| Historical oddities rest unseen in local archives |
By: ARIEL EMERY, News Editor
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Posted: Tuesday, December 2, 2008 10:36 am
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Carleton College keeps on hand this commemorative dish from the 1977 football game played between Carleton and St. Olaf entirely by metric measurements. The game was the only such ever allowed by the NCAA, and the last event to fill Laird Stadium.
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At first, it looked to Jeff Sauve like it was a wooden doorstop that his student assistant sat cradling inside the St. Olaf College Archives.
“Look what was in this folder,” said the assistant, presenting the archivist with the doorstop look-alike.
The scrap turned out to be a piece from the U.S.S. Constitution, the oldest commissioned ship in the world still sailing, nicknamed “Old Ironsides.”
The student had found the wood — and a calling card from President Woodrow Wilson — inside a file in the school’s Norwegian American Historical Association archives.
The items are two among a motley array of historical oddities that are hiding inside the different archives around Northfield.
“People think all I do is house just dusty old objects,” said Sauve. “But (the archives) are a wonderful place to come and get the stories. We’re helping the people in the future understand the past.”
Many of these strange artifacts end up in local archives by default, explained Eric Hilleman of Carleton College. When benefactors and their families make donations of items to the college archives or the Northfield Historical Society, buried beneath a pile of documents and photographs can be items of sentimental or historical value that don’t directly reflect the institution’s past, “but there’s no way we’re going to get rid of it,” said Hilleman.
Such is how Roman coins from the time of Jesus’ birth came to live in places like St. Olaf, along with Confederate currency and a death mask of George Washington — one of only two or three in existence.
As the colleges have no formal museum space, and the Northfield Historical Society has limited exhibit space, these items and others special to the college remain “hidden treasures” deep in the basements of their respective buildings until their archivists get a chance to tell their stories. |
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