Last week, the floor of the Unitarian Church of Montpelier was still under two inches of water as a result of the flooding in the city and other parts of Vermont earlier this month. During the cleanup, a young congregant discovered two dampened 1928 blueprints. Where others saw a ruined artifact, volunteer Carolyn Frisa, a conservator with more than 15 years of experience preserving artistic and historic works on paper, saw an item that was fully recoverable with the right treatment.
“I know a lot about handling wet paper,” Frisa said.
The church blueprints were among the many public documents and records damaged in the statewide deluge, as were collections maintained by historical sites.
Luckily, certain employees and volunteers, including Frisa, had long been preparing to address such damage as part of their work in the Vermont State Archives & Records Administration and other cultural agencies. All over the state, these preservationists have been working to ensure that public documents, cultural artifacts and prized possessions are not lost forever.
Vermont state archivist and chief records officer Tanya Marshall reported that the toll of the floods was considerable. “Basements, regrettably, tend to be where people stockpile records,” Marshall said. She and others spoke of particularly serious harm to municipal records at Montpelier City Hall and the archive of print work written by past residents at Vermont Studio Center in Johnson.
Marshall helms VSARA, a division of the Office of the Secretary of State, which oversees the management of records and information for all of the state’s public agencies. While those agencies operate as usual during blue-sky times, VSARA works year-round on emergency preparedness.
“These are the kinds of plans that you don’t usually want to see implemented,” Marshall said. But when flooding hit, the staff was ready. With a number of contracts already in place for disaster recovery, VSARA began working to salvage documents for affiliate organizations.
“We all tend to be pack rats.” Rachel Onuf
The document recovery process varies by case, but the first step is to assess the damage. Not all fouled documents require salvation.
“We all tend to be pack rats,” said Rachel Onuf, director of the Vermont Historical Records Program, which oversees all of the state’s historical records and provides assistance to local historical societies, museums, college and university archives, and other repositories.
“In the case of public records,” Onuf said, “it may be that materials … were already overdue for destruction.”
This was the case at Montpelier City Hall, where representatives from Polygon Group, which subcontracts with the state for document drying services, determined that the legally mandated retention period for a portion of damaged documents had expired. VSARA authorized them to be destroyed.
Polygon’s response team collected the remaining documents for salvage and loaded them into a freezer truck. Its closest facility with vacuum freeze-drying capabilities is in Andover, Mass.
According to the website of Polygon Group, vacuum freeze-drying involves freezing wet documents and then reducing surrounding air pressure until the frozen water turns into gas without reverting to its liquid form. A home freezer works, too — at least to start the process and prevent mold from forming.
Developed by Marshall, the Vermont Historical Records Program fosters collaboration among records repositories. Its administrators joined the Vermont Arts Council and the Vermont Emergency Management Association in founding the nonprofit Vermont Arts & Culture Disaster and Resilience Network in 2019.
A coleader at the network, Onuf has dedicated the past several weeks to flood recovery and continues to field reports of damage from across the state. When organizations contact her, she said, she connects them with members of the network “who have expertise in salvage. So far, it’s gone really well.”
Other than the 20 employees at VSARA, most of these salvage experts are volunteers such as Frisa. Since this month’s flooding began, she has been consulting with institutions such as Vermont Studio Center and the Justin Morrill Homestead State Historic Site.
Volunteers at the former helped treat damaged prints with dehumidifiers and fans to prevent media bleed and mold growth.
Whereas VSARA’s interests are mainly bureaucratic, the disaster and resilience network has a broader concern for the preservation of arts and culture. The work of the network’s employees and volunteers sometimes crosses into the domains of community space and personal objects.
On the outskirts of Ludlow, where Frisa lives, her neighbor’s mud-filled binders were recovered in the river. After discovering that they contained crucial formulas and information for a business called Stone Soup Concrete, Frisa took them home and froze them.
The years since Tropical Storm Irene in 2011 have seen improvements in the state’s recovery capacity, including the formation of the disaster and resilience network and widespread digitization. “We’re not seeing at all some of the destruction that we saw in Irene, just because of the transition of government to digital over the last decade or so,” Marshall reported.
Preservationists are already preparing for the next disaster. Last week, VSARA held several online and in-person “Save Your Family Treasures” trainings for people who want to learn how to dry and clean damaged heirlooms.
“I think it’s really important to … say, ‘All right, what went well? What went wrong? Where were the gaps?'” Onuf said. In this way, she hopes to continue to honor her “appreciation for what people have written and created … in the past.”
The value of those efforts can be seen in items such as the Unitarian Church of Montpelier blueprints, which appear to date back to a construction effort begotten by the destruction of the 1927 flood.
It’s a reminder of something well known to those who aid in disaster recovery: “This is gonna happen again,” Onuf asserted. “This is gonna be a part of our life.”
The original print version of this article was headlined “Water Marks | After the floods, Vermont’s preservationists come together to save waterlogged documents and artifacts”
This article appears in Jul 26 – Aug 1, 2023.
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