the first published essays from what came to be known as the "Chesapeake School." Under the leadership of Lois Carr, an interactive group of young scholars, meeting almost daily at the Archives were making good use of the records that Dr. Radoff, Gust Skordas, Phebe Jacobsen, and others, had so carefully preserved and made accessible in the Memorial Hall of Records. At that time they were mostly colonial era records, principally court and probate gathered from the courthouses around the state after they had been 'discovered' through the vast inventory project called the Historical Records survey, a part of the first national stimulus package devised by the Roosevelt administration to give jobs to what would be called unemployed arts and sciences majors today.
Other conferences would follow, mostly sponsored by the Institute of Early American History at Williamsburg, including the one at which a summary of these remarks was given entitled The Early Chesapeake: Reflections and Projections.
By way of introduction it should be pointed out that the Cheaspeake School was not really about defining a region or even sub-regions of study, nor was it solely about what could be learned about the life styles of the not so rich and famous of the 17th and 18th century Chesapeake. It was about an extensive, energetic intellectual collaboration and interactive dicussion about community. The long lunches in the late 60's and through much of the first half of the 1970s at St. John's commons, and the frequent late night dinners that bored our wives, husbands, and significant others to death as we debated Harris's theories of generational changes, were about how best to make sense of the detail of the records so well cared for and accessible at the Archives. In all this intellectual synergy, Lois Carr was the heart and soul.
Much has been accomplished over the last 35 years in awaking scholars and the public to the wide range of topics that can be addressed by the surviving record, not only that which is on paper, but also what that paper tells us about what is found in the ground. It is important, however to add a note of caution and, what I hope is inspiration for the future.
I perhaps should re-title my comments "The Devil is in the Details of Preserving and Making Accessible the Records" so essential to the future work of the Chesapeake School and those informed and inspired by it.
What was done in the past built on the first stimulus package, the capital funds and salaries provided by the Works Progress Administration that built Archives (including the National Archives and in part the Maryland Hall of Records) and staffed the most extensive inventory of record resources ever undertaken in the United States. Out of that effort came the first generaton of Archivists incuding Morris Radoff and Gust Skordas. We need part of the present stimulus package today, if Archives on and off the Web are to survive.
The Present is exciting with regard to building public interest and confidence in the need to fund and make accessible the Archival record. The future of historical research is on and through the web linked to such extraordinarily popular public exhibits as Written In Bone which combines the best of documentary and archaeological research into a public draw unlike anything its creators expected. Go see it.
The Future for the institutions caring for the records behind such exhibits and the associated virtual reality on the web, is not bright, unless we find ways to convince the public that you can't have exciting exhibits and on-line virtual reality without a sustainable environment upon which those exhibits and those virtual reality worlds are based. It costs money in staff and space to put resources into electronically accessible form, and to sustain it there. It costs money in staff and space to maintain, describe, and make accessible archival series such as the probate records on which so much of the Chesapeake School early work depended.
That underlying superstructure of sources currently accessible and yet to be accessed is in danger of disappearing, if not altogether, in large measure, especially as it relates to electronic access. A major collection depository in Maryland has just reduced its hours to two days a week, let all of it staff related to education, record description, and web maintenance go, is thinking of selling off it s collections, and backing away from making any more of what it has known and available on the web.
The Maryland State Archives just underwent severe budget cuts amounting to nearly 25% of its operating funds (ALL of which are salaries--we have no direct appropriations for papers, pencils, computers, etc.-- we have to earn income for all of that). If we did not have a reasonably stable source of income this year (that source too was raided by budget transfers this week to the tune of half the monies in the fund), we too would be in the process of closing down.
What then can be done to shore up the collapsing infra-structure so essential to research, writing and interpreting the history of the Chesapeake Region, however defined?
1) perhaps institute tithing (10%) to your favorite archives (as long as it is the Maryland State Archives) and (as some have just now reminded us of the median age of this panel) estate planning in which your favorite archival repository gets a share
2) get your departments and libraries to support Archives directly through subsidies for on-line access. Don't let them just down load and forget. We would be happy to have sattellite servers (we have them now at a local university) that duplicate our holdings, but help pay for the cost not only of maintaining them, but for the addition of resources over time
3) help us build a stronger base of support from the public for direct tax dollars to Archival and Archaeological repositories (like the Maryland State Archives and Patterson Park) who could and do share facilities for more than their 'own' collections.
The key to the future of access to the archival and archaeological record is greater public support for direct allocation of public and private funds for the care, maintenance, and accessibility of Archives and Archaelolgical collections. We need all the help we can get in that regard.
Other conferences would follow, mostly sponsored by the Institute of Early American History at Williamsburg, including the one at which a summary of these remarks was given entitled The Early Chesapeake: Reflections and Projections.
By way of introduction it should be pointed out that the Cheaspeake School was not really about defining a region or even sub-regions of study, nor was it solely about what could be learned about the life styles of the not so rich and famous of the 17th and 18th century Chesapeake. It was about an extensive, energetic intellectual collaboration and interactive dicussion about community. The long lunches in the late 60's and through much of the first half of the 1970s at St. John's commons, and the frequent late night dinners that bored our wives, husbands, and significant others to death as we debated Harris's theories of generational changes, were about how best to make sense of the detail of the records so well cared for and accessible at the Archives. In all this intellectual synergy, Lois Carr was the heart and soul.
Much has been accomplished over the last 35 years in awaking scholars and the public to the wide range of topics that can be addressed by the surviving record, not only that which is on paper, but also what that paper tells us about what is found in the ground. It is important, however to add a note of caution and, what I hope is inspiration for the future.
I perhaps should re-title my comments "The Devil is in the Details of Preserving and Making Accessible the Records" so essential to the future work of the Chesapeake School and those informed and inspired by it.
What was done in the past built on the first stimulus package, the capital funds and salaries provided by the Works Progress Administration that built Archives (including the National Archives and in part the Maryland Hall of Records) and staffed the most extensive inventory of record resources ever undertaken in the United States. Out of that effort came the first generaton of Archivists incuding Morris Radoff and Gust Skordas. We need part of the present stimulus package today, if Archives on and off the Web are to survive.
The Present is exciting with regard to building public interest and confidence in the need to fund and make accessible the Archival record. The future of historical research is on and through the web linked to such extraordinarily popular public exhibits as Written In Bone which combines the best of documentary and archaeological research into a public draw unlike anything its creators expected. Go see it.
The Future for the institutions caring for the records behind such exhibits and the associated virtual reality on the web, is not bright, unless we find ways to convince the public that you can't have exciting exhibits and on-line virtual reality without a sustainable environment upon which those exhibits and those virtual reality worlds are based. It costs money in staff and space to put resources into electronically accessible form, and to sustain it there. It costs money in staff and space to maintain, describe, and make accessible archival series such as the probate records on which so much of the Chesapeake School early work depended.
That underlying superstructure of sources currently accessible and yet to be accessed is in danger of disappearing, if not altogether, in large measure, especially as it relates to electronic access. A major collection depository in Maryland has just reduced its hours to two days a week, let all of it staff related to education, record description, and web maintenance go, is thinking of selling off it s collections, and backing away from making any more of what it has known and available on the web.
The Maryland State Archives just underwent severe budget cuts amounting to nearly 25% of its operating funds (ALL of which are salaries--we have no direct appropriations for papers, pencils, computers, etc.-- we have to earn income for all of that). If we did not have a reasonably stable source of income this year (that source too was raided by budget transfers this week to the tune of half the monies in the fund), we too would be in the process of closing down.
What then can be done to shore up the collapsing infra-structure so essential to research, writing and interpreting the history of the Chesapeake Region, however defined?
1) perhaps institute tithing (10%) to your favorite archives (as long as it is the Maryland State Archives) and (as some have just now reminded us of the median age of this panel) estate planning in which your favorite archival repository gets a share
2) get your departments and libraries to support Archives directly through subsidies for on-line access. Don't let them just down load and forget. We would be happy to have sattellite servers (we have them now at a local university) that duplicate our holdings, but help pay for the cost not only of maintaining them, but for the addition of resources over time
3) help us build a stronger base of support from the public for direct tax dollars to Archival and Archaeological repositories (like the Maryland State Archives and Patterson Park) who could and do share facilities for more than their 'own' collections.
The key to the future of access to the archival and archaeological record is greater public support for direct allocation of public and private funds for the care, maintenance, and accessibility of Archives and Archaelolgical collections. We need all the help we can get in that regard.
Monday, November 9, 2009
Digital Tools and Sources for Information and Democracy
A minister friend of mine once told me that the successful formula for a sermon required that the preacher begin and end with no more than three points, and that they be made as quickly and as forcefully as possible in less than half an hour.
The excellent Knight Commission report on the Information Needs of Communities follows the formula of three main objectives in its foreword to Informing Communities Sustaining Democracy in the Digital Age:
1. Articulate the information needs of a community in a democracy,
2. Describe the state of things in the United States, and
3. Propose public policy directions that would help lead us from where we are today to where we ought to be.
I ask your indulgence to permit me to outline briefly five elements of institutional and public policy with regard to digital archives that are critical to sustaining the information needs of a community in a democracy. I propose to do so, however within the time allotted which is considerably less than 30 minutes.
Before I address the five points, allow me to circulate two images that address in greater or lesser degree all five points. The first is an exceptional painting by Richard Caton Woodville which is currently included in an exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, entitled American Scenes of Every Day Life, 1840-1910. Woodville painted this scene in Baltimore, Maryland, and it became one of the more popular reproduced graphics of its day.
The original is owned by a museum in Arkansas, which I assume because of its inclusion in the Metropolitan exhibit receives a gratis condition report and any necessary conservation for permission to include it on display.
Richard Caton Woodville (American, 1825–1855)War News from Mexico, 1848Oil on canvas; 27 x 25 in. (68.6 x 63.5 cm)Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas
Reproducing this image in any format other than as it is presented here, hyperlinked to source, requires payment of a permissions fee, and it is uncertain how long both the hyperlinked references above (one of which does not include the Woodville painting from the exhibit) is uncertain. It is one of the best ways to graphically convey the concept of Informing Communities in the middle of the nineteenth century, yet the understandable barriers to it use are expensive. The owners of the painting deserve support for its care and conservation and the authors of the exhibit text and interpretation as evidenced in their superb publication as currently available through Amazon for $37.80, deserve their royalties if similar books are to continue to be available:
If we are to sustain Democracy in the Digital Age, there is a critical need for good graphics and dependable information to be inexpensively and readily available in electronic form for educational purposes. This means that the critical and expository skills of historians, archivists, librarians, and educators generally need to be widely and freely available on the web through authoritative, accountable, and persistently (permanently) available electronic form (which in today's world, means the world wide web).
The second graphic is a neglected letter of Thomas Jefferson's. That is not to mean that its text is unknown, or for that matter not available in superbly edited form by the Jefferson Papers project at Yale. Jefferson's own, barely legible copy is on line at the Library of Congress, while Barbara Oberg presents the letter in volume 34 of the Papers of Thomas Jefferson published in 2007, now available from Princeton University Press for $110 or used on Amazon for $46.98. The footnote on p. 459 is both helpful and illuminating about the history of the letter, pointing to the Christie's sale where the document sold for $228,000n for the benefit of a house restoration where it was discovered. Apart from the fact that a teacher would have to go to a library or pay the tariff on purchase to read the footnote, what the footnote does not do is lead you to the original (now privately owned and not publicly accessible) or explain the context of where it was found. When I was asked to authenticate the letter, I addressed the context in which the original was found, which proved to be the papers of the editor of the Wilmington, Delaware, Mirror of the Times, James Wilson. That context remains behind and off line at the house museum, while the details of my research and his own able studies remain with the Chrisitie's document expert, Chris Coover, who wrote a very good, descriptive catalog entry for the sale (lot 485, Sale 1677).
My first point with regard to this letter is that the letter and all of the context work that went into its sale should be available on line at little or no expense to the educator and student, linked through the careful editorial work undertaken by Barbara Oberg and her staff. That means that anyone wishing to to pursue the nearly 250 papers which were published in 1801 in order to assess its distribution, could do so at little expense. At present the originating newspaper is not available on line (apparently the only copies exist on film at the University of Delaware Library), and if it were, the cost of accessing it by the teacher or student, would be prohibitive.
My second point is that there needs to be an on line audit trail from analysis to documentation that permits the educator/communicator and student to examine the images of the original sources, where they need to be accompanied by an easy to use system of user transcription and adding value to the understanding of the original.
Source: Christie's catalogue
For example, the trail to this letter should lead from the editorial work of the Jefferson papers to on line images of this original and Jefferson's copy, which in turn should allow user input with regard to further explaining context, content, and additional links to explanatory studies. A prototype of what I mean is on line as http://editonline.us, which is a wikipedia like approach to on line access and editing of documents. I do not yet have the owner's permission to place this particular document on line as an example, but what you might find there with the image of the original, would be something like the following, attached as a note to the letter, which was my suggestion for further research in 2002 when I was first asked to authenticate the document, updated when I returned to it for this conference:
This letter of Jefferson, the only one extant that he wrote on July 2, 1801, a day he felt ought to be the day celebrating the adoption of his Declaration of Independence, offers a number of possible avenues of further investigation in the context of a bitterly fought election and constitutional resolution . For example Jefferson appears to clearly articulate his ideas of separation of church and State more forcefully than his later letter to the Danbury Baptists, including the careful wording “The obedience you profess to those who rule under such an order of things [outlined in the previous paragraph] is rational & right and we hope the day is”far off when evils beyond the reach of constitutional correction, & more intolerable than their remedies in the judgment of the nation, may fix a just term to that duty.” It is important to know the intended audience (how widely distributed was the letter in the press of the day?), and to understand it in the context of how Jefferson communicated his views and ideas to the public. A sampling of the papers now in the Readex/American Antiquarian Society index (as of 11/2009) indicates at least 9 newspapers carried the letters to and from Jefferson. It appears probable that Jefferson, who responded quite promptly to the letter from the Delaware Baptists of June 26th, intended it for publication. Why it took to September 9, is a puzzle, as is the question of its ultimate distribution for the reading/listening public, one which further research through the auspices of the Jefferson Portal, may prove instructive, assuming that all the necessary resources to do so are readily accessible there, as is the intent of the Portal. (Ed Papenfuse, Maryland State Archivist, 2002, revised 11/2009)
Recommendation 6: Integrate digital and media literacy as critical elements for education at all levels through collaboration among federal, state, and local education officials.
Recommendation 7: Fund and support public libraries and other community institutions as centers of digital and media training, especially for adults.
[to which I would like to amend, clearly identifying Public Archives and as an additional critical constituency of the first importance to read:
Fund and support public archives and public libraries, along with other community institutions as centers of digital and media training, for children and adults.]
The five points are:
the establishment of authoritative, reliable, and permanent conduits that lead from exposition to dynamic editing/annotating/transcription compliments to original sources
comprehensive understanding of the nature, extent, quality of original sources. For example, the work of Clarence Brigham on Early American Newspapers as incorporated into such authoritative sites as the Maryland News Paper Project, need to be readily available on line as context for Newspaper research in the Early Republic. Brigham, which is not on line, appears to be the only available resource for puzzling out what newspapers Jefferson's letter to the Delaware Baptists may have been published, although any and all newspapers for the period published in Maryland can be understood through the Maryland Newspaper project which is on line, although not easily accessible by such on line indexing services by Google because its managing database is not open to outside spiders.
Ease of/inexpensive means of access to information using the World Wide Web
ability to gather authoritative leads and answer on line, easily, in the context of the user being able to add value to the understanding of the identified sources. This requires a managed editorial apparatus similar to Wikipedia which provides a community managed filter for ill informed and maliciously intended annotation.
Sustainability/affordability of the electronic sources of information for the community which would include a shared, distributed means of supporting resources to such neglected fonts of basic data as public archives and libraries.
In all, the underlying questions are: Who does it? Who pays for it?, in the context of a cooperative distributive network not unlike what Google has created for itself in which a wide variety of portals focused on an informed process of qualitative analysis where community questions of any nature are met with informed directions to answers that include an audit trail leading to the ongoing effort to place reliable and authentic documentary resources on line.
Ed Papenfuse
Maryland State Archvist
Friday, November 6, 2009
Jefferson Institute Conference at Monticello
on Digital Tools for Information and Democracy
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
Salvaging the Remains of a Family Archive
by Dr. Edward C. Papenfuse, State Archivist
November, 2008
My introduction to the collection of historical records at Poplar Grove Plantation in Queen Anne's County, Maryland, came with a call from Adam Goodheart, Director of the Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience at Washington College. He told me that a few years ago in the course of a fascinating archaelogical field study of a Queen Anne's county plantation slave cabin, family papers had been discovered in the plantation house. At the time an effort was made to assess the content of the collection, but time and resources were limited, and not much progress was made. Since then the owner, James Wood, had become increasingly concerned about the collection, and welcomed advice on what to do. Adam asked if I could spare a day to visit the collection and offer some suggestions.
I met Adam and James at Poplar Grove on a beautiful day in May, 2008. It was clear from what we had time to sample that the surviving records were a treasure trove relating largely to the antebellum history of Maryland and the Nation, as well as to the economic history of the region throughout much of the 19th century. In one out building we even found an extensive collection of records kept by one member of the family who prospected for minerals in Guiana in the first half of the 20th century. The records were not in the best of shape and called for immediate attention to prevent any futher loss and deterioration.
I suggested a plan to James and Adam. If the Starr Center could come up with matching funds for four summer interns and recruit the interns from Washington College and the family, I would devise a salvage and management plan, provide a place to process and house the collection, and supply half the money for the interns from the Archives of Maryland fund of the Maryland State Archives.
We were exceptionally fortunate in the selection of the Poplar Grove Project staff. Washington College supplied Albin Kowalewski, who was chosen to coordinate and manage the project under my supervision, James Schelberg, who was drawn to the collection because of the significant amount of material relating to a Civil War general, and Jeremy Rothwell, who knows everyone in Queen Anne's County and the surrounding area, as well as having a deep appreciation of agricultural history. We were doubly fortunate in the family's suggestion for the internship in Olivia Wood. She not only brought a high level of enthusiasm and family knowledge to the team, but also her close relationship with her grandmother, author of an excellent book, My Darling Alice, inspired by correspondence her grandmother found in the collection, helped us all to better appreciate the cultural and literary value of what we were finding.
In all the internship was satisfying on all fronts. The interns presented their findings at a well-attended conference at Washington College on November 24, 2008. They moved the audience with the high quality of their reports, as did James Wood with his closing reflections on serendipity and entropy as it related to his unexpected inheritance of Poplar Grove and its contents.
The Poplar Grove project gave me the opportunity to put into action ideas that I had formulated over many years about how to most effectively process and make permanently accessible a large collection of family papers quickly and economically. Because the collection was in such disarray and presented a wide range of conservation issues including mold, mouse droppings, and even the presence of a decomposing dead dog, it was clearly a worst case scenario fraught with a wide range of challenges, perhaps only exciting to an Archivist, but definitely worth the effort, especially as a model for the future of collection management.
The first stage of processing was to flatten, folder, and box the collection as quickly as possible, removing the papers from the peach baskets, lard tins, attic trunks, out building attics, and second floor heaps in which they were found.
This first stage was a simple, not a terribly pleasant one, yet one filled with the 'aha's' of discovery that kept us going through several days of the very hottest weather of the summer. Thanks to James Wood, the owner, who installed an air conditioner in the kitchen of the plantation house where we worked, it was bearable. For the most part, we kept the papers in the disorder they were found, placing them in highly absorbant (cheap) folders, with as many as 6-10 flattened documents per folder, and placing the folders in a standard, one cubic foot, record center box, lined with a clear plastic garbage bag. As we foldered and boxed, a limited number of selected items that helped explain the character and extent of the collection were pulled and placed in a separate series for appraisal purposes. These would be among the first items in the collection to be addressed in the second stage of processing, and among the first to be scanned and placed on line..
To get to the comfort of our processing office as quickly as possible, we worked at a fast pace. Adam joined us as much as he could and was forever encouraging us to look more closely at the scraps and nooks and crannies for more, when we were sure that we had salvaged all that could be kept from recycling. Generally he was right, but at last we did manage to take under our charge almost every salvagable scrap of record remaining at Poplar Grove. We were pleasantly interrupted a few times by the press which took a great interest in our work and gave the project national publicity, which the Starr Center in turn reflected in a very popular Project Blog to which we all, in some measure contributed articles.
In the end we moved over 80 record center boxes and oversized containers to the Archives processing center (a commercial warehouse, the address for which we do not make publicly available for security reasons).
The rest of the 10 week summer internship was spent in the comfort of the warehouse office sorting, refoldering into acid neutral folders placed in archival storage boxes, and scanning the papers in their sort sequence. The collection was sorted into series that seemed, from the appraisal selection and our initial boxing experience, to make the most sense for the overall management of the collection. For Poplar Grove that generally meant sorting by principal recipient or person most likely to have been associated with keeping the records. We did not intend to spend a great deal of time doing more than making a best guess at series sorting and keeping the results in as good chronological order as possible. Little time was meant to be spent on refinement of sorting. The idea was to provide a simple, logical framework for the gross management of the collection, employing elementary conservation techniques as we went along. For example, the cheap folders for the intial boxing absorbed much of the unwanted moisture and helped flatten the papers. The sorting and refoldering was accompanied by elementary cleaning, and scanning of as much of the contents as the time of the ten week internship permitted. The work of refined cataloguing, description, and indexing would be left to the virtual reality of the web based inventorying, transcribing, and editing programs which I had designed.
As part of the proof of product of the internship, Olivia Wood had the dual responsibility of testing our new approach to on-line transcription and editing of collections, the pilot for which is http://editonline.us. While the project staff did most of the scanning, the Archives staff (in the person of Erin Cacye, now on staff, but also a former MSA intern) scanned the first series, a collection that was found very early on in the bottom of a nearly empty trunk in the bee infested attic of Poplar Grove. Eventually all the scans of the collection will be accessible through this pilot editing and transcription project, enlisting as much free help on line as possible in transcribing the contents of the collection.
Once all but the fragments of paper had been placed in archival acid free folders and boxes, the Assistant Director of Special Collections at the Maryland State Archives, Maria Day, labeled the boxes, counted the folders, and described the collection to the box or book level in our Special Collections cataloguing system. Her cataloguing work can be found on line at the Maryland State Archives web site as Special Collections MSA SC 5807, the James Wood Poplar Grove Collection. There it is linked to the ebooks of the papers themselves which I produced in the evenings and on weekends on my home computer as my personal contribution to getting the project on line.
In doing so, I intentionally used a very simple ebook approach written in Perl that I had devised for my own electronic publications. The Perl programs produce a static, as opposed to a dynamic, ebook. Dynamic ebooks are generally created on the fly utilizing database/table driven systems such as sql or Oracle and pose massively expensive future problems of management and deployment. I believe that this static ebook approach is all that an individual or struggling historical society can afford, and that it makes the product, the resulting html based ebook, as close to platform and operating system independent as possible in the rapidly changing and volitile world of electronic information.
Not all of the scanning of the Poplar Grove collection completed to date is as yet on line, nor, as of this writing, has the whole of the collection been scanned, but I hope to have it all on the web in the near future, resources permitting. As a rule of thumb in 2008 dollars, it costs about $250 an archival box (a legal sized acid neutral box approximately 5" by 15") to process, folder, scan and place its contents on line, and about a cent a page per year to maintain it live on the web. As of this date we have 72 boxes of original papers from Poplar Grove, of which we have placed on line approximately 3000 images of the estimated 15,000 manuscript page images in the collection, or about 20% of the manuscripts, not bad for ten weeks worth of work by four people. We now need to find funding to complete the project and sustain it. The prospects for any additional State support beyond hosting what is already completed are bleak. In 2008 dollars, $14,400 is required to complete the scanning and mounting the images on line, and about $150 a year to keep the web site of all the images up and running for public access and use.
We welcome contributions towards the further scanning and maintaining of this and all other collections, public and private. All such contributions are tax deductible and should be made out to the Friends of the Maryland State Archives, which is the private, non-profit, fund raising arm of the Maryland State Archives:
Friends of the Maryland State Archives
c/o the Maryland State Archives
350 Rowe Boulevard
Annapolis, Maryland 21401
by Dr. Edward C. Papenfuse, State Archivist
November, 2008
My introduction to the collection of historical records at Poplar Grove Plantation in Queen Anne's County, Maryland, came with a call from Adam Goodheart, Director of the Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience at Washington College. He told me that a few years ago in the course of a fascinating archaelogical field study of a Queen Anne's county plantation slave cabin, family papers had been discovered in the plantation house. At the time an effort was made to assess the content of the collection, but time and resources were limited, and not much progress was made. Since then the owner, James Wood, had become increasingly concerned about the collection, and welcomed advice on what to do. Adam asked if I could spare a day to visit the collection and offer some suggestions.
I met Adam and James at Poplar Grove on a beautiful day in May, 2008. It was clear from what we had time to sample that the surviving records were a treasure trove relating largely to the antebellum history of Maryland and the Nation, as well as to the economic history of the region throughout much of the 19th century. In one out building we even found an extensive collection of records kept by one member of the family who prospected for minerals in Guiana in the first half of the 20th century. The records were not in the best of shape and called for immediate attention to prevent any futher loss and deterioration.
I suggested a plan to James and Adam. If the Starr Center could come up with matching funds for four summer interns and recruit the interns from Washington College and the family, I would devise a salvage and management plan, provide a place to process and house the collection, and supply half the money for the interns from the Archives of Maryland fund of the Maryland State Archives.
We were exceptionally fortunate in the selection of the Poplar Grove Project staff. Washington College supplied Albin Kowalewski, who was chosen to coordinate and manage the project under my supervision, James Schelberg, who was drawn to the collection because of the significant amount of material relating to a Civil War general, and Jeremy Rothwell, who knows everyone in Queen Anne's County and the surrounding area, as well as having a deep appreciation of agricultural history. We were doubly fortunate in the family's suggestion for the internship in Olivia Wood. She not only brought a high level of enthusiasm and family knowledge to the team, but also her close relationship with her grandmother, author of an excellent book, My Darling Alice, inspired by correspondence her grandmother found in the collection, helped us all to better appreciate the cultural and literary value of what we were finding.
In all the internship was satisfying on all fronts. The interns presented their findings at a well-attended conference at Washington College on November 24, 2008. They moved the audience with the high quality of their reports, as did James Wood with his closing reflections on serendipity and entropy as it related to his unexpected inheritance of Poplar Grove and its contents.
The Poplar Grove project gave me the opportunity to put into action ideas that I had formulated over many years about how to most effectively process and make permanently accessible a large collection of family papers quickly and economically. Because the collection was in such disarray and presented a wide range of conservation issues including mold, mouse droppings, and even the presence of a decomposing dead dog, it was clearly a worst case scenario fraught with a wide range of challenges, perhaps only exciting to an Archivist, but definitely worth the effort, especially as a model for the future of collection management.
The first stage of processing was to flatten, folder, and box the collection as quickly as possible, removing the papers from the peach baskets, lard tins, attic trunks, out building attics, and second floor heaps in which they were found.
This first stage was a simple, not a terribly pleasant one, yet one filled with the 'aha's' of discovery that kept us going through several days of the very hottest weather of the summer. Thanks to James Wood, the owner, who installed an air conditioner in the kitchen of the plantation house where we worked, it was bearable. For the most part, we kept the papers in the disorder they were found, placing them in highly absorbant (cheap) folders, with as many as 6-10 flattened documents per folder, and placing the folders in a standard, one cubic foot, record center box, lined with a clear plastic garbage bag. As we foldered and boxed, a limited number of selected items that helped explain the character and extent of the collection were pulled and placed in a separate series for appraisal purposes. These would be among the first items in the collection to be addressed in the second stage of processing, and among the first to be scanned and placed on line..
To get to the comfort of our processing office as quickly as possible, we worked at a fast pace. Adam joined us as much as he could and was forever encouraging us to look more closely at the scraps and nooks and crannies for more, when we were sure that we had salvaged all that could be kept from recycling. Generally he was right, but at last we did manage to take under our charge almost every salvagable scrap of record remaining at Poplar Grove. We were pleasantly interrupted a few times by the press which took a great interest in our work and gave the project national publicity, which the Starr Center in turn reflected in a very popular Project Blog to which we all, in some measure contributed articles.
In the end we moved over 80 record center boxes and oversized containers to the Archives processing center (a commercial warehouse, the address for which we do not make publicly available for security reasons).
The rest of the 10 week summer internship was spent in the comfort of the warehouse office sorting, refoldering into acid neutral folders placed in archival storage boxes, and scanning the papers in their sort sequence. The collection was sorted into series that seemed, from the appraisal selection and our initial boxing experience, to make the most sense for the overall management of the collection. For Poplar Grove that generally meant sorting by principal recipient or person most likely to have been associated with keeping the records. We did not intend to spend a great deal of time doing more than making a best guess at series sorting and keeping the results in as good chronological order as possible. Little time was meant to be spent on refinement of sorting. The idea was to provide a simple, logical framework for the gross management of the collection, employing elementary conservation techniques as we went along. For example, the cheap folders for the intial boxing absorbed much of the unwanted moisture and helped flatten the papers. The sorting and refoldering was accompanied by elementary cleaning, and scanning of as much of the contents as the time of the ten week internship permitted. The work of refined cataloguing, description, and indexing would be left to the virtual reality of the web based inventorying, transcribing, and editing programs which I had designed.
As part of the proof of product of the internship, Olivia Wood had the dual responsibility of testing our new approach to on-line transcription and editing of collections, the pilot for which is http://editonline.us. While the project staff did most of the scanning, the Archives staff (in the person of Erin Cacye, now on staff, but also a former MSA intern) scanned the first series, a collection that was found very early on in the bottom of a nearly empty trunk in the bee infested attic of Poplar Grove. Eventually all the scans of the collection will be accessible through this pilot editing and transcription project, enlisting as much free help on line as possible in transcribing the contents of the collection.
Once all but the fragments of paper had been placed in archival acid free folders and boxes, the Assistant Director of Special Collections at the Maryland State Archives, Maria Day, labeled the boxes, counted the folders, and described the collection to the box or book level in our Special Collections cataloguing system. Her cataloguing work can be found on line at the Maryland State Archives web site as Special Collections MSA SC 5807, the James Wood Poplar Grove Collection. There it is linked to the ebooks of the papers themselves which I produced in the evenings and on weekends on my home computer as my personal contribution to getting the project on line.
In doing so, I intentionally used a very simple ebook approach written in Perl that I had devised for my own electronic publications. The Perl programs produce a static, as opposed to a dynamic, ebook. Dynamic ebooks are generally created on the fly utilizing database/table driven systems such as sql or Oracle and pose massively expensive future problems of management and deployment. I believe that this static ebook approach is all that an individual or struggling historical society can afford, and that it makes the product, the resulting html based ebook, as close to platform and operating system independent as possible in the rapidly changing and volitile world of electronic information.
Not all of the scanning of the Poplar Grove collection completed to date is as yet on line, nor, as of this writing, has the whole of the collection been scanned, but I hope to have it all on the web in the near future, resources permitting. As a rule of thumb in 2008 dollars, it costs about $250 an archival box (a legal sized acid neutral box approximately 5" by 15") to process, folder, scan and place its contents on line, and about a cent a page per year to maintain it live on the web. As of this date we have 72 boxes of original papers from Poplar Grove, of which we have placed on line approximately 3000 images of the estimated 15,000 manuscript page images in the collection, or about 20% of the manuscripts, not bad for ten weeks worth of work by four people. We now need to find funding to complete the project and sustain it. The prospects for any additional State support beyond hosting what is already completed are bleak. In 2008 dollars, $14,400 is required to complete the scanning and mounting the images on line, and about $150 a year to keep the web site of all the images up and running for public access and use.
We welcome contributions towards the further scanning and maintaining of this and all other collections, public and private. All such contributions are tax deductible and should be made out to the Friends of the Maryland State Archives, which is the private, non-profit, fund raising arm of the Maryland State Archives:
Friends of the Maryland State Archives
c/o the Maryland State Archives
350 Rowe Boulevard
Annapolis, Maryland 21401
Saturday, August 2, 2008
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