The public can access thousands of historical land records for the first time with the completion of renovations to the land commissioner’s office in January.
Commissioner John Thurston said he planned to protect the documents within his first month in office.
“I felt that they needed a permanent home. They didn’t need to be sitting underneath sprinkler systems in the basement of the Capitol,” said Thurston, who was elected in 2010.
The office will unveil its nearly two-year renovation with an open house Jan. 24. The renovation includes a vault for notes, books and maps, and an exhibit room. Some documents date backto soon after the Louisiana Purchase.
“There were probably groups that would have taken them - they would have loved to have had these documents. We just felt that these need to stay in the Capitol and stay in the public trust and in the public’s hands,” Thurston said.
Cline Construction performed the $326,000 renovation. The Arkansas Natural and Cultural Resources Council provided a $250,000 grant. The other $76,000 came out of the office’s budget, office spokesman Nikki Heck said.
The land commissioner’s primary role is to collect delinquent real estate taxes, often through auctions of tax-delinquent land. It is alsoresponsible for maintaining land records.
Visitors entering the commission office will now walk into an exhibit room, which will house rotating displays of documents and maps that belong to the office. Previously visitors were greeted by a secretary.
Thurston said he envisions droves of schoolchildren, genealogists, historians and other visitors viewing the exhibits.
“If they don’t already have an interest in history, just seeing these and being able to see that they exist will probably stir an interest,” he said.
Most original documents are kept in a humidity-controlled vault illuminated by ultraviolet lamps for their protection. Those who handle the documents must wear gloves, Heck said.
“I don’t think they’ll be able to just pull out books and look through them like a library,” Thurston said of visitors.
Many of the documents can be viewed online at www.cosl.org/history. The office has two computers where people can access them from the Capitol.
Above the computers is a framed birds-eye-view map of Little Rock from 1871, when a prison stood where the state Capitol now sits.
The collection begins before Arkansas was a state.
After the ratification of the $15 million Louisiana Purchase in 1803, President James Monroe commissioned a survey of the new land, which doubled the size of the United States. That survey began in a swamp near the border of Lee and Phillips counties.
The collection includes more than 3,200 books of original field notes drawn up after the Louisiana Purchase.
“The public has never seen these documents; they’ve never been on display like this,” Thurston said. “They went through with these little books and wrote as they went.”
The notes were transcribed in the 1870s and typed out in the 1930s through the Works Progress Administration.
Heck said surveyors still use information from those original notes.
There is also a register of who was allowed to keep land granted to them by the Spanish government before the Louisiana Purchase.
“There’s just a handful of them that the government went ahead and let them keep that land,” Heck said. “They had to prove that they owned it, the Spanish government had given it to them or they had bought it.”
The vault contains a 1831 map of Indian territories in the western portion of the state and Oklahoma.
Other documents show where the federal government gave Arkansas land inthe 1820s to survivors of the 1811 and 1812 New Madrid earthquakes.
“I don’t know that we even know all that we have,” Thurston said. “There’s so much.”
Another document shows land donations made to create a county separating indians and white settlers. Lovely County was near Washington and Benton counties, and extended into what is now Oklahoma. It lasted one year.
Thurston said the commissioner’s office also plans to finish digitizing the documents, a process begun by the two previous land commissioners.
“It would have been a tragedy on my part not to continue that effort, to finish preserving them and to safeguard them for generations to come,” he said.
Digitizing the documents is an additional cost, some of which is covered by another grant from the council.
Thurston said companies wouldn’t insure the documents.
“They are irreplaceable. It would cost too much,” Thurston said.
He said if the documents couldn’t be insured, he wanted to make sure they were in a safe place.
“You could look at it like family pictures. It tells the story of Arkansas. And not just Arkansas, but even a part of our nation’s history,” Thurston said.
“These documents are just as valuable as the Capitol itself. You could rebuild a Capitol, but you cannot replace these documents.”
Northwest Arkansas, Pages 7 on 12/31/2012