My life-long effort to preserve the historical resources of Arkansas can involve long hours of drudgery and not a little disappointment, but it is also has more than its share of rewards.
Life conspires against archivists as we work to save the documentation necessary for us to understand our past, our culture, and perhaps our future. Sunlight, insects, and mildew are deadly to paper, the medium on which most of our records are kept. The successor to paper, the digital document, is an even bigger threat to preservation of our collective record.
However, the biggest threat to historical records is people. Saving boxes of old documents and photographs does not fit into our rush to the future. Thus, discovering the occasional trove of historical materials is always a cause of great rejoicing for me.
One high point of my career was acquiring the Arthur Keller photograph collection from Mountain Home in Baxter County. It began with a phone call to my office at the University of Central Arkansas Archives in Conway in 1986 from a woman in Little Rock who urged me to go see her father in Mountain Home, who was not happy with going to a nursing home until he had disposed of a large collection of local photographs.
Greeting me at his home on a beautiful ridge overlooking Mountain Home was Charles Butcher, an engineer who came to the region in the 1940s to work on Bull Shoals dam. Butcher told me that in the early 1960s he rescued a large collection of old glass negatives when a local photographer, Arthur Keller, died without heirs. He showed me a number of amazing pictures he had printed from the negatives, and I knew immediately that I had stumbled onto a major photo collection.
"I must warn you," Butcher said in his soft voice, "that you will have to go down into my old bomb shelter to see the negatives." Indeed, all four walls were covered with stacks of oversize glass negatives--many of them still in their original Kodak boxes. Yielding 2,234 images, I call the Butcher bomb shelter "the King Tut's Tomb of Arkansas history."
In more recent years, while head of the special collections department at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, I was fortunate to acquire a mass of papers by renowned black composer Florence Price. A native of Little Rock and graduate of the New England Conservatory of Music, Price and her lawyer husband left Arkansas in the aftermath of a searing 1927 lynching and settled in Chicago, where she thrived.
Price produced more than 300 compositions, including Symphony in E Minor, which was performed by the Chicago Symphony in 1933, the first time a major American orchestra had performed a work by a black female composer.
A fierce wind blew the snow horizontally as I went into a home in Kankakee, Ill., in 2010 where I had been told that a batch of Florence Price records were for sale. An amazing discovery awaited me. A young inter-racial couple had bought a number of dilapidated houses at the site of a long-defunct black country club south of Chicago. One of those houses was the final home of Florence Price, and it was full of records, as well as her grand piano. Apparently abandoned after her death, Price's small frame house had been damaged by falling trees. Inside were file cabinets filled with Price's compositions, correspondence, and much more--though in poor condition.
Florence Price was reluctant to donate her papers while living, so the existing Price collection at the University of Arkansas Libraries was composed mostly of photocopies. The new Price collection contains numerous original compositions. It was important to acquire this collection since it completed the smaller existing Price collection at the university, and it is the perfect accompaniment to the large William Grant Still Papers. Still was also from Little Rock, and I think it amazing that the two most prominent black composers of the 20th Century had deep roots in Arkansas.
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Tom Dillard is a historian and retired archivist living in rural Hot Spring County. Email him at [email protected].
Editorial on 06/22/2014