Good-bye….For Now!

Upon completion of my course work and requirements for this internship I now bid you goodbye. I look forward to continuing my work in this field of Public History, Archives and Document Preservation. I have placed a link of my final project in regard to this internship, a paper summarizing what I have done and of my findings. I hope that you all enjoy and that this project will help at least one person with finding whatever it is they are looking for. If there is any questions in regard to this project you may contact me through this page, or your best bet if you are looking for something within my sources, please contact Dr. Nicholas Butler at the Charleston County Public Library, a link to the Special Collections Department in which he works is on the sidebar. Happy Searching!

Final Project

 

Just to update everyone, I am currently writing my paper and with all hopes it will be finished before April 17th. I will of course attempt to post it, since I am still new to this blogging thing, once I have finished. I also hope to finish off with some pictures soon. So these are some things to keep you holding on for more until I have finished. I also hope that maybe, just maybe, one day I will be able to use this project as a jumping off point for a Master’s thesis, this is with all hope that I will make it to a point in which this would be a possibility. So anything that may be useful from all of you reading this would be greatly appreciated, Public History is a wonderful thing!

 

I have returned

After quite a long absence, I have returned to update you on what is going on with the Chafee, St. Amand and Croft ledger. I have finished transcribing the book, it amounted to 77 pages and 1272 entries in Excel. I am now currently researching the interesting transactions, the salary accounts, as well as the people that showed up the most. I have yet to narrow it down to several and currently have four pages of written names, which I hope to get down to less than a dozen. Some of the transactions are coming together to help me understand the business, though there are some oddities. One such strange transaction, actually there are two of them, are the Adventures in Cotton, the only name connected with these two accounts is J. A. Hasseltine, which after some searching, I can only find a Hasseltine that was a Soldier in the Civil War, and he sued a railroad company because they booted him off a train since he did not have his quarantine papers and he was much put out by this, he won the case. There are others, on such is a transaction for 2 Bon Star Pickles from Wm. Underwood Co., who prospered in the pickling and canning business. Other odd transactions with food involve oysters, to and from several different people. The question that now arises is… Why is a business that is labeled as “wine, liqueur and segar” dealing with foods such as oysters? The pickles can be understood by labeling them under “bar food” of the time, this tid bit was conveyed to me through Nic, businesses like these would have jars of pickles present for sale along with the alcohol.

The salaried workers names that appear in the book, some are found, though some are not. The ones that I did find as of now are listed in the 1860 U. S. Federal Census as clerks, merchants and a grocer. Though, this is all speculation because there is no way to verify that these men are the men that were working for C, St. & C. but the fact that they are living in Charleston and nearby wards to the business, the are fairly reliable.

I am going to research the names further, and also I will search the newspapers for any type of declaration of bankruptcy by any of the men or for the business. There is one indicator for this, a bankruptcy fee that was paid in 1869 by T. Croft. I hope to find out more about the customers of the business so that I can attempt to interpret the business dealings themselves, and possibly even track where the business declined and how the blockade on Charleston affected their business dealings and the general survival of the business. Though there are pages missing that may lead the paper in a different direction, they are not available to me, so much of this is speculation and the rest is thoughtful interpretation of the evidence available. There is a drop in business transactions during the blockade and there is even evidence that the business closed temporarily, though, when they do return, they appear to be cleaning up what is left, and what they were unable to tie up before the break. Hopefully I will be able to learn more about this aspect of the ledger, but, if not today, maybe one day either I or someone else will be able to acquire the research and the support for an explanation.

I leave for now and also promise that I will try to be more consistent with my updates until the paper is completed and posted for all to read.

 

Some Progress

So…. I have hit a kind of lull in the project, I am transcribing the majority of the ledger (names and info about the transaction, when it is interesting/different). But it is a lot of typing and not as much fun (or therapeutic) as removing the newsprint from the paper, though the upside is that I do not stink when I go home. There are interesting things in the transaction notes, but the majority of it is payments and bills received, though when there is a comment it is usually very interesting and is another piece to the puzzle. I am noting account and transaction numbers for the purpose of matching names for research and hopefully that will bring back a big payday in the end (hope for a great/interesting paper). I break up the silence with music since I am doing a lot of my work at night after most of the staff have gone home and the bare bones are left to run the place until closing. I also do some research online and in the stacks for Otis J. Chafee, who owned the stores that C, S & C were renting, and also one of the original men in the old firm of C, C & C, or Chafee, Croft & Chafee. I have attempted some research on William H. Chafee, but I have yet to find any firm evidence, and there is not a whole lot of information on Croft or St. Amand, but there is a bountiful amount of records on Otis J. Chafee. I am using Ancestry.com for passenger manifests, census’s and death and marriage records. The Charleston City Directory of 1859 has been helpful as well. There is a lot of work to do and not a whole lot of time to do everything I want to do so I am working as best I can to do what I can and hopefully I will get a great ending to my project and maybe I will even get a good paper out of it to tell the whole story about this book and its history.

 

Some Great New Developments

So we have had some great breakthroughs in the deciphering of the journal. We have figured out what C C & C stands for Chafee, Croft and Chafee. There was some reorganization in the company and the name changed to Chafee, St. Amand and Croft, in the 1859 city directory this business is listed as Wholesale Liquor dealers and Importers of Segars (Cigars). While scanning through the records it becomes apparent that they are dealing with goods, there are references to barrels of whiskey, vats of muscat wine, barrels of cocoa and what I believe is lbs of segars. Also there are mentions of cans of oysters, which I do not understand but hopefully I will find out more about this as we go through the rest of the ledger, gross bottles, and later in the ledger there are entries of “Adventures in Cotton” and the dates match with that of Charleston blockage during the war between the states, aka the Civil War. This is a great discovery because by finding all of this we were able to find out the names of the company from before and after the change of names. Though the biggest breakthrough in discovering the name of the company was entries of rent paid for their stores at 179 and 180 E. Bay Street, which the numbers have changed but if you know anything about Downtown Charleston, their stores were on the opposite corner from the Custom House, and today it is a bar. I am transcribing the book so that I will be able to find out who they were selling to and what they were doing before, during and after the blockade and shelling of Charleston, and also why the business did not survive more than 10 years, as well as never really recovered after the war.

 

Week 3.. so far

I am almost finished with the soaking and scraping of the pages to remove the news-clippings and I am so excited that this part of the project is almost complete. Although, it is a very relaxing thing to do, the monotony of it all, and the instant reward of seeing what I am doing, the paper smells awful and headaches are not an uncommon thing for me right now. The smell of wet newspaper and on top of that old newspaper combined with the smell of the paste, plus the fact that this book is about 140 years old… you get the picture, it smells. I go home smelling musty, but I have the great reward of knowing I have accomplished something, that is a great feeling. My hands are chapped constantly, but it is cold out, or suppose to be with today’s high of 64 degrees and it is January, but I am also working with paper, which absorbs the oil in your hands, and also in water, I have dry hands and lotion is always somewhere close, though never while I am working with this book.

Now to move on to the other things I am doing since I have already finished copying all the pages.

I have just started to read the pages and examine the names of the people in the ledger. Next, I will take notes of name that are repeated and also the dates that the ledger spans. But for now, a lot of the names I am recognizing, in a way, they are a lot of old family names in Charleston, and also, since I work in the Medical Records Department at a local Gastorenterologist (Charleston Gastroenterology Specialiast for all those wondering), so a lot of these names are familiar. Also, a simple scan through an old city directory (a.k.a. a phone book) a lot of these names appear. I am fortunate that I am working with the Special Collections Department and the South Carolina Room at the Charleston Public Library because these city directories in or around the time period are quite available. I have one from 1859 that I will be working in close conjunction with to make sure that I have the spellings of the names correct, as well as to identify the companies and attorneys that are being named in the ledger. About half of the names are people and the other half are companies and attorneys. So, either way I am looking, a city directory is a great resource to have at my disposal.

Some things to look for in the near future:

- More updates on my work

-Some background information on

~W.G. Hinson and Ben Tillman, as well as on CC&C.

 

Some more days of fun

I have been busy attempting to finish tearing apart the book, as well as slicing the pages down the folio’s crease so that I am able to efficiently copy each page and then soak them in a warm water bath. This is tedious work because I have to be very careful not to tear the underlying paper, since I have a photocopied record of the newspaper clippings I do not have to worry about preserving the newsprint. I have allowed the paper to soak for about 20 minutes before I start working on removing the newspaper with a micro-spatula, my new best friend, and once I have removed all of the newsprint from the page I brush the page with currently a nylon nail brush, those ones that come in manicure kits, but before I was using a tightly-bound brush. The nylon nail brush is more effective in removing the slimy paste in a single pass the majority of the time. I have been stacking the pages in the water basin, usually about 6 or 7 with a piece of window screen between each one to prevent pages from sticking together, as well as it helps to use the screen to remove the pages with some structure, without it the pages may rip very easily, they are very vulnerable at this point because they are so water soaked. I then places the pages on blotter paper, and then on our wonderful drying rack, this is the greatest invention of all because I am able to place them in this compact place and not have all these wet pages strewn everywhere.

So, by they time I get to the last page, it has been sitting in the water for about and hour, and the newsprint usually comes right off. The first several pages were very tough to remove the newsprint, but the last several have been extremely easy to remove with just a few swipes of the micro-spatula and its off. We, Liz, a preservation expert with the library, Nic, the Special Collections any my internship director, and I have decided that Mr. Hinson must have changed pastes, we do not know what kind of pastes, but the paste that was holding down the previous pages and the paste of the pages that I have just completed today are different, and for the better on my side of things. Also, today the water changed to a very odd color, previously it was a brownish color, and only turned that way once I started working with the pages, today, the water started to turn immediately after I put the first page in, and it was this neon yellowy-brown color, nothing like before, and it just got worse, but the water never seemed to get as cloudy as it did previously, I was able to see clearly, just with an almost urine colored tint to it. The smell was also worse today than before, and it seems to linger in the room in which I am working even when I am not there, it is the smell of old, musty newspaper that is wet, hmmm… imagine that.

I have noticed in regard to the clippings, that Mr. Hinson did not put the in any order other than chronological, no one article seems to fit with another article, except for their subject, Mr. Tillman, and the time period, even the pasting of the articles to the page seems to differ at points. Some pages are more tightly stuck at the center, others at the edge. With this, I have developed some theories: one, that Mr. Hinson was not the only person working on this book and that occasionally someone else was pasting in the newsprint at his discretion. Two, Mr. Hinson did all of his work sporadically, whenever he had a chance to put articles in he did, and when he did not, he collected them until he had time and them put them all in hurriedly, or three, Mr. Hinson was diligent about his scrapbook and whenever he had an article he place it in immediately, it is almost like a pastime for him, something to keep his mind sharp other than reading and he was just not consistent with his pasting. Though there is no way that we will ever be able to discover which of these theories are true, or even if any of them are true, it is just going to be one of the many mysteries of this journal.

Some things about the writings underneath, it is definitely a ledger of some type, though we had this pretty much figured out already. Also, the first page is dated January 1860, and for the first several pages, each page is a new month, even if the previous month did not fill up the page. Another conclusion is that the handwriting of the ledger is not that of Mr. Hinson’s, there is some writings and even a small math problem on one of the later pages, and the handwriting does not match, though all of the writing is in cursive, the numbers are not formed the same way, even if age and changes in writing style are taken into account. The ledger is only on the first 70ish pages, though there have been several pages that were removed to make room for the newsprint, this is a very good thing for me, because I only need to remove the newsprint from the pages that appear to have writing underneath, and this is only about one third of the book, and the newsprint covers almost the entire space in the book. There are a lot of loose clipping as well though, and when I have completed my current goal of removing all the newsprint from the pages that I need, I will photocopy all of these clippings and place them with the other photocopies as a back up just in case the loose clipping are lost, and also as a record because there are some pages that are missing parts of the article because of how the article was placed it was to long for the page and they were just folded over, and after over a hundred years they have become brittle and have slipped out and then just placed back in the book haphazardly.

 

Day 2

After everything was dry from Day 1, we inspected the paper, but there are a lot of stains and residue that some of the ledger is unreadable. After consulting with Liz, we decided to cut out a page and test to see if soaking the pages in warm water would work better. So, we got out a bin and some screen and put some warm water in the bin, then put a piece of screen in, then our test piece, then another piece of screen and let it sit for a bit, but the paper was not floating up like we thought it might so we took a brush and lightly rubbed each side to remove the residue. Then, we lifted the paper using the screens, let it drain, put it on a piece of blotter paper, then put it on a drying rack and left it dry. I did not check it before I left, but even when it was dry it was a lot cleaner and I could read more than I could before. So, since this was to much for time effective and less labor intensive, we decided to cut the book apart and we will photocopy all the papers with the newsprint on, then place each piece of paper in the water filled bins and rub off the paper with the brush and let them dry on the drying racks. I did break one scalpel when I was cutting the binding apart, but I was able to get it out safely. The leather on the book was very rotten, a lot of it was turning to dust, also, the book left a lot of dust everywhere, something they call red rust. Then, I had to separate all the pages, so I took the micro-spatula and placed it between the pages and slid it down the length of the book to separate the sections. This is all that I completed on Day 2, so the next steps are to photocopy all the pages once I slice them apart at the folds.

 

Day 1

Today is the first day working on this project and I have learned quite a lot. The Tillman Ledger was used by Hinson as a scrapbook of the activities of Tillman during the late 1880s. The book was produced by Walker,Evans & Co., which is still in business today, a business bought this book, named C C & C, for their ledger. It is most likely made of cotton pulp and the newspaper clippings are wood pulp and fastened down with some type of paste. By adding warm water to the paper and allowing it to sit for a little while we were able to lift a lot of the newsprint with the micro-spatula, the only problem was that some of the newsprint was stuck to the point that I almost ripped the paper trying to remove it, so I finally just left it alone and moved on to another page. The ink on the underlying ledger is most likely iron gall ink, it held fast in a preliminary test with a q-tip, and also after the paper was brushed down with warm water and a paint brush. There is a lot of residue left over as well as a lot of ghost writing from the newsprint and the only way to get it off is to scrap it off with a scalpel when the paper is wet, but with very light pressure or to much might come off.