Published: May 20, 2008 10:16 am         

Woman works to save historic documents

ESSEX, Mass. — Love of country and the promise of a $150 payment from the town drew 87 Essex men to enlist in the Union Army at the height of the Civil War in 1862.



Now, 146 years later, Gloucester native and Manchester resident Anne Bevan is hoping love of history and a desire to preserve the records of those soldiers' service, along with details about numerous other aspects of town life, will persuade volunteers to join her effort to save Essex's archives.



For the past year and a half, Bevan, 33, has been working with Town Clerk Sally Soucy to rescue the hundreds of tax forms, health statistics, military records, election ballots and meeting minutes rotting away in liquor boxes and garbage bags in the metal vault in Town Hall's partially-finished basement.



Bevan, who recently earned her master's degree in museum studies from San Francisco State University in California, first heard about the archives from a resident who had been researching his family history and described the terrible conditions in the basement.



"I came down here and realized anything I could do would be an improvement," Bevan said recently during a visit to the vault. "It was musty and wet and the first thing we had to do is run the dehumidifier and stabilize the climate. There were papers in garbage bags that had completely disintegrated. We had to throw them out."



The town appropriated $5,000 toward preserving the archives to pay for the dehumidifier and acid-free storage boxes and Bevan, outfitted in coveralls and a breathing mask, has dedicated a few hours each Friday to sorting through the piles and taking the most vulnerable documents out of danger.



Now, Bevan said last week, the time has come to begin the second phase of the preservation project, a complete cataloguing and organization of the documents and transfer into a permanent storage system upstairs, out of the flood-prone basement.



"The next phase is the most time-consuming, because we have to go through everything," Bevan said. "It's a big undertaking. We have to create an inventory and then pull out certain things that we want to display and need professional conservation."



Among the documents in need of attention are records cataloguing taxable land and livestock holdings of Essex families throughout the 19th century, an 1819 survey of local streets, Board of Health statistics compiled during the Spanish influenza pandemic of 1918 and a roll call of residents preparing to vote on constructing Town Hall in 1882.



The oldest document is a property record from 1760, Bevan said.



Records show the school district budget in 1838 was $600.



Many of the documents predate the town being called Essex and record events in the old Chebacco Parish, when the town was still part of Ipswich.



The Civil War documents include lists of payments soldiers who received from the town and federal government for their service and record what regiment they served in.



A form signed in 1862 by resident William Allen authorized the enlistment of his 13-year old son Robert Wallace Allen into the Union Army for a nine-month tour of duty as a battlefield drummer.



Additional old town records are located in other parts of the building, Bevan said, and ultimately should be combined with everything in the vault into one archive.



Bevan said she hopes to pull together a team of volunteers to tackle the job of cataloguing the documents and to form a town committee that would make decisions about the project's ultimate goals and apply for grants. Documents in need of conservation work could be saved through an "adopt-a-document program" where residents would fund the rescue of individual records, Bevan said.



Ultimately, saving the town archives and keeping them useable for future generations will depend on finding a new storage location, away from the water, mildew and pests in the basement, Bevan said. She cited what has been done with archives in Ipswich and Gloucester as positive examples.



"What you want is a constant environment, because paper pulp expands and contracts," Bevan said. "Eventually they have to get out of here, because if the dehumidifier goes down, it will go right back to where it was."





Patrick Anderson writes for Gloucester (Mass.) Daily Times. Anderson can be reached at panderson@gloucestertimes.com.