THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, December 17, 1995 TAG: 9512150234
SECTION: CAROLINA COAST PAGE: 12 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Cover Story
SOURCE: BY LANE DEGREGORY
DATELINE: ROANOKE ISLAND LENGTH: Long : 200 lines
IN A SHINY white cardboard box, on a hip-level shelf of a locked metal cabinet, a piece of the strut from the world's first airplane sits on an inch-thick foam pillow.
Orville and Wilbur Wright engraved the wooden artifact - ``with compliments'' - for a bystander who watched the brothers' craft soar near Kill Devil Hill exactly 92 years ago this week.
The witness gave the signed piece of history to his family, who donated it to the National Park Service.
Few people have seen it since.
In another gray locker, six Spanish coins wrapped in wrinkled tissue paper, marked with manila tags, rest in their own boxes. Archaeologists found the 400-year-old silver pieces during a dig at Fort Raleigh - the site of the first English settlement in North America.
They gave the dime-sized coins to North Carolina officials, who passed them on to the Park Service.
But, like the airplane part, these ancient artifacts are not visible to the public.
Neither are:
Sections from the 1870 Cape Hatteras Lighthouse lens that still have the Paris manufacturer's label affixed to their thick glass bottoms.
Leather-bound logs from the Portsmouth Weather Station keeper, which include daily Outer Banks barometer readings, temperatures and wind directions from 1891 to 1893.
An antique oyster dredge that Nags Head watermen once used to drag the shellfish-rich sounds.
These objects - and thousands of others - are kept under lock and key in a climate-controlled shed near the National Park Service headquarters on the north end of Roanoke Island.
Of 3,500 historic items the federal agency has on the Outer Banks, more than 80 percent are stored in this isolated repository - where only one person has immediate access to them. Other items are on loan to outside institutions. Some have been lost or stolen.
Only 329 objects actually are displayed at the Wright Brothers National Memorial, Fort Raleigh National Historic Site and in visitors' centers along the Cape Hatteras National Seashore.
The rest remain unseen and untouched in a makeshift museum that smells of mothballs and moldy manuscripts.
``Before the Park Service built this storage shed in 1989, some of these artifacts were jammed in an office at headquarters or stuffed in the boathouse at Little Kinnakeet Lifesaving Station,'' Park Service curator Steve Harrison said recently from in front of the garage doors that open into his wide warehouse.
``Then they finally decided they needed a more stable environment to help preserve the pieces. This Bally building was a walk-in refrigerator, so it's highly insulated,'' Harrison said. ``Temperature, humidity and light all are well-controlled. It's inside a locked, fenced compound, so we know it's safe. And we try to keep all the artifacts free from insects and pests - including people, I guess. Just away from pollutants of all kinds.
``Preserving the objects, after all, is what it's all about.''
A shy, soft-spoken man with warm brown eyes and a meticulous mind, Harrison makes no apologies for keeping some of the most valuable pieces of the Outer Banks' past out of sight.
Besides the historic objects that are available for public view at the Wright Brothers National Memorial, Fort Raleigh National Historic Site and visitors' centers along the Cape Hatteras National Seashore, more than 200 of the Park Service items are on loan to the Virginia Lifesaving Museum in Virginia Beach, the North Carolina Maritime Museum in Beaufort, the Chicamacomico Lifesaving Station on Hatteras Island and other institutions.
Throughout the country, Harrison said, most museums display only 3 to 5 percent of their collections at a time.
``We don't want to have these things constantly exposed to bright lights - much less getting used,'' he said. ``I don't think people would want to see all this stuff anyway. But if they did, it would no longer be unimpaired. It would be vulnerable to all kinds of exposure to the elements and other damage. Once papers or paintings have deteriorated, you can't bring them back. They're gone.
``I would like to see them get more exposure to the public through publications and photographs, though,'' Harrison said of his carefully kept charges. ``And I want to provide the Outer Banks History Center with a catalog of our written materials so their visitors also can utilize our resources. A lot of Park Service employees don't even know exactly what's in here.''
With 1,500 square feet of storage space housing four centuries of artifacts from all over the Outer Banks, the Park Service preservation facility is understandably overcrowded.
Two wooden surfboats that crews from U.S. lifesaving stations rowed into the waves for daring 19th-century rescues now fill the federal facility's concrete floor with their hand-hewn hulls. Eight levels of gray, metal shelving rise almost to the ceiling of the 12-foot-tall shed. Two layers of lockers - also gray and metal - line the back wall.
The place is dark, lit only by fluorescent lights hung from the roof. Artifacts are everywhere, in drawers, on chairs, along the floor. But Harrison knows his way around the chaotic cache - and he's the only one who has to.
``I try to get in here three or four times a month to work on cataloging and caring for these things,'' said the curator, pulling on white cotton gloves. ``I'd guess less than 12 people a year pass through these doors. You've got to sign in here, so we know who's visited. And don't bump into anything, touch anything, move anything, eat, drink or smoke in here.
``There's a history of history in this place.''
Filigreed brass buttons from U.S. Lifesaving and U.S. Coast Guard uniforms fill one shallow storage drawer in the 30- by 50-foot facility. Brass bullets from the Civil War are inside another. There's a tin box that kept gunpowder dry during the early 1800s, two 3-foot-long bronze cannons that fired ropes for lifesaving crews and a 14mm musket ball found during a 1940s archaeological excavation at Fort Raleigh.
One cabinet overflows with glass-globed lanterns, whale oil lamps and all sorts of candle holders. Another contains a chain that drove the propeller on the Wright brothers' plane, a bicycle hub Wilbur and Orville used on a launching ramp, and the stand from the Singer machine they used to sew the wing fabric for their famous flier.
Behind door No. 12, newspapers Wilbur and Orville published are propped up on the brothers' 100-year-old printing press. The 1880 annual report from the U.S. Lighthouse Service's chief signal officer to the secretary of war collects dust on a bottom shelf nearby. A ``gyro-compass'' spins mysteriously inside an 18-inch glass box in one locker. Above it, on a top shelf, a wooden first-aid box embossed with a blue cross still has its original tourniquet and two dozen corked brown medicine bottles inside.
At least 100 books and bound ledgers are embossed with lighthouse, weather service and lighthouse keepers' logos. An 8-foot tall cabinet - labeled H-1 - has more than 2,000 manila folders overflowing with stalks of sea oats, petrified pelican feathers and king-sized conch shells. Thousands of photographs are filed in other drawers. And a stuffed harbor seal, its flippers outstretched, stares through glass eyes from an eye-level metal shelf.
``For most of these things, we know where they came from. We know the material they're made of. We keep records of gifts, deeds and origins,'' Harrison said. ``We know the history of where they've been and how they've got here.''
The seal, for example, was found April 5, 1962, by an Outer Banks resident and was once displayed in the visitor center at the Bodie Island Lighthouse. A token from Surfman (NU)1 at the Nags Head Lifesaving Station was donated by the serviceman's distant relative.
And the shed's latest acquisition - a white china pitcher with a brown leaf pattern painted around the top and U.S.L.H.S. stenciled on the side - came from a Park Service employee who spotted the unusual artifact in a Montana antique shop.
``She saw it had the old Lighthouse Service initials on it. So she bought it and donated it to us,'' explained Harrison, fingering the fluted spout as he gingerly lifted the pitcher from its deep drawer. ``There were very few of these made. The federal government only gave them to the top officials. This is a very rare find.''
Although luggage-like tags hang from most of the artifacts, labeled with wide, black, numerals that correspond with card catalog files, other items are saddled with tags that contain only big question marks.
These are some of Harrison's most prized possessions.
``About 1 or 2 percent of the items don't have a history on them. So I try to unravel the mystery and track as much as I can run down,'' the curator said. ``Some of these things are just things. And they'll always be that - unless you can figure out the history of them and learn how they connected with people. That's really a lot of the fun of it.''
Harrison readily admits that inadequate space has hindered the Park Service's ability to display some of the artifacts. This fall, he asked Congress for a special $200,000 museum appropriation so workers can build a second storage facility at Fort Raleigh. The proposed 2,000-square-foot building would include a research room where people could examine some of the objects; a reading room where they could look at books or photographs; even a small museum-like lobby area so that some of the artifacts finally could be displayed on a rotating - if not permanent - basis.
Park Service officials have identified such a need for years, Harrison said.
He hopes to hear about the appropriation next month.
``The whole notion of preserving things or exhibiting them is a difficult one I've been wrestling with,'' Harrison said. ``What good is it to have these things if you don't display them? That's a tough question. But if they are all out on exhibit, are we really willing to lose them? It's inevitable some of them will get stolen or damaged. And many of them are irreplaceable.
``These national resources are here. But few people know that or care about them. That's one of the dangers,'' the curator explained. ``Are we also threatening the collection by not displaying it? But then what about the people 50 years from now? Is there going to be anything original left from the 18th century for them to see?
``It's my job,'' Harrison said, ``to make sure there is.'' ILLUSTRATION: Staff photos by DREW C. WILSON
A harbor seal, skinned and preserved after it died on the Outer
Banks in 1962, resides - on its own blanket - in the National Park
Service's repository.
Information on each artifact in the repository is catalogued with
detailed notations as to the item's significance.
A lifesaving surfboat is just one of 3,500 historic artifacts the
parks service has on the Outer Banks.
Park Service Curator Steve Harrison makes no apologies for keeping
some of the most valuable pieces of the Outer Banks' past out of
sight in the repository. ``We don't want to have these things
constantly exposed to bright lights - much less getting used. . . .
It would be vulnerable to all kinds of exposure to the elements and
other damage. Once papers or paintings have deteriorated, you can't
bring them back.''
by CNB