What does it take to care for a nation’s history, piece by piece? In a little-known building off a country road in West Virginia, a small team of experts restores and preserves some of America’s most precious objects and papers. Who are these trained specialists, and why were these priceless artifacts at risk?
Earlier this month, the National Park Service had a major victory in a place you’ve probably never heard of and didn’t know was in danger. The focus of this good news is a humble warehouse on the outskirts of Charles Town, West Virginia, that houses millions of rare artifacts and employs a dream team of specialized staff devoted to restoring and conserving America’s history.
In March, the Department of Government Efficiency made plans to cancel the lease on this Park Service facility, throwing the future of these rare objects into question. Though the collections can stay in their specialized facility, for now, we investigate the highly skilled conservators, archivists and technicians who keep the country’s most precious papers and keepsakes from falling apart, and we delve into why “we need to be able to treat our history with the respect that it deserves, because that's how you honor the people who lived it.”
This episode, host Jennifer Errick speaks with Director Brendan Bray, Supervisory Conservator and Manager Theresa Voellinger, Textile Conservator Anne Ennes, Book and Paper Conservator Allison Holcomb, Inorganics Conservator Nicole Peters, Taxidermist and Organics Conservator Fran Ritchie, Archivist Nancy Russell, Collections Manager and Museum Specialist Kyle Bryner, and NPCA Senior Director for Cultural Resources Alan Spears.
The Secret Lives of Parks is a production of the National Parks Conservation Association.
Episode 44, The Sum of Its Parts, was produced by Jennifer Errick, with help from Todd Christopher, Bev Stanton and Linda Coutant.
Original theme music by Chad Fischer.
Special thanks to all the National Park Service staff in Charles Town and Harpers Ferry who took time to talk with me and answer questions about their work.
Learn more about the National Park Service’s museum collections and read their Conserve O Grams at https://www.nps.gov/subjects/museums/conserve-o-grams.htm
Learn more about this podcast and listen to the rest of our stories at thesecretlivesofparks.org
For more than a century, the National Parks Conservation Association has been protecting and enhancing America’s national parks for present and future generations.
And we’re proud of it, too.
You can join the fight to preserve our national parks. Learn more and join us at npca.org
Episode 44
The Sum of Its Parts
Jennifer Errick: What does it take to care for a nation’s history, piece by piece? In a little-known building off a country road in West Virginia, a small team of experts restores and preserves some of America’s most precious objects and papers. Who are these trained specialists, what do they do and why were these priceless historic artifacts recently at risk?
I’m Jennifer Errick, and this is the Secret Lives of Parks.
[Break]
Earlier this month, the National Park Service had a major victory in a place you’ve probably never heard of and didn’t know was in danger. The focus of this good news is a humble warehouse tucked behind a car wash off a scenic road on the outskirts of Charles Town, West Virginia.
This ’90s-era Park Service facility looks like a nondescript metal building with plain beige siding on the outside. But on the inside, it houses millions of rare artifacts and employs a dream team of specialized staff devoted to restoring and conserving America’s history, all under one roof. It also serves as a sister site to the nearby Harpers Ferry Interpretive Design Center, where staff design and produce brochures, maps, signage, exhibits and other media for parks across the country.
Sounds amazing, right? But in March, the Department of Government Efficiency, in its haste to cut expenses, put this Park Service facility on a list of 34 leases slated for cancellation, throwing the future of all these rare objects into question.
Alan Spears: I don't know of any other facility that compares to Harpers Ferry or to the conservation labs in Charles Town. In that one facility, they've got a collection that's about 3.5 million in strength and in total. And the Park Service has about 49 million artifacts in their overall collection that's in all national parks across the country. But this place is critically important because so much of the preservation that happens throughout the National Park System, it gets taken to Charles Town.
Jennifer Errick: That’s NPCA Senior Director for Cultural Resources Alan Spears, who has devoted his career to protecting and expanding the rich history told at national parks. After finding out about the plan to cancel this lease, Spears arranged for a small group of NPCA staff to tour the Charles Town facility. And so, we met in Washington, D.C., on a sunny Friday morning in May and drove along winding byways to the eastern panhandle of West Virginia.
Alan Spears: I think what made me want to bring a cohort of NPCA employees out to Charles Town and then to the Harpers Ferry Service Center was learning about this small magical place. It is a large collection of the National Park Service holdings for historic and cultural resources. This is the behind-the-scenes, under-the-water element of what the Park Service does, what the conservators in the National Park Service do. And I felt like it would be really, really magnificent to share that with other people so we had a clearer sense of what we were trying to protect, but also a clearer sense of the mission and vision of the National Park Service and how they do that work.
Jennifer Errick: First, the good news: We found out on June 13 that the Charles Town facility was officially removed from DOGE’s list of federal lease cancellations. That means these historic objects can stay put, for now at least, with the environmental controls and staff they need to keep from falling apart over time. But the public may not realize the level of attention and skill that goes into maintaining an entire nation’s keepsakes and records — or how these workers are continually being challenged to do more with less.
As our small group gathered last month in front of this large, converted warehouse, we were welcomed by Director Brendan Bray and Supervisory Conservator and Manager Theresa Voellinger.
Theresa Voellinger: We have all these specialties in one place, which is an amazing opportunity to collaborate.
Jennifer Errick: That’s Voellinger, who oversees a textile conservator, a book and paper conservator, a metal and inorganics specialist, a taxidermist and organics specialist, a wooden artifacts conservator, and a technician who helps identify materials from different time periods. That’s a lot. This collaboration among areas of expertise is rare, and aside from the Smithsonian, few institutions have a setup that’s at all comparable.
Theresa Voellinger: In conservation, it's all very highly specialized because there's so much to know in your one field. So, I like to say a conservator has three different brains. One is the artist side of things — the studio, the hand skills. The other one is the historian brain — understanding materials through time to understand deterioration [effects] through time. And then the last part of the conservator brain would be the science side of things. You’ll see our studio later where we do a lot of our research and a lot of our testing because that informs our treatment. So, you need to have all of those brains working at the same time in every treatment.
Jennifer Errick: One of the first specialists we meet is Anne Ennes, the only textile conservator in the entire Park Service. Any historic item with fabrics, from a flag to a hat to a quilt, might need her care.
Anne Ennes: All these artifacts are great, the stories they tell.
Jennifer Errick: Ennis shows us a coat worn by a soldier at Gettysburg that she is in the process of restoring. She needs to be able to treat and stabilize multiple types of fabric in a way that maintains the deep gouge that shows where the soldier was wounded by artillery fire in the historic battle.
Anne Ennes: We have to come up with a system for supporting it but also to let it tell its story. This one's going to be a little bit of a challenge to best display it, so it does not strain the existing damage. But this fellow got hit with artillery in the elbow. He didn't die. The poor fellow behind him did.
Jennifer Errick: She compares it to another piece she worked on where the damage was a critical part of the item’s restoration.
Anne Ennes: We worked on Mr. Withers’ jacket, the frock coat jacket from Ford’s Theater. He was the orchestra leader, and he also had historic slash marks from John Wilkes Booth as he made his escape. So again, we had to conserve the coat and stabilize those areas but let them be seen to tell that story. It makes it a little more of a challenge, but it's fun.
Jennifer Errick: The frock coat of William Withers, Jr., is normally displayed at Ford’s Theater, along with sheet music from an original song he had written and planned to lead his orchestra in performing that night — before he was so rudely interrupted.
The types of objects we learn about are remarkably diverse, from some of the favorites that book and paper conservator Allison Holcomb has worked on…
Allison Holcomb: Because I treat books, I think one of my favorites was treating the case for Orville Wright’s drafting tools, because the case looks like a book. I was like “Me me! I'll treat that!” But we have had some autographed books, some with Lincoln’s signature from Arlington House, which was a really fun one to treat. That one also had Frederick Douglass’ signature in it. We've also had a land survey that was done by a very young George Washington that's actually signed by Washington.
Jennifer Errick: … to one of the more extensive and challenging treatments that metals and inorganics conservator Nicole Peters completed.
Nicole Peters: This was a galvanized steel life rescue boat, which I think sort of haunts us all a little bit. It's on exhibit at the Chicamacomico Lifesaving Station in Cape Hatteras. So, they would tie one end to the shore and one end to a foundering ship and then stuff people in — there's a little hatch on top — put them in and then shuttle them back to the shore, so it’s more of a shuttle system. So, we got this object in and then we did some testing to it, and we discovered it had lead paint all over it, so it was corroded with lead paint. So, we went ahead and built a custom lead workroom in here according to OSHA standards. So, we had PVC pipe and plastic. We had a dress room that we got in and out — and then we PPE-ed up. We had Tyvek suits. But a lot of research goes into the types of treatments we do, because this is going on exhibit, and it's in an open-air historical structure about 100 yards from the ocean. So, we need to make sure that what we do here really ensures the efficacy of our treatments and the longevity of our projects, really.
Jennifer Errick: We get to meet the only taxidermist in the National Park Service, Fran Ritchie, who handles all kinds of leather and organic materials, or as she puts it …
Fran Ritchie: I like to call my lab the “dead stuff” lab.
Jennifer Errick: She shows us luggage that has degraded over time and explains her goal to restore it to the normal level of wear and tear it would have had when Dwight Eisenhower used it in the 1950s.
Fran Ritchie: In the Park Service, working on organic objects means a lot of leather, which is my favorite type of material. And that ends up being a lot of suitcases, trunks, chairs, saddles, different things. These are all from Eisenhower's collection. This one I love because it has a tag on it that says, “The Prez.” So, I was like, OK, we know who used that one. So, we work with the curator to be like, exactly what do we want this to look like? How do you want this represented? And usually for things for Eisenhower, they want it to look like it looked when the Eisenhowers used those objects. So, this will look nice and tidy once we're done with it.
Jennifer Errick: She tells us about two very different recent projects that she loved working on.
Fran Ritchie: Last year I was at Yellowstone helping them with their fluid preserve collections, so topping off wet things in jars and whatnot, and then also did a taxidermy survey at Sagamore Hill, which is Theodore Roosevelt's house. So, he's like, that's cream of the crop taxidermy. That was the highlight of my career.
Jennifer Errick: Because the team can only treat so many objects in its Charles Town facility, they sometimes go on the road and consult with other curators on how to care for entire park collections. Here again is Theresa Voellinger.
Theresa Voellinger: Yes, it does come down to single objects at some point, but also what we do is affect whole collections on site. So, for instance, all of the conservators last week and the week before, five of them, they were all at Gettysburg doing a massive survey of over 6,000-7,000 objects, writing team reports, taking images, giving suggestions to the curator to set priorities for the future. How is the storage doing? How is the exhibit environment doing? And we give them suggestions on all of that. And even beyond that, talk with the maintenance people, the facilities, people who take care of that HVAC, right. And so, we're making all these connections when we're there.
Jennifer Errick: The team is also called in to save artifacts as part of disaster response efforts.
Theresa Voellinger: You're making on-the-spot decisions for entire collections and, it's either do or die for that collection. It's either it's gonna get moldy and you probably can't reuse it, or we are gonna save it. We're gonna clean it. We are gonna freeze it. We are gonna give advice when we're on site on cultural resources. The last big one I was on was Sandy, Ellis Island. There were, oh my gosh, I forgot how many linear feet of archival collections that we justified the contract for, moved, because otherwise, if they would have sat there and we didn't have the conservator consulting some sort of contract? All those records — those are everyone's records on Ellis Island — immigration records would have been lost.
My colleague, Associate Director of Communications Kyle Groetzinger, asks a couple of questions that are on everyone’s minds. You’ll hear him here, followed by the voices of Anne Ennes, Brendan Bray and Theresa Voellinger.
Kyle Groetzinger: What are some of the things that could go wrong if we didn't have what we have here?
Anne Ennes: The parks themselves don't have experts on site. A lot of the curators and stuff, it’s collateral duty, so they don’t have that subject matter expertise. So, it’s nice. We go out, we help them with training, help them to learn how to take care of their collections. That wouldn't happen if we're not here. Contracting out to private conservators, people in private practice have small studios. They cannot tackle big projects. They don't have deionized water systems. They don't have custom dyeing capabilities, things like that. So, you're not going to get the proper treatments on a lot of things.
Brendan Bray: And a real quick addition to that — we’ve done an analysis that the cost to parks, if they were to go that route of a private conservator, would be anywhere from three to four times the cost to have Anne work on these items.
Theresa Voellinger: Because not only is it more expensive just for the conservator in private practice, you also have to have conservation expertise anyway, of some sort, monitoring the contract, right? So, they have to write up a scope of work. They have to look at the treatment reports, make sure with the conservator is saying makes sense and is ethical. And then also at the end of the contract, proving that the treatment was done as said and that all the documentation is there. So, even if the conservator doesn't do the treatment, you would still need that expertise in the Park Service in order to successfully run the contract.
Kyle Groetzinger: What are the risks if these sorts of objects weren't at this sort of secure facility?
Theresa Voellinger: The risk would be total deterioration. I mean, that's slowly over time. We all deteriorate, right? Everything deteriorates over time. But providing the right care in terms of conservation care, whether it be preventive care, making sure that the facility is supporting the right environment, holistic care and then it comes down to individual object care — we would do all of those things from the big bucket to all the all the items in one collection to that individual object.
Jennifer Errick: Coming up after the break, we talk about a pen, a hatband, 12,000 pieces of art and why people devote whole careers to saving objects like these.
Alan Spears: We can't save everything, but we can save a lot if we've got the people in place to do the work, and that's what we're in jeopardy of losing right now.
Jennifer Errick: That’s next. Stay with us.
[Music break with promotion]
The conservators in Charles Town work to preserve every kind of object that might need attention throughout the park system. But the facility also houses two permanent collections — one with 3 million historic artifacts and another with 12,000 pieces of commissioned art. Nancy Russell is chief archivist of the historic collection, which takes up an enormous storage room with drawers and display cases, kept refrigerator-level-cold through strict temperature controls. As a kind of mama bear of these historic artifacts, it's somehow fitting that Russell welcomes us with a dad joke.
Nancy Russell: I like to say that this collection exists because the National Park Service is more than the sum of its parks.
Jennifer Errick: The objects kept here aren’t the same as what you might find at a typical park exhibit.
Nancy Russell: Although this collection does include objects from individual park collections, our goal isn't to reproduce park museum collections. We have broader stories that we're trying to tell about the National Park Service as a Bureau. And we were established about 53 years ago by then-Director George Hertzog, who really felt that the Park Service had not been doing a very good job of capturing its own administrative history, and who really felt it was important to understand the decisions of the past to make good decisions moving forward for our resources and visitors.
Congress created the National Park Service in 1916 through a piece of legislation known as the Organic Act, and this is where Russell begins her show and tell.
Nancy Russell: I wanted to start out with the pen. This is the signing pen for the NPS Organic Act.
Small group reaction: Oh wow.
Nancy Russell: Appropriate response.
Jennifer Errick: Russell explains how the millions of artifacts in this building don’t just stand on their own. She helps foster connections that create a richer understanding of the events the artifacts represent. Sure, she has this pen once used by Woodrow Wilson. But there are also telegrams and documents of early luminaries describing their efforts to shape the language in the legislation. There’s a telegram from the first Park Service Director Stephen Mather describing the signing of the bill. There are even letters with a bit of trash talk about one of the early superintendents.
Nancy Russell (whispering): All good history also has some good juicy gossip in it.
Jennifer Errick: As we gather in the chilly room, Russell excitedly pulls items from drawers and points to display cases, showing us the breadth of the collection. We see some of the original national park posters created in the 1930s by the Works Progress Administration, whose iconic style is still in use on T-shirts and posters today. She has a selection of windshield stickers that parks used as proof of entry from 1917 to 1939, from the transition from horse-and-buggy visitors to early automobiles. Then she shows us a narrow piece of brown leather engraved with images of branches and pinecones.
Nancy Russell: This is actually Horace Albright's hatband.
Jennifer Errick: For context, Horace Albright was the second director of the National Park Service.
Nancy Russell: So, one of the things that's great about this collection is that we've had the ability to do our own research on the collections ourselves. So, our website for the NPS history collection has a lot of research on this particular hatband as part of a series we did a couple of years ago called 50 Nifty Finds for our 50th anniversary of the collection. And we took a specific object and sort of delved into the history of that object and the different stories they could tell. No one was more surprised than I as to how they turned out, because I thought I would start an object with a particular story, and it would take me in a totally different direction during the research.
But this was particularly interesting because it was seen as Horace Albright’s hatband, but I was concerned about it because we didn't get it directly from Albright, and I never saw a picture of him wearing it. And in our research, which is a long, very convoluted story, we were able to verify by reviewing 1,200 photographs of Horace Albright, I finally found one with him wearing this as the director, and it was actually a dated photograph from 1929. But in the process, we actually found that there were at least a dozen of these hats made, and so this is really the very first uniform hat band and was completely overlooked in the history of the Park Service uniform.
Jennifer Errick: The evolution of the Park Service uniform is a strength of the collection, and we see many examples of what rangers wore over the decades, with a focus on how this male-dominated institution adapted to bringing women into its ranks.
Nancy Russell: One of the one of the things we've really stressed is what I call the myth of the men's uniform, this idea that the first uniforms were for men and the Park Service didn't have a uniform for women until the 1940s. In fact, the first uniform was the standard uniform, and you see women wearing the uniform in the 1920s. You also see women who don't wear the uniform, but they have the badge, which is the symbol of authority. And that wasn't just women doing whatever they wanted to. It was geographic by park, because the superintendents determined which positions were uniformed. And that's a really important story in terms of the history of women and how women sort of lose the uniform over time.
Jennifer Errick: Eventually, a skirt is added for women. Then, they get a whole other outfit, which Russell describes as the “stewardess” uniform. And in the ’70s, the agency creates several new variations that only deepen women’s frustrations, and it all goes haywire.
Nancy Russell: And as you might imagine, this was not popular with the women. It was a terrible color. It was hot in the summer, cold in the winter. And it looked nothing like the standard uniform, and so many women talk about being somewhere like Independence, and everybody just making a beeline to the man in the ranger uniform and then completely dismissing the women. And so, what ends up happening, in 1977, the Park Service says OK, we're going to have one uniform, no more separate uniforms for men and women, but then they don't implement it. So, in 1980, the women sue, and that's what actually leads us to our first nationwide uniform contract. So, this collection has a wide variety of materials and lots of stories that we can tell with it. It doesn't exist anywhere else.
Jennifer Errick: Down the hall from these treasures are thousands more singular items that don’t exist anywhere else — park-related artwork. Collections Manager and Museum Specialist Kyle Bryner oversees these pieces and the many associated letters and documents that give them context.
Kyle Bryner: We support every single park in the system by helping to create waysides, exhibitions, videos, websites, publications, anything that you can think of that helps a visitor orient themselves to the park and learn. That art is paid for with controlled federal funds, so it has to come to me, and I take care of it in perpetuity, because the goal is to preserve the arts, but also to make sure that we're able to reuse it for future projects. And then we make it be accessible for the entire public.
Jennifer Errick: This art includes illustrations in brochures and educational materials at parks — nearly every brochure you might get at an entrance gate has some kind of illustration, map or artwork in it.
Kyle Bryner: The collection comprises of 12,000 pieces of art and it ranges widely in materials and contents and time period. None of the art is older than 1970, because that's when Harpers Ferry Center was created and we started developing contracts for art. But the content of the art goes all the way back to when this planet became a planet, and all the way up to modern day. So, the breadth and depth of the collection is phenomenal, and I really want people to be able to access these resources because we have so much that we can share.
Jennifer Errick: The collection also includes recognizable pieces, such as nature-inspired paintings by beloved wildlife artist Charley Harper, which have been featured in a variety of park-related materials. I’ve had a print of one of Harper’s works hanging on my own wall for 25 years, and you can hear everyone’s excitement when Bryner pulls open a metal rack to reveal the originals.
Kyle Bryner: So, here’s the Harpers!
Small group reaction: Oh my god!
Jennifer Errick: A large focus of Bryner’s work has been digitizing the entire collection so that the public has access to it. She also works with the conservators to create preservation resources known as Conserve O Grams, covering a range of specialized topics.
Kyle Bryner: We have a partnership with the museum management program to do Conserve O Grams. If anyone has heard of the Conserve O Grams? Yes, thank you. So, they're a short, brief technical leaflet series that I coordinate, and I work with all the conservators here in the facility and other museum professionals outside of this office to work on authoring these. And recently we went through a huge redevelopment and reconfiguration of this program so that we made things more accessible for people to be able to read, and we've made them a lot more engaging for people. So now you see them fully online and more in-depth information.
Jennifer Errick: We’ll include a link to the Conserve O Grams in our show notes.
Kyle Bryner: They're a great resource for any museum professional that's out there in the world. It gives them a place to start so that they can do the best they can for their collections and help to reach best practices for their care. And that is the goal, why we make it so that people can really access this art for no charge whatsoever is making sure that it's democratized and that people have access to the resources that we have here in the National Park Service.
Jennifer Errick: Part of the trust Americans have in the National Park Service is our faith that rangers and staff are committed to taking care of the things that matter. But the teams at the Charles Town, as well as the teams at the nearby Harpers Ferry Interpretive Media Center, have been doing their work with fewer staff than they’ve had in the past. Here again is my colleague Alan Spears.
Alan Spears: Do more with less, do more with less. That has been a mantra for the agency ever since I started at NPCA 26 years ago, and it looks like it’s going to be a mantra for the next several years. We need to reverse that paradigm.
Jennifer Errick: Spears has spent his career studying not just the significance of historic preservation, but its role in the broader economy.
Alan Spears: What we say at NPCA is that for every federal dollar invested in a national park, it generates about $10 in return for local economies. People should take a great deal of pride in the work that's being done by the National Park Service and not to take it for granted and not to see it as some sort of a swindle. Right? Oh, we've got these Park Service experts. We've got somebody who does wood and somebody who does metals and somebody who does clothing. And that's something that we don't need or that we can't afford. We actually have to work to switch that paradigm.
Jennifer Errick: In fact, while we were going into production on this episode, Spears let me know that the ratio is now higher, and for every dollar invested, national parks generate closer to $15 in revenue for local economies. That includes everything from tour guides to hotels to granola bars, and it amounts to jobs in places that need it.
Alan Spears: We need to be able to treat our history with the respect that it deserves, because that's how you honor the people who lived it, and one of the ways of honoring the people who lived it is to ensure that their manuscripts, their photographs, their clothing, all the material culture associated with the people who have contributed to our shared national narrative is protected and preserved. We can't save everything, but we can save a lot if we've got the people in place to do the work, and that's what we're in jeopardy of losing right now.
We need to make sure the national parks are not just adequately funded but funded in surplus. It's not like elves come out after the moon rises and they repair the cannons and the historic structures and all of the material culture in the National Park Service’s collection. We have to have people. They have to be trained, they have to be professional, they have to abide by a work ethic. And they have to have the technology to enable them to take care of all these incredible resources that we have amassed over centuries of our history.
We've got that. So, let's defend it.
[OUTRO THEME]
Jennifer Errick: The Secret Lives of Parks is a production of the National Parks Conservation Association.
Episode 44, The Sum of Its Parts, was produced by me, Jennifer Errick, with help from Todd Christopher, Bev Stanton and Linda Coutant.
Special thanks to all the National Park Service staff in Charles Town and Harpers Ferry who took time to talk with me and answer questions about their work.
Learn more about the Park Service museum collections and read their Conserve O Grams at https://nps.gov/subjects/museums/conserve-o-grams.htm
Original theme music by Chad Fischer.
Learn more about this podcast and listen to the rest of our stories at thesecretlivesofparks.org
For more than a century, the National Parks Conservation Association has been protecting and enhancing America’s national parks for present and future generations. With more than 1.6 million members and supporters, NPCA is the nation’s only independent, nonpartisan advocacy organization dedicated to protecting national parks.
And we’re proud of it, too.
You can join the fight to preserve our national parks. Learn more and join us at npca.org