STATE ARCHIVISTS WORK TO SAVE MISSISSIPPI COUNTY RECORDS

Debris covers the stairway to the second floor of the Mississippi County Courthouse in Charleston, which burned Feb. 10.

CHARLESTON -- A team of archivists from the Missouri secretary of state's office has begun work to save records damaged by a fire that destroyed the Mississippi County Courthouse Feb. 10.

Lynn Morrow, director of the state's local-records division, said the task is the biggest preservation effort in the brief history of his agency.

"It is the most expensive, requires the most staff and more coordination than any other recovery effort we have been involved with," said Morrow.

The state records program started as a pilot project a decade ago and went full time July 1, 1990.

Both current and historic records were damaged by fire and water. Records preservation couldn't begin until state and federal officials finished investigating the cause of the fire, Secretary of State Bekki Cook said.

"The loss of this historic courthouse is a tragedy," she said. An investigation showed the fire was intentionally set.

Cook said every effort will be made to preserve vital government records.

Joan Feezor of Charleston is directing the effort. She is one of 11 local-records archivists who work in the state's records preservation program.

Feezor and Margaret Beggs, an archivist from Jackson, began working to save the courthouse records shortly after the fire.

Most of the damage to records resulted from water. "Very few records were lost due to the fire itself," Feezor said.

Feezor said older records are in better shape because they are on paper with rag content. The least durable records are those on computer paper and records from the 1940s where the paper is brittle, she said.

Feezor said they will try to save the records and dry them out. Then the records could be photocopied or microfilmed, she said.

Time is critical, she said. "The longer they stay in the water, the more damage they sustain."

Feezor said county assessor's records remain buried under rubble. "That part of the building has been condemned," she said. Safety concerns have prevented archivists from retrieving those records, she said.

Some of those records are scorched around the edges, she said. "We don't know how much of the records were destroyed." Feezor hopes archivists can begin retrieving those records soon.

Morrow visited Charleston last week. Sandy Hempe of the state archives' preservation lab arrived in Charleston on Monday. Three other archivists arrived Wednesday.

The archivists are working with county employees and volunteers to determine what records need to be saved, Morrow said. He said the preservation work could take two to three months.

The archivists met Wednesday with about 15 volunteers. An archives class from Southeast Missouri State University in Cape Girardeau also plans to help along with a volunteer group from Dunklin County.

Mississippi County and the state are sharing in the records-recovery effort.

The county's insurance policy allows only $2,500 for records recovery. Feezor said the task could cost $10,000 or more.

Without the state program, there would be little chance of saving most of the county records, she said.

Morrow said, "The expense is going to depend a lot on the commitment of volunteers and how much time they put in."

Many of the records are being placed in a donated freezer truck to halt further deterioration while the sorting work proceeds.

Records will be sorted and dried at a vacant lumber building near the courthouse and at a vacant building in Wyatt, Feezor said.

Many of the county's historic judicial records weren't in the courthouse at the time of the fire. Morrow said those records were being processed for microfilming by State Archives.

Many of the older county records had been microfilmed prior to the fire. The microfilm copies are stored in a vault at the State Archives.

Some of the other older records were on shelves in a storage vault in the basement of the courthouse. Those records weren't seriously damaged by the water, Morrow said.

The county received a local-records matching grant several years ago to construct the records vault.