Remember being a little kid at Christmas and there was that one special gift you always wanted – like the Red Rider BB gun? For me, I wanted a pellet rifle so bad. One Christmas I got up and there under the tree was a long box all wrapped up so nice and pretty. I just knew this was the year for me to get a pellet rifle! I ran over and tore open the box and low and behold, there was a Winchester 30-30 lever action, custom built rifle. If I had the capacity to think back then like I do now, I probably would have thought, “What the fuck dad! I’m eight years old. What am I going to do with a 30-30 rifle?” It’s not like something that I could go out in the woods and shoot everyday, like a pellet gun. I would have to wait for those special days when my dad would take me hunting. Which meant the 30-30 would probably sit for 362 days out of the year.
Yesterday was that same sort of let down for me – so close and yet so far away. I’ve been doing history research and archiving for Baltimore City’s water supply for close to two years now. By title, I’m a maintenance supervisor, but in my spare time – early morning and lunch, I work on sorting through and documenting all the records that have been stored at both the Montebello and Ashburton Filtration Plants. There are a lot of them. I came across most of these records by chance 20 some years ago when the supervisor of that time told me to get rid of all that ‘junk’. I didn’t and I stored it all away until 2 years ago when I was looking for some electrical drawings and started to sort through it. It was such an exciting feeling to look through all of this ‘junk’. I found old glass plate negatives, lantern slides, plats, prints, personal journals and records and books dating back to the 1800’s.
The excitement of all this discovering is still with me today. I love it. The let down though is this: Both my boss and me can retire in a couple years and when we are gone, nobody is going to give a shit about any of this stuff. So I was really excited when I read in the Baltimore Historical Society newsletter that Baltimore has an Archives. I had read about it from some old records that I found from the 1950’s but no one could tell me anything about it. It actually was part of the Finance Department. So I call the Baltimore Archives and ask if I can come down and take a look at what they have and share with them what I have. The guy tells me to come down at 10:30am. I go there and it’s on this back street and is in part of an old warehouse that smells of mold and old. The man who greeted me was like, “What do you want? What are you looking for?” (Sounding like Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh) So I explained who I was and what I’ve been doing for the past two years. “Oh, really? Well here is what we have on water history.” He hands me this three page booklet with a brief water history typed onto it. I had taken with me a memory drive so I could show him a sample of what I’ve got. Two computers but neither one hooked up?
After about ten minutes of pouring my excitement out to him, he wants to know if I know one of the workers at Montebello? And oh yea, we can come get some of that stuff if you want. All I wanted was to just share some excitement of history with some one.
This is the typical city mentality. People are given jobs that they really don’t care about. The city itself is messed up in how they handle the history and archives. You have the Industrial Museum, the Public Works museum, now the Baltimore Archives and god only knows how many agencies have stuff undocumented, scattered throughout the city. Some one told me that the Construction Management Division stores stuff at the Backriver Plant. Why? I don’t understand the city’s complacency on its history. If anything, all the history and archives should be at one location, like the DPW museum. But it won’t be. That is too logical.
But you know what? All of this won’t deter my enthusiasm for what I love to do. I wish the City of Baltimore would start showing the same.
