DEERFIELD — While the town works out a record storage agreement with the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association, the Historical Commission and a local historian will prepare to move those documents upon execution of the agreement.

The Select Board agreed by consensus last week to allow the Historical Commission and retired historian Peter Thomas, who has been working with the records already, to prepare the documents for transportation out of the 1888 Building’s basement. The agreement for PVMA to store town records dating back to the 17th century is currently going through a legal review.

Thousands of the town’s records reside in the vault in the 1888 Building, also known as the former South County Senior Center building, which experienced a radiator leak last year. The leak briefly attracted the attention of the Secretary of State’s Office due to the state’s requirements for permanently storing documents like Town Meeting records. The records were spared by the leak, but it spurred the town to start seeking alternative options for preservation.

“Fortunately the records are not moldy,” Thomas, who previously worked as a records preservation expert with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said at last week’s Select Board meeting. He noted the building’s vault is permanently left open because nobody knows the combination and there’s a dehumidifier “going full-time,” but it is “just recirculating damp air.”

Beyond the objective of preserving historical documents, the other major aspect of storing them is the state’s laws regulating public records requests. Currently, if someone were to request a historical document, town staff members would need to walk over to the 1888 Building and locate the document. Under the town’s plan, PVMA would help digitize the documents and make them more readily available for the public, which Town Administrator Kayce Warren said would save the town a lot of work.

Thomas said he’s already digitized more than 9,500 pages of vital town documents — such as Town Meeting, Select Board and proprietors’ records — and he’d be willing to share the digital version with the town so it could be posted on the town website, which may satisfy the state’s access laws.

“These are just photographs mounted in a Word doc, page after page after page, so what the person’s going to be looking at is the original handwriting,” he noted. “On the basis of what I have, I’m perfectly willing to give the town all the digital records. You could put them up on your webpage.”

In 2020, Thomas compiled a similar document for Hatfield, which now has documents from 1668 to 1844 available on its website. He added there are thousands of other documents left in Deerfield’s vault, although many of them are not high priority.

“It’s one thing about Town Meeting and proprietors’ records and that sort of thing, but do we really need to do school taxes from 1865? I say no,” Thomas said, noting that it’s still crucial to get the less-important documents out of the vault and safely preserved. “If we don’t, something’s going to happen to them.”

The Select Board agreed to allow the Historical Commission and Thomas to begin placing the records in archival boxes and preparing them to be moved to PVMA. That move cannot happen, however, until the agreement is ratified by the museum and town. Select Board member Tim Hilchey noted this process of moving the records has come at a great time because the 1888 Building is one of the main focuses of the town’s South Deerfield revitalization plan and the building will likely be fully renovated in the coming years.

“This is a win-win for us as far as I’m concerned,” Hilchey said. “As long as we allow the (memorandum of understanding) to be finalized.”

Thomas said he expects work to be done within the next “couple of months.”

Chris Larabee can be reached at clarabee@recorder.com or 413-930-4081.]]>