Heritage Health Index Calls for Case Studies

Our past in peril or our past preserved?
Findings from the Heritage Health Index survey will be released with recommendations about what institutions and our nation must do to protect our historic, artistic, and scientific heritage collections. To complement the survey data, Heritage Preservation is seeking stories about significant artifacts or collections that are in need of preservation or that have received care due to a preservation effort. If your museum, library, historical society, or archive has an example of our past in peril or our past preserved, click here for submission information.

An opportunity to bring attention to your preservation needs or deeds
Heritage Preservation will be distributing the Heritage Health Index report to key policy-makers at the state and federal levels, to funding sources, and to the media nationwide. Your example could be selected to illustrate the important work that institutions do to care for our collections and the additional support they need to protect the past for present and future generations.

Some stories we have collected

In 1998, during a reassessment of its Civil War collections, The Connecticut Historical Society rediscovered a flag that was donated in 1922. Upon closer examination they verified it as one of five flags that decorated President Abraham Lincoln’s box at Ford’s Theatre the night of his assassination. Because the flag had been left undisturbed in a box in storage, it did not suffer from damage due to light, but the silk fabric was brittle with age and had split into fragments. The Textile Conservation Workshop in South Salem, New York, performed a conservation evaluation and treatment, which included humidifying the flag to relax the fragments so that they could be correctly arranged on a supporting piece of fabric. The flag is now mounted on a frame and protected from further harm by a plexiglas case.

In 1999, the St. Louis Circuit Court Clerk asked the Missouri State Archives to preserve and make accessible approximately 4 million pages of historic documents dating from the Louisiana Purchase in 1804. Many significant records are in this collection, including court documents relating to U.S. explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, U.S. Senator Thomas Hart Benton, and Dred Scott, whose petition for freedom from slavery went on to become a landmark Supreme Court decision.

These records were housed in metal till drawers in the Civil Courts building, and the lack of finding aids made access difficult. Many documents were fragile or damaged from being crowded in drawers that exposed them to damaging temperature, humidity, and two centuries of coal dust and other pollutants.

With help from a Save America's Treasures grant, the Missouri State Archives processed the records. About 800 were sent to the Conservation Center for Art and Historic Artifacts in Philadelphia and to Richard C. Baker in St. Louis for treatment. The records are now being prepared for microfilming for access by researchers.

Please share your story
If your museum, library, historical society, or archives has an example of our past in peril or our past preserved, please submit it to Kristen Laise at klaise@heritagepreservation.org, 202-233-0807 (fax), or Heritage Preservation, 1012 14th St., NW, Suite 1200, Washington, DC 20005. Please include your name, institution, contact information, description of the artifact(s) and its significance, why it is in need or what has been done to care for it, support that was given for its preservation, and whether photographs are available.

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