Gazette archives donated to historical society collection

DEVON IMMELT

Edi­tor

Delaware County’s his­tory as recorded by The Delaware Gazette will soon be made avail­able to the pub­lic via the Delaware County His­tor­i­cal Society.

The Gazette this week donated its exten­sive hard­bound news­pa­per archive and its large col­lec­tion of pho­to­graph neg­a­tives to the Delaware County His­tor­i­cal Soci­ety (DCHS). The his­tor­i­cal soci­ety plans to make the news­pa­per and pho­to­graph archives avail­able to the pub­lic begin­ning next month.

“This is such a valu­able piece of our his­tory that we knew we could not turn down the oppor­tu­nity to main­tain them,” DCHS Pres­i­dent Brent Car­son said of the Gazette archives, which date back the late 1800s. “As we go through the pho­tographs we may be seek­ing the public’s help in iden­ti­fy­ing some of the neg­a­tives, many of which were stored by year.”

The deci­sion to donate the Gazette’s print and photo archives was made as a result of the newspaper’s recent relo­ca­tion from 18 E. William St. to 40 N. San­dusky St. in down­town Delaware.

“The new offices do not pro­vide the stor­age space needed to house the col­lec­tion, so to ensure that the news­pa­pers are main­tained for future gen­er­a­tions we felt it was appro­pri­ate to give them to the his­tor­i­cal soci­ety,” said Gazette Pub­lisher Scott Koon.

In order to com­plete the relo­ca­tion of the archives, the his­tor­i­cal society’s research library is closed to the pub­lic tem­porar­ily. Car­son said the office will reopen Oct. 9.

Faced with the task of mov­ing the heavy, 340-plus book archive to its DCHS office, Car­son sought help from Delaware Hayes High School’s ath­letic depart­ment. Mem­bers of the school’s wrestling, lacrosse, golf, swim and bas­ket­ball teams responded to the call; the stu­dent ath­letes spent the past sev­eral days load­ing the archives into trucks for trans­port to the his­tor­i­cal society.

“We’re doing this instead of our nor­mal daily team work­out,” Delaware Hayes Wrestling Coach Josh Hef­fer­man said while direct­ing mem­bers of the wrestling team to keep up the pace of their book-carrying workout.

DCHS vice pres­i­dent Roger Koch and DCHS vol­un­teer Fred Wicker also assisted in relo­cat­ing the archives.

The Gazette’s archives went dig­i­tal in 2003 and its hard­bound col­lec­tion process was dis­con­tin­ued at that time.

Posted by Devon Immelt on Sep 28 2011. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.