Archives move to new building on Park Street

Home News Archives move to new building on Park Street
Archives move to new building on Park Street
The new Park Street location will house the archive collection beginning in February.
Olivia Pero | Collegian

The Hillsdale College Mossey Library will store its archive collection in a new building on Park Street after years of storage across campus and even out of state.

Construction of a new archive building finished after having begun early last fall, according to Chief Administrative Officer Rich Péwé. The building can safely store historical books, papers, and other artifacts relating to Hillsdale College and Winston Churchill.

“The warehouse that the college was renting in the Hillsdale Industrial Park, which housed much of the archival collections, was sold,” said Lori Curtis, college archivist and special collections librarian. “So the college had to build a new warehouse. Nothing is really changing for archives, except that the new building will be closer and will provide a better environment for the collections that have to be in storage.”

According to Maurine McCourry, director of the Mossey Library, the college has many book collections of historical figures in the archive collection.

“We have the library of Russell Kirk,” she said. “That’s about a 10,000 book collection.There is Martin Gilbert’s collection. We have both his papers and his books, with his archival papers being processed now. We also have Gilbert’s personal book collection. We haven’t begun processing that yet but that’s a vast book collection that are in boxes that will be moved into the storage facility, eventually processed, and maybe, if we’re able to expand the library, they’ll be stored as part of the library.”

Other collections in the archive include the works of Harry Jaffa and former U.S. representative Philip Crane, according to McCourry.

“We also have a couple of chairs that were built for one of the literary societies in the 19th century,” McCourry said. “They had a whole series of chairs designed for their lectures. There’s an old chandelier from one of the old buildings too.

There’s a lot of stuff but mostly related either to these big archive collections or to the college’s history.”

The papers and artifacts archived by Hillsdale College are important both for the college’s history and for history in general, according to McCourry.

“Mr. Martin Gilbert’s papers were vitally important to the study of Winston Churchill,” she said. “There are a lot of other collections like that that are related to the Churchill project that really need to be preserved and cared for. People from all over the world are asking to get access, especially to the Gilbert papers, but also some of these other collections. So it’s important for the study of history that we protect these things. We will be much more equipped to do that and will be able to provide better access to these collections with the new facility.”

Curtis said the project has gone well.. 

“We hope to move the collections over during the first week in February, provided the shelving arrives on schedule,” Curtis said.

Curtis has been the college’s archivist and special collections librarian for two years and will continue to manage the archives once they are moved.

According to McCourry, the new building will contain extra laundry facilities for the Dow Hotel and Conference Center.

“The new facility will be much more secure and our security can keep an eye on it,” McCourry said. “We’ll have cameras and locks, but it will be on campus so we can have people retrieve things easily.” 

Library staff had to drive to the industrial park to grab items from the archives before the new construction.

Now we’ll have somebody from the maintenance department retrieve those things from the new building,” McCourry said.

Freshman Abby Idstein, who works in the mailroom, said she often works with archive materials.

“There’s Imprisises and magazines that date pretty far back,” Idstein said. “I definitely think it’s important to preserve our college’s history which we really only can do if we continue to preserve our archives.”