Preserving History at Morgantown's Aull Center for Local History and Genealogy Research

For my Civic Service Project as an AmeriCorps member with the Preservation Alliance of West Virginia and the history app and website Clio, I helped lead volunteers in organizing a collection of historic newspapers and documents held at the Aull Center for Local History and Genealogy Research. Opened in 2004 as an annex of the Morgantown Public Library in the historic home of the Garlow family, the Aull Center contains a unique collection of primary and secondary resources related both to the history of Morgantown, Monongalia County, and West Virginia and genealogy of local families. This collection began on the second floor of the Morgantown Public Library next door but moved to the Garlow home in order to accommodate its continued expansion. The opening of the Aull Center resulted in the collection’s tripling in size. Within this collection is an assortment of historic newspapers and other documents in a filing cabinet on the second floor. This particular collection began life on the second floor the library as a keystone of the historical collection there but became disorganized in its transportation to the Aull Center and has since languished. Without the staff necessary to both operate the Aull Center on a daily basis and reorganize this collection patrons have been unable to benefit from the historical resources and knowledge held within it, once such a key part of the research capacity of the library’s historical records.

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In the hopes that patrons might once again be able to benefit from the information in this collection, I helped to lead a small group of volunteers in cataloging, organizing, and when necessary more suitably preserving the documents in the first drawer of the filing cabinet that holds it. Over the course of three hours, we were not only able to complete our task, but enjoy the many interesting and enlightening documents across which we came. As they sought to bring order to this drawer in the collection, volunteers learned about the early industrial history of the city of Morgantown, the construction of the Morgantown and Kingwood Railroad, the early life of the Morgantown Public Library itself, and an episode during the Cold War when a West Virginia mayor invited Soviet officials to his town to complete the construction of a local bridge. Volunteers were also able to locate several resources for which Aull Center staff had been searching for some time, including a map of archaeological and historic sites in Monongalia County. In all, the volunteers organized over two dozen file folders of documents in the drawer. With their help, Aull Center staff will now be able to better serve their patrons by providing access to more in-depth and extensive research materials than was before available. Without the help of the volunteers in the Civic Service Project, this would not have been possible. The staff and patrons of the Morgantown Public Library and Aull Center for Local History and Genealogy Research thus owe a considerable debt to AmeriCorps and the volunteers who assisted in the project.

NATHAN WUERTENBERG

Nathan served with the Clio Foundation as a Preserve WV AmeriCorps member during the 2018-2019 term.