The Grundy County Historical Society’s Preservation Program for Materials in the Heritage Center, Tracy City, Tennessee
FAIN: PG-253018-17
Grundy County Historical Society (Tracy City, TN 37387-4072)
Cynthia Sue Killian (Project Director: May 2016 to June 2019)
A preservation assessment; purchase of archival
shelving, an environmental monitor, and preservation supplies; a three-day
training workshop and in-house preservation training for staff and volunteers responsible
for managing this local history collection.
Records include 2,470 original papers relating to the coal mining in
Grundy County; rare 20th-century children’s and young adult fiction;
62 bound volumes of financial, county court, and other legal records from
1845-1948; atlases, maps, and plats of the area; 1,040 original postcards and
photographs, including images of tourist attractions and of people and
activities at the Highlander Folk School, a training ground for Civil Rights
activists and Southern labor organizers; and five plats of the original
Highlander Folk School property from the 1950s and ‘60s. The collection is used by local and outside
scholars, genealogists, and teachers.
To support the hiring of a
preservation specialist to conduct an assessment of rare photographs, books and
historical documents in the museum and special collections library in the
Grundy County Historical Society (GCHS) Heritage Center; Tracy City,
Tennessee. The second activity is
purchasing conservation tools, archives shelving and preservation supplies for
images, county documents and rare books in the collections. Finally, a member
of the library staff will attend a three-day workshop on preservation and
archival techniques while in tandem, the preservation consultant will train
volunteers on the use and installation of environmental monitoring equipment
and the interpretation of the monitoring data.