The Jefferson Trust announced the recipients of 18 grants April 15 to support initiatives “that enhance the University of Virginia as a preeminent global institution of higher learning” according to its website. Among these recipients is the Jefferson Society Archives Project.
The project — which will be receiving a $33,615 grant — will support reorganization of the archival items to create a well-organized inventory.
Using resources at the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, 5,000 items will be converted into high-resolution images. The Jefferson Literary and Debating Society will then upload the photos to their website to make it available for viewing for the public.
Second-year College student Jack Chellman, historian of the Jefferson Society, said the society’s archives date back to its founding in 1825 and are currently stored in cabinets at Alderman Library.
From old minute books and roll call logs to signatures of significant figures in United States history such as Edgar Allen Poe and Woodrow Wilson, the archives contain items that are of interest to the University community, Chellman said.
“One exciting thing about the project is to a certain extent we don’t really know what we have,” Chellman said. “What we do know is that we have a couple big categories of interesting things — minutes taken from meetings, roll books … we have correspondence with speakers, articles about the society that we’ve kept, and we have just kind of general paraphernalia about society’s history.”
Chellman said he is not sure when the society’s archives became disorganized, but the society has not had the resources to support a project like this in the past.
“To a certain extent, the society has never had the capital necessary to do anything different, and the society does a whole lot of different programs and never had the free $33,000 to fix it up,” Chellman said.
With the grant, the organization hopes to restore the archives and also make them more accessible to the public.
The project will span over 53 weeks and will require the hiring of nine student workers who will physically sort the archives, organize the documents and note key identifying information, as well as create an online catalog that will be accessible through the University’s Virgo search and through the society’s own website.
The University libraries and faculty members have been helpful in the process, Chellman said.
The libraries have been helping with the training and providing the society with physical space to store the newly organized archives.
Wayne Cozart, executive director of the Jefferson Trust, said the historical significance of the project led the Jefferson Trust to offer its grant.
“One of our specific areas of interest are the University and its history and as the oldest of the societies of the University, we felt that the long-term preservation of the materials was important,” Cozart said.
The Jefferson Trust has supported similar projects in the past, such as preserving Corks and Curls and Thomas Jefferson’s academical village drawings.
“I think it’s going to be very valuable to take a look at what the documents of the Jefferson Literary and Debating Society are and to really understand the early history of that particular group,” Cozart said. “It’s very important for history.”
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