History in Those Hills: Upgrading Storage for the Appalachian Mountain Club's Historic Outdoor Recreation and Conservation Archives

FAIN: PG-271704-20

Appalachian Mountain Club (Boston, MA 02129-3740)
Rebecca Maxwell Fullerton (Project Director: January 2020 to May 2022)

The purchase of high-density shelving that would store 224 cubic feet of records within the club’s library and archives, thereby completing the organization’s installation of compact shelving and eliminating the need for temporary and offsite storage. The collection, which documents the history of outdoor recreation in the Northeast from the 1870s to the present, informs both internal and external research and publications. Highlights include 100 years of log books; 20,000 images of travel, people, landscapes, and events in this outdoor community; and diaries, scrapbooks, and maps of club excursions. This project builds on a preservation assessment from 2010.

The project will focus on the Appalachian Mountain Club’s (AMC’s) Library & Archives Special Collections and Institutional Records. These materials range from outdoor photography from the 1870s onward, manuscript collections of outdoorspeople of the 19th through the 21st centuries, and complete business records of America’s oldest outdoor recreation and conservation organization. Our primary and secondary source materials document over 140 years of the wilderness experience in the United States through the lens of history, writing, visual arts and culture. Our specific goal within this project is to complete an upgrade to our storage facilities to meet modern standards of preservation by incorporating high-density shelving. The project is a culmination of improvements following a move of our Library & Archives from our organization’s headquarters in Boston at the end of 2018 to the heart of the White Mountain National Forest in New Hampshire.