BETHEL — “I like this old stuff,” said Telstar High School student Adam Literak Saturday, as he looked through boxes at the Bethel Historical Society.
Literak was one of a half dozen THS students who volunteered their time to help the Society move 35 years’ worth of collection items out of the storage room at the Moses Mason House.
It’s part of a plan to renovate the second-floor room. The overhaul will include the installation of heating and cooling equipment to improve climate control for BHS archives on that floor of the 1813 building.
As part of the project, hundreds of 19th- and early 20th-century items were temporarily relocated downstairs to the exhibit hall. Among the items: an air-raid sand pail, a picnic box with real plates and silverware, a hearthside popcorn popper, a Victrola phonograph, photos, signs and dresses.
There they will be examined, cleaned, photographed and re-catalogued into a recently-upgraded computer database. When the storage room is ready, they will be returned.
The effort, said Executive Director Randy Bennett, “is the largest collections-management project in BHS history.”
The students who helped Saturday learned a little history along the way. Even the method they used to move the artifacts had a lesson.
Beginning at the storage room and stretching down the stairs and around the corner to the exhibit room, the students stood in a line and handed objects from person to person.
“It’s like a bucket brigade from the old days,” said Charlie Raymond, dean of students at THS.
A member of the BHS Board of Trustees, Raymond helped coordinate the moving project with BHS.
The picnic box and Victrola were among the most popular items with the students.
So taken were they with the Victrola — which they cranked over and over while they played several old records — that progress ground to a halt as the teens all stood around marveling at the old player. As the turntable wound down playing “In the Shade of the Old Appletree” and the music slowed, they laughed.
Several old typewriters were particularly fascinating to Literak, an exchange student from the Czech Republic. Every time one of the old machines was unearthed, the volunteers called out to him to come and look at it.
The moving project took about three hours to complete.
Work on the storage room renovation is scheduled to begin by the second week in February, Bennett said, and should take less than a month. “It will likely be ready for us to use as an addition to the research library (work area and climate controlled storage) by mid-March,” he said. “The re-cataloging of the Society’s collections, which includes what we’ve moved plus much more, is scheduled to be completed in June 2013.”
In addition to thanking the students for their help, Bennett expressed his appreciation to Robert and Janet Spidell of Andover and California, who helped finance the renovation, and Ned and Susan Robertson of Solon, Ohio, who funded the computer-database upgrade.
The computer upgrade will allow BHS to post individual collection records and images online, and permit more digital displays to be linked to the BHS website, Bennett said.
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