Hello Everyone,
My name is Josh Masser, and I am currently working as
the Maryland Folklife Network Intern for UMBC’s special collections. The bulk
of this internship is focused on processing a newly acquired collection of
archival materials that is currently named the Mills of Baltimore County
Collection. Archival processing is essentially the act of organizing,
appraising, and defining a given collection of materials. The Mills of
Baltimore County Collection is just one part of a larger collection of
materials gathered by Charles L. Wagandt II. Wagandt was the founder, owner,
and president of the Oella Company Inc., an organization committed to the
restoration and preservation of Oella, a mill village just outside of Ellicott
City. The Oella mill village, grew around Oella Mill, a textile mill that
operated along the Patapsco River between 1808 and 1972. Wagandt was the
great-grandson of William James Dickey whose family business W.J. Dickey and
Sons had owned and operated Oella Mill since 1887. In 1973 Wagandt purchased
Oella and launched his forty-year campaign to preserve the historic character
of the village, which still exists to this day.
The Mills of Baltimore County Collection is housed in
about eighty boxes of various sizes (and yes, I have looked in every one of
those boxes already), for those of you familiar with archives this collection
is currently about thirty-three linear feet. The first step in processing a
collection like this is to conduct a survey of the materials. This involved
going through the collection box by box and recording some of the general
topics, dates, and contents. I really enjoyed this process, though I have to admit
that it was difficult to not spend too much time on each box, my supervisor
stressed that the survey is very informal and instructed me to spend no more
than five or ten minutes on a single box. This became particularly difficult
when I would encounter materials that related to Maryland textile mill history,
a subject that I have become increasingly interested in over the past couple of
years. Now that my survey is complete, I have begun to draft a processing plan
for the collection, which outlines how I plan to approach organizing the
collection and arguing why this collection will be useful for future research.
The processing plan is both familiar and daunting at the same time, but I feel
like it is starting to come together nicely.
The collection has a variety of materials related to
the people of Oella, the W.J. Dickey and Sons company, and various research and
oral history projects related to the same topics. I’ve looked at a bunch of
photos, memorabilia, and various documents in the collection. I hope that I get
the opportunity to look closer at some of these materials because I could only
get a glimpse of them during the collection survey. In particular I would like
to listen to some of the oral history interviews, look at some of the photos of
the town’s rehabilitation, and read through some of Wagandt’s research
materials.
Until next time,
Josh
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