The Alabama Experience; Holding on to History: Alabama's Archive

You You What I see is the incredible way these collections fit together and as a whole tell

a story that is beyond the capacity of one mind to take in every drawer of a chest you open every box has a story as the lives of people are there it's just wonderful to see all of that and its richness and its complexity to be described basically as a piece of pipe on a two by four and to know it you know to have a feeling that it will be there for others in decades and hopefully generations in the future if you love history you'll really enjoy digging through thousands of documents artifacts and photographs that reflect the

diversity and richness of our state's history and culture the role of the state archive is to preserve to hold on to that history but also to explain it to us and as you're about to see history fascinating history often reveals itself in unusual ways these records are records of Juliet Opie Hopkins it was who was a volunteer from Mobile she went to Richmond in the first few years of the Civil War and opened three hospitals for sick and wounded Alabama soldiers in Richmond and the records are really phenomenal I think the most interesting the most remarkable volume here for me is that they kept a death register of all the soldiers from Alabama who died there in those hospitals this register actually is a compilation from other record books listing the names regiments dates and calls of death of all of the soldiers

who died in these three hospitals when we first opened this book to process it a few years ago these four of these packets fell out of the books these are packets of hair that were clipped from the soldiers who died this one just says champions hair this fits with a description in the book of Jackson A champion from Pike County who died in December 23rd 1862 in one of the hospitals in Richmond and the hair was wrapped in this paper and obviously what the hospital attendance did was to clip a lock of hair from each soldier who died rapid in paper and sit it on to the next of kin but for some reason the hair of four of the soldiers remained in the book 135 years later when we open

these books to process them one of the finest examples of significant materials in the collection is this flag here this is the flag of the fifth Alabama battalion it was captured during pickets charge at Gettysburg Pennsylvania July 3rd 1863 it was captured at the Stonewall what's called the high tide of the Confederacy we have a really nice collection of World War One German and American helmets and this tradition continued right up through Desert Storm we've received a helmet that was there I've also mentioned the firearms collection that we have here at the department there were military small arms but as well there were civilian firearms a good example of our civilian firearms is this one here this belong to William White Bibb who was Alabama's second governor and it's one of a set of doing pistols and as you can see it's in very very fine condition

weapons helmets uniforms if many of the prominent artifacts and documents at the state archives seem military related it's for good reason it's part of the story of the birth of the first state department of archives in history in the country the late 1890s was a time of great sentiment about the Civil War aging veterans were being honored in a number of ways as the state entered the 20th century Thomas Owen who had received archival experience in Washington used that enthusiasm to generate interest in preserving Alabama artifacts oh when a graduate of the University of Alabama law school also sought to improve an understanding of Alabama the result of his persuasive powers was the formation of an archival agency in 1901 with Owen as the first director in the early years as many as 8,000 people annually flocked to see Owen's museum located within the state capital he made an effort to collect portraits of famous

Alabamians he again began to assemble a history museum so he saw that as serving a useful purpose but if you look in the his and the reports that he gave to the Board of Trustees he always made a point of saying our first and foremost in our primary purpose is preserving the records of state and local governments it's if we don't do it no one else will it helped Owen's cause that he married Marie Bankhead whose brothers became prominent members of Congress after Owen died in 1920 she would run the archive for the next 35 years in the late 1930s Mrs. Owen secured federal funds to build an impressive new building across the street from the capital to how's the archive and museum this is me this is really me it's a diploma from the University of Alabama but making note that it's to a Confederate veteran who was not able to finish

school because of the war soon to be some surprises lots of surprises opened up a book yesterday that was for a butcher shop in Montgomery from 1845 and stuck in the middle of the pages was an 1840 coin that was a half dime oh this is the original 1901 constitution it's the current constitution that we operate under however since it was passed in 1901 it's undergone numerous amendments and matter of fact it's somewhere in excess of over 600 amendments at this point in time and this is the constitution that's currently in the news where people periodically talk about having to revise it update it or redo it or have a brand new constitutional convention this is a part of our portrait collection we have a fairly extensive

collection perhaps 450 portraits in the department's collection they range in artistic quality from very poor to very fine we have a range in age from fairly recent portraits this one of governor Wallace is one of our more recent ones to some very early portraits they range as well in condition this one is an example of a problem painting we have flaking going on in the face of this and down here it is in need of conservation treatment we design these racks to accommodate the part of the collection that has to remain in storage we only have exhibit space for about 150 portraits in any one time a coal foreman in carbon hill on Sally a doctor in G's band a mother and daughter in Eden a docks worker in mobile Toronto in Mount Vernon Alabama these are

samples of the over 20,000 images contained in the archives photographic collections if there is a photo in the archive most likely Francis Rob has seen it the Huntsville historian is writing a book on the history of photography in Alabama she says two images discovered at the archive hold a special place in history in 1839 in February photography was invented and by that winter two men in Tuscaloosa professor Barnard of the University of Alabama and a doctor Harrington a medical doctor we're taking their first photographs we know they opened a studio in Tuscaloosa in 1841 but we would never have had any idea of photographs survived from 1840 the year after photography was invented if it weren't for this wonderful discovery at the archives what you see is a man at

the top and down below his wife the man is Joshua linear Martin who had just moved to Tuscaloosa after serving as a U.S. congressman and his wife Sarah and Mason Martin these pictures are identified on the backs that's the real intriguing part of this well someone in this family and I believe it was Mrs. Martin was a natural historian on the back is an inscription that says Mrs. Sarah a Martin taken in Tuscaloosa Alabama in the year 1840 by Dr. Harrington and Professor Barnard of the University of Alabama and the first daguerreotype ever taken in Tuscaloosa it's just since Jill's done my back the idea that someone would understand how important it was to document these pictures they don't live without words and to have these words really brings us back to a time when looking at a photograph with something very new and very few people had

experienced it at all there's an odd quality these pictures have these early daguerreotypes as they're called when you haul them in your hand you have to shift them around they pick up the light and bounce it off because they're basically photographs on silver coated copper like a silver tray and in order to make the image visible the viewer has to shift the around in her hand until the reflections are all gone and the only thing that's left is the image this way the viewer actually participates in making the picture come to life and that must have added another note now people in 1840 knew that pictures were science photographs were scientific but they speak about them as if they were a kind of magic the archive is a public place with exhibits and tours about a variety of historical topics it's this role as the states museum that bridges would like to see

improved we still think that the the museum function should be here now it's been grossly underfunded for the last 60 years and frankly I'm embarrassed when I go to other state history museums and I see the quality of the exhibits that they have and I come back and I see that we've got wonderful things but we don't do a good job in interpreting we don't do a good job in presenting them to people to come here we don't tell the story of Alabama the way we should as many as 14,000 people use the archive research facilities annually to delve into state government records dating as far back as Alabama's territorial assembly in 1818 researchers like Tuskegee associate professor James McSwain who's writing a paper about an 1850 murder often find the archive to be a gold mine of information while some are seeking information for publication or perhaps researching a documentary many others are here on a

personal mission people like Dara Tolbert down from Farmington Michigan right now I'm looking at the agricultural census for Barbara County, Alabama I happen to be looking in Clayton district when you get property records or tax records or or education records you get inclusive kinds of records and so it's one of the nice things you you can go into the to the research room and see people from all different backgrounds and doing research and finding information on their family I'm looking up my both aside the family or the Ellington's from Lake County, Chambers County, Randolph County, and also the Evans family. Right now I'm looking at 1880. What do you find out about what they are? Well it's

really kind of interesting because besides talking about how many acres that they actually worked it tells how many acres were were not worked that were maybe forest or just unimproved periods so you can you can ascertain how many acres they had from that then it goes down it talks about how many mules they had how many horses how many chickens and how many dozen eggs they produce for the year I mean that's something I never would have imagined that they would have had here. Well I started hanging out at the archives just by doing family research I started when my nephews had a report to do at school about their famous ancestors and we knew nothing we didn't know anything past our grandparents and that was rather embarrassing so I started digging that was back in the early 80s and since then I come to the archives I do do research for other people now and I

love it I don't think I would continue doing it if I didn't it's a fascinating place. Each time I do research for someone else even though they're not my family they become my family because I learn about those people and I learn about the history involved in those people and what they went through and struggles I found it I found it all and someone may call it a sign been looking for this for five and ten years and I just found it and I got here. We tend to think because it's African-Americans kind of hard but it is because of the way in which things happen in history it is a little hard but you just have to know where the records are they find their their ancestors on the 1920 1910

1988 and worked back to for African-Americans to work back to 1870 for other people just keep going back to to 1918 20 census but once they get to that area and find out where they were living in 1880 where the African-American lived in 1880 1870 then they will need to look at the people around in that area the people living next door and and preferably they are the Caucasians the white people so they can sort of determine who might have been the slave owner and once that is determined they don't already know some people already know they've been had been told down through the years if they find those if they find out the slave owner in that period then they can start looking at the slave owners ancestry and that's where you find bill of sales inventory property with inventory these wheels all that type of record that

will list the first name of the person well what I do is for the last three years I've been producing a family newsletter and you know say if you were my relative I might talk about your anniversary your wife your kids graduations and things like that but also in the newsletter I will talk about an ancestor you know from the 1800s or the early 1900s and talk about maybe when for instance when I access deed records it gives the description of the property I'll talk about that in the newsletter not only that he owned land but this is where it was and this is what it looks like today so if you go over to the Kmart we used to own that you know those kinds of things given the fact that we have what 9 floors and 20 some odd areas of material that we have kind of in some cases quarreled away in

this building yet we find all kind of things all the time and usually dependent on the kind of request we get from material it's not so much a matter of finding lost things as finding material in records that we knew about but we didn't realize that that record would yield that kind of result those kinds of things I think that's particularly true when you look in the say the governor's records that are here in almost any issue that deals with Alabama if you can nail it down narrow it down to a period of time looking the governor's papers and somehow the governor's office has either dealt with it or at least had correspondents dealing with it the election of a new governor puts many wheels in motion at the archive as the James administration leaves the capital archive staff work with his aides to determine what records should be

boxed for storage and filing in the archive the richest gubernatorial records are in hundreds of boxes down several miles spanning 25 years of Alabama history they contain photos letters and documents from four-term governor George Wallace's administrations in 1995 Wallace paid an unusual visit to a part of the archive you have seen he came to see the clothing he wore at a Maryland rally in 1972 where he was shot three times and crippled for a lifetime you know we all thought about well he hasn't seen these clothes than a long time and you know wondered how it would affect him and I I don't think that it came home any more than when we were going through the clothes and he he was in good humor about most of him he always seemed to be in good humor but I think it really hit us when we took out the shoes to show him the

shoes and at that moment I think myself and everyone else was who was in the room realized that the last time the man walked he was wearing that pair of shoes and when I showed him the shoes he looked at them and he looked up at me he turned and looked at the tie that was in the cabinet also and he said boy that sure was a wide tie and then you look back at the shoes and I think he said something about I can't believe I wore shoes with buckles or something like that but he sort of broke the ice so to speak and it made it a little easier on a crowd these are the shoes he was wearing that day and these are some of the contents of his pocket these are his slacks the tie was wearing and some materials that were also in his pocket are given to individual that was there in the crowd that day and finally this is the shirt that he was wearing when he was shot the shirt was cut away from him in the hospital and then placed in this hospital towel

cabinet two drawer six folder one 86.736.1 and 0.2 the archivist and curators here are consumed with the challenge of both preserving the archive and using it to tell the story of Alabama far from being boring they say if you love history there is no better job when he toured the archive as a boy scout in 1964 Bob Bradley found his calling we looked around all over the building of course I was a typical boy back then you know I was into military things and army things and the Civil War Centennial was going on so I was just really enamored with the place my dad was with me he was an assistant scoutmaster there's a statue of a Spanish American war soldier in the lobby and I distinctly remember putting my hand up on the foot of that statue it was just tall enough to do that I looked at my dad and said you know I give anything the world to work in a place like this and is one of those those points in your life you remember he said well set

that is your goal and one day you'll end up here but I I try to pass by the soldier every day and rub his foot for good luck if that bridges was an inch taller he'd probably have to find another line of work bridges and his staff spend much of their time sorting cataloging and pulling from nine low ceiling floors of archival documents and materials bridges is just the fifth director of the Department of Archives in history since 1901 this I know this will sound crazy but I think most of us feel a really kind of a sense of mission or sense of calling about it almost a religious kind of terms it's more than just a job so many of the problem problems that I see we have in working together I think could be overcome if we can get a better understanding the history that we share and that that we are in so many ways the products of

conflicts and issues that existed in the past that if we understand those better we can we can work out a lot of those issues much more effectively to die if the archive staff has one constant mission it's to maintain this rich resource well into the next generation to not lose anything on their watch one of their battles is with the humid Alabama climate for about the last nine years we've been experiencing mold growth from May through October and it begins like this it starts with little white splotches and it generally affects the outsides of volumes this year we've had more problems it's been attacking the actual storage boxes and collections inside boxes and that's the first time we've ever had it go to that extreme it goes into a second stage of green and eventually comes into this purple color and by that time it has started eating the cellulose in the paper and started destroying the

paper the final stage then is black and by that time usually the paper becomes so soft that you can't pick it up we do have problems with the heating air conditioning system it's not operating the way it was designed and the equipment is getting old so we feel that it is going to be a reoccurring thing until we can get a new system or get rid of the system renovated yes I think I do I believe so it's frustrating though because we keep having to do this summer after summer when you talk about the future with the staff digital is the mantra you'll hear the archive already handles over a thousand electronic mail requests annually from their internet website they would like to create a searchable database for the most frequently used materials allowing access through their website but where the digital world becomes most complex is when the archive deals with state records it's a huge huge

challenge for 900 years in the English-speaking world we've had a standard way of keeping records on parchment or paper where records are signed and witnessed when you record your deed and now much of that is being done on a computer file or on optical disk it's scanned into a system of the in the traditions the practices of 900 years taught us a lot that we need to preserve and protect and and one of the real big challenges is how do we protect what we've learned that's good over those past nine centuries into this entirely new technology that works in entirely different ways while the technical challenges of the future are daunting look for the archive to become even more of a prominent part of the downtown Montgomery landscape the state has authorized the sale of bonds to build a twelve million dollar west wing to

the archive the wing will add temperature and humidity controlled storage and may expand the capabilities of the archive to serve as the state's history museum new exhibit and gallery space are expected to improve the way the archive interprets and presents their impressive collections as they strive to tell the story of Alabama