Preserving African American Church Collections

This summer, I interned with Heritage Montgomery, a non-profit organization that serves to promote tourism and heritage culture in Montgomery County, Maryland. This past spring, Heritage Montgomery undertook a project designed to preserve and archive the records, documents, and photographs of African American communities located in Montgomery County. Two communities were chosen for this grant, Pleasant View Historic Site and St. Paul Community Church. These communities were identified and chosen based on their immediate need to stabilize their records, documents, and photographs that were damaged or close to being lost from age and deterioration. Heritage Montgomery collaborated with these two communities and the Maryland State Archives (MSA) to complete this project.

My internship played out in two different stages. The first stage consisted of working with Heritage Montgomery in Germantown, MD to develop a collections intake form and conduct a collections intake session for Pleasant View Historic Site. At this intake session, my duties involved maintaining the organization and documentation of the extensive collection so that it would be well prepared for its transportation to MSA in Annapolis, MD. Once MSA staff assessed Pleasant View’s collection, it was transported to Annapolis ready to be archived and digitized into the MSA database.

The second stage of my internship included the responsibility to archive and digitize Pleasant View’s collection with the help of MSA staff. Because of Pleasant View’s large and extensive collection, it took June, July and August at the Maryland State Archives under the supervision of the Special Collections, Imaging, and Legacy of Slavery Departments to successfully complete this project. My duties included cataloging each individual item into the Archives internal database using basic HTML and then scanning each individual item into the imaging database. This allows for public access to view each cataloged entry alongside each digitized item.

Once Pleasant View’s collection was completely archived and digitized, the materials were transported back to Fairhaven Methodist Church that is serving as an intermittent storage facility. Ongoing measures are being taken to begin St. Paul Community Church’s collection this fall.

Pleasant View’s collection is accessible on the Maryland State Archives website in their Special Collections database under collection number 6158. Please check out my archival work from this summer!