The county, flattened and weighted down.
Surveys, plats, and boundary records for Fenwick and the surrounding county, most of them older than anyone currently asking to see them.
Before you request anything
The local history room holds materials relevant to Fenwick and the surrounding county, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Access is by appointment. Researchers should contact the library in advance to describe the nature of their inquiry, so we can identify the relevant holdings before they arrive. This saves time for everyone, which the library considers a reasonable goal.
C. Marchand, head librarian
What the room keeps
Four kinds of record, filed by subject and by year.
Founding papers
Charters and deeds
The founding documents of Fenwick's five major institutions are in the collection: charters, deeds, and the paperwork of getting started.
Rec. 1Surveys and plats
Older than the requests
Boundary records for the town and the surrounding county, most of them drawn before anyone currently asking to see them was born.
Rec. 2The Gazette, on microfilm
Read, not shown
County newspapers, reduced to film and kept in sequence, edition by edition, back to the eighteen-nineties.
Rec. 3Lantern slides of the town
Shown, not read
Glass slides used for public lectures: streets, storefronts, buildings that have since changed hands or come down entirely.
Rec. 4Shown, not read
Before photographs traveled easily, the town came to you on a screen.
Magic lanterns for public lecture halls came in two common kinds: the costly limelight lantern, burning compressed gas through a cylinder of lime for a brilliant white light, and the ordinary lantern lit by a raised oil wick, the kind most small halls and traveling lecturers could actually afford.
Ours is the ordinary kind. Turn up the wick, seat the slide, and Main Street resolves on the wall exactly as it did in every hall too modest for gas.
The lantern is not a record of what was written. It is a record of what a room full of people once stood and looked at together.
Two records, kept differently
The lantern shows the town as it looked. The reader holds what the town said about itself, in print, one edition at a time. Neither replaces the other. The room keeps both, because a place is both what it looked like and what got written down about it.
Read, not shown
The town written down, one edition at a time.
Recordak, a Kodak subsidiary founded in 1928, pioneered microfilming newspapers for libraries, and by the nineteen-thirties most serious collections had adopted it: a year of a paper's daily run, bulky enough to fill a shelf in bound volumes, reduced to a single reel a hand could close around.
A single researcher, a single reel, a specific request. The Gazette does not project onto a wall for a room to watch together: it holds still for one reader at a time, close to the glass, cranking through columns until a particular notice, on a particular date, turns up exactly where the record says it should be.
A photograph shows you a street. The Gazette tells you what the council voted to do to it. We hold both, because neither one is the whole record by itself.
Before you go
This room is only
ever seen by appointment.
If something here is what you came for, the counter can tell you when to come back with an appointment already arranged. If you'd rather see what circulates freely first, the main collection is a shorter trip.
C. Marchand, head librarian