THUNDER BAY — Archiving the history of a city is a lot of work, and getting to work with some very old items is both a blessing and a big responsibility.
Christina Wakefield, the city's archivist at the Harry Kirk Archives Records Centre, took a couple of hours to show this reporter some of the unique pieces that are preserved at the archives.
The archives have a staff of five and two part-time employees who work to keep the city's history organized.
One of the oldest pieces in the city's historical collection lies on a table at the archives' main entrance.
It's a map printed on linen from 1875. It is one of a few items in storage printed on linen.
Also at the front entrance of the archives are the Henderson directories, which are available to anyone and can be used like phone books to look up a specific person who used to live in the city.
Either looking up someone by street or name, the Henderson directories offered more information on each listing. The person's name, who they were married to, their occupation and their address. Details that phone books moved away from years later.
While not every room is meticulously climate-controlled, each storage room has temperature monitors to keep an eye on humidity levels and preserve all documents housed at the facility.
"Once a month, I download the information from them to track what it's been doing in every room. We like to keep things around 18 C, plus or minus a couple of degrees on either side, and around 40 per cent humidity going down to 30 or up to 50 is OK. But for the majority of the year, you want it around 40," said Wakefield.
She also spoke about how some items that get donated to the archives are in less-than-ideal condition, and they work hard to preserve and retain the pieces.
Staff at the archives also work diligently to recycle office supplies.
Every item received in a binder, including paper clips, alligator clamps, and other office supplies, is sorted and eventually sent back to city offices to be reused again.
One of the first rooms that Wakefield toured was filled with wide cabinets with drawers that contained original hand-drawn maps of city streets.
One map (pictured) was originally created in 1908 but had pasted updates to it from 1915.
She said lots of engineers will come look at the old maps to see the original layout of a street, or people will request to see the maps of the history of their homes.
Wakefield showed off the city's art room, which stores pieces that are showcased at city offices.
While the archivist doesn't believe they own any Norval Morrisseau pieces, she thinks the corporation used to own some Roy Thompson pieces.
In another room, there are a few shelves dedicated to gifts that the city and its former mayors have received by visiting dignitaries over the years.
Especially noteworthy is the top of the champagne bottle that was smashed on the night that Port Arthur and Fort William merged into one city.
Wakefield showed that the current building only has one shelf left for storage in its archives. The shelf space is approximately two feet high and upwards of 20 feet long - there's not much space left to store the city's history as it continues to happen.
Next on the tour were two freezers in the archival room, which aren't for staff lunches but for colour photographs, negatives, and slides.
"You know how an old photo gets that sort of like yellow and maroon look to it? If you have it in the freezer, the colour doesn't degrade like that," Wakefield said.
While the items at the archives are stored with care, there are safety measures in place in the event of an emergency to further keep them in their best condition.
A specialty fire suppression system that uses gas instead of water to extinguish a potential fire.
Wakefield explained that when the fire alarms go off in these specialty rooms, there is a limited amount of time for anyone in the room to escape safely before the gas is released.
The gas is supposed to drain the room of oxygen in seconds, thus extinguishing the fire. There are emergency abort buttons near the exits if someone is found to still be in a room when the alarms go off.
During an alarm, the rooms lock upon exiting and employees require special safety gear to re-enter the room after an incident.
In a large room upstairs, the archivist showed off some of the oldest written items in the city's combined history.
Shelves are lined with cloth-bound ledgers containing deeds, mortgages, property titles, and more, all rewritten into "copy books."
Notes can be seen in the margins, some with red ink for corrections, confirming who proofread the copied item and signed and dated it, as shown in the photo gallery above.
Some of the notes in the margins date back to 1891 — others likely have earlier dates.
Wakefield took a moment to fawn over the delicacy of the books and the marbled designs on the edges of the pages of the over 130-year-old books.
There are even boxes filled with city-focused scrapbooks.
Opening one scrapbook at random, it showed items from 1949 that had been clipped from the newspaper of the day and pasted into the book.
One clipping showed a declaration made by Mayor Robinson. He was proclaiming a civic holiday on Feb. 2, 1949, in Port Arthur to honour the Fort Wiliam Carnival Week.
In a different newspaper clipping in the 1949 scrapbook, the article cited the Port Arthur mental hospital getting new beds that would likely cost $1.6 million.
Wakefield talked about getting lost in the city's history and how she loves receiving requests from the public for more information.
"Somebody called up, and they had found an armband in their father's or grandfather's stuff, and it said Royal Police or something . . . I found it in one of these scrapbooks.
"One of the Royals visited in the 1930s and they didn't have enough police for crowd control. So they asked for volunteers, and we have the newspaper clippings of them asking for volunteers to be deputized for the day for the police service. So, this guy got an armband and then stood there and held out the crowd."
Coming upon a large mechanical machine, Wakefield said it was some sort of time-clock card puncher, but it's not obvious how it was supposed to have worked.
With various dials, pegs, and moving parts, the device sits in storage as part of the city's history.
Speaking to the organizational structure of some of the various ledgers, Wakefield said it's not always clear why things were done the way they were.
One book contains details on property values and tax levies. Instead of having pages filled with only one street, some could contain multiple because that would've been the walking path of the person inputting the information.
After Port Arthur and Fort William amalgamated into Thunder Bay, archival storage was still at a premium and was scattered in buildings across the city.
In the 1990s, it was decided to unite the city's corporate historical collection under one roof.
"So we have a collection for Port Arthur, one for Fort William, and one for Thunder Bay," said Wakefield.
"So on paper, they're all separate, but on the shelves, they are very together."
Katie Nicholls is a Local Journalism Initiative Reporter with Newswatch
