The Filson Historical Society Blog

Jacob Lee at his curatorial station.

That famous advice dispensed by 19^th century newspaperman Horace Greeley for young Americans to head west as the tide of Manifest Destiny swept across the Great Plains to the Pacific is being followed today by one of our own. After five years and eight months at The Filson, today is Jacob Lee’s last day. Jacob first came to The Filson as an undergraduate intern from the University of Louisville for the spring 2005 semester. Working on his degree in history, with an emphasis on American history, Jacob was a natural researcher and cataloger from the outset. His inquisitive and intuitive nature for the work and history made him an excellent addition to the Special Collections Department staff. When that internship ended and he entered graduate school, working on a master’s degree in American history, he received a year-long internship. When that ended he was awarded a Boehl Internship. We clearly wanted to keep the young man around! With an opening in the department looming on the horizon, we hired Jacob part-time, positioned to join the department full-time. On September 1, 2006, Jacob joined the staff as a special collections assistant; later being named an associate curator.

Jacob and Col. Reuben Durrett.

Jacob has worn a number of hats in fulfilling departmental and Filson duties. From monitoring researchers and answering research queries to all aspects of cataloging and supervising interns – even hanging the occasional portrait – he has handled his responsibilities with ability and professionalism. A list of the collections he’s cataloged would be lengthy, but some of the largest and most historically important are those from the 19^th century. The Speed Family Papers and the Beatty-Quisenberry Family Papers are two wonderful and frequently used collections that bear the Jacob Lee stamp of excellence. Those who read The Filson newsmagazine, our quarterly journal Ohio Valley History, The Filson’s blog, or attend Filson staff lectures know him well. His work has always been thorough, accurate, and well-written. It has been a pleasure to see him develop into a first-rate curator and promising historian.

Jacob and his cousin, Philip Lightfoot Lee.

Jacob will be missed by his Filson colleagues and many others as he heads west to the University of California at Davis to pursue a PhD in American history, but we certainly wish him happiness and great success. We send him off with thanks and best wishes and even though Thomas Wolfe opined that “You can never go home again,” Jacob can rest assured that he’ll always have friends here at The Filson who would indeed be happy to see him return home to Kentucky, and maybe to The Filson, some day. Read the rest of this entry »

Volunteer Joan Rapp cataloging a collection.

The Filson is most fortunate to have a loyal core of volunteers. As related in a previous post on Larry Carr vounteering at The Filson, our volunteers bring a variety of experience and knowledge to the work they do here. Their talents and dedication help us to succeed in our mission of making collections available to researchers and telling the stories of Kentucky and the Ohio Valley.

One of our most dedicated volunteers is Joan Rapp. Joan is our longest serving volunteer. A native of Albany, New York, Joan graduated from Vassar College with a BA in history. Her former husband’s career took the family to various cities, including Evanston, Ill., and St. Louis. They have called Louisville home since first moving here in 1955. The mother of four sons, Joan kept very busy with family, but still found time to keep up with her interests outside the home, including history.

Joan checking entries in the card catalog.

In February of 1993 Joan began volunteering two days a week in The Filson’s Special Collections Department. Seventeen years later, she is still volunteering two days a week! As with any job, orientation is an important component. There are always collections awaiting cataloging that need preprocessing – arranging a collection in proper order, foldering it, etc. This is a task that most volunteers in Special Collections begin with. Joan quickly mastered the sometimes rather involved steps of this phase of collection processing. One of the aspects of the work she most enjoyed was the immediacy of the letters. Handling letters and documents written fifty, one hundred, or perhaps two hundred years ago brings history and the people making it alive. “You’re holding history in your hands,” Joan says. “It is living. It is unfolding before your eyes, whether it is the descripiton of a battle, or carving a home out of the wilderness, and it’s a thrill.”  Such enthusiasm coupled with Joan’s historical knowledge and quickly graduated her to actual cataloging.

An important aspect of cataloging is understanding what it is you’re reading so that the appropriate subject and name headings can be generated for the online and printed finding aids. This is what allows the researcher to know that information regarding their topic is in a collection. If the information is missed, then important information regarding people and events might go unnoticed for years, if not forever. For years now, Joan has been cataloging new collections and “recataloging” old collections not originally done to our current standards. Joan’s favorite collection cataloged, she answers with no hesitation, is the Mona Bismarck Papers. A who’s who of the mid-20th century Cafe Society, Joan enjoyed reading about the activities of these “beautiful” people and more importantly, recognized the names, generating the appropriate catalog cards for them. Working on the collection also led to one of those serendipitous experiences that make working with the researchers who visit so memorable. Noted British biographer Hugo Vickers visited one day to conduct research in the Bismarck papers. Joan was volunteering that day and not only did she serve as his personal guide to the collection but she also shared her lunch with him. A memory that Mr. Vickers himself fondly recalls to this day.

Joan "living history" through cataloging.

In “recataloging” collections, Joan reads the material, checks exisiting card entries for headings she believes are pertinent, and if they are lacking she creates cards for them. In some cases, the number of entries – signposts for researchers to find material of possible interest – have more than tripled.

There is no end of collections in site for Joan to catalog. “I’m learning something all the time,” she says. As a history major and avid reader, she appreciated the importance of primary sources; but in actually handling and reading the letters, diaries, and documents themselves, “history comes alive.”

Special Collections Assistant Heather Fox working with the card catalog

Friday, September 4, marks Special Collections Assistant Heather Fox’s final day at The Filson.  In May 2008, Heather joined the staff as an H. F. Boehl Summer Intern, while she completed her Masters in Library and Information Science at the University of Kentucky.

Since last August, she has served in her current position as Special Collections Assistant.  She now moves on to the University of Louisville University Archives and Records Center, where she will work as a “Data Wrangler” on a large, multi-institution digitization project.  All of us at The Filson wish the best for one of our favorite Filsonians.  Good luck, Heather!

Scene from a Filson garden party, 1984

While surveying the Filson’s audio-visual collection last week I found an 8mm Filson home movie.  Entitled “The Filson Moves Along” the film includes footage from May 1971 of “scenes of the Filson Club party preparations, Mr. Harry Hill carving ham, members preparing beaten biscuits and ham on the day before the party” and also scenes from the Filson Club Christmas party on December 23, 1971.  This find demonstrates the excitement that home movies can generate.  The staff here is looking forward to seeing what the Filson was like nearly forty years ago.  Just like any historic document, home movies connect us to our past and can provide information about the way we used to live.

On October 17, 2009, The Louisville Film Society and the Filson Historical Society will be sponsoring the city’s first observance of Home Movie Day.  Created in 2002 by a group of film archivists, Home Movie Day is an international event that celebrates amateur film making and aims to educate the public about film preservation.  During an event, sponsors provide preservation know-how and a venue and the public provides the films from their personal collection. Community members are invited to bring films (16mm, 8mm, and Super 8mm) to the  Filson Historical Society starting at 9am.  The Louisville Film Society will be on hand to inspect, repair and clean the films.  Following the cleaning and inspection phase, the films will be projected on-site the same day for a public screening.  The event is free and open to the public.

As the director Martin Scorsese once said, “Film is history. With every foot of film that is lost, we lose a link to our culture, to the world around us, to each other, and to ourselves.”  Come to the Filson Historical Society and find out how you can help preserve your own piece of history.

Find out more about the international event Home Movie Day by visiting the official website.

Inaugural Blog Post Celebrates The Filson’s 125^th Birthday and New Website

This month The Filson launches its new website. It has a new look that we believe viewers will enjoy; and more content that we know researchers will find useful. Additions will continue being made so viewers should check back regularly. One of the new features of The Filson site is a blog. Popular and informative, The Filson wanted to include this style of forum in order to tell more about our collections and the significant stories of Kentucky and the Ohio Valley. What more appropriate way to celebrate our new website than to look back and remember our founding 125 years ago, in May of 1884, when The Filson itself was brand new. Those familiar with the history of The Filson Historical Society know that it was founded on May 15, 1884, as The Filson Club. Ten Louisvillians, all prominent men, gathered together that month at the home of Reuben T. Durrett, at the southeast corner of Brook and Chestnut Streets, to form a group dedicated to “collecting, preserving, and publishing historical material, especially that pertaining to Kentucky.”

Durrett's house at Brook and Chestnut Streets, ca. 1890

As a group they had a number of things in common, from most of them being lawyers to having deep Kentucky roots. They also had differences; politically they identified with both the Democratic and Republican parties, and during the Civil War they split pretty much down the middle in their support for the Union or the Confederacy. Topics such as these were generally avoided; and it was their love of history and Kentucky that brought them together for their collegial and educational gatherings.

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