I was visiting my grandparents in Deep River, CT this past weekend and since I had no time to visit an archive during the week, I asked my grandfather–a former high school history teacher–to take me to the archives of the Deep River historical society.

I had a particular subject in mind. One day, when I was driving, I listened to a radio story about the ivory trade’s route to America. Surprise, surprise, Deep River–a small town of less than 5,000 residents–was a prime destination for ivory processing in the 1800s.

When I asked my grandfather, he told me about the piano-key factory run by Pratt, Read, & Co. that was situated in Deep River until 1936.

I wanted to see their archives. I had visions of deciphering decaying financial statements and company correspondence, discovering the slimy details to what I (and, I think, most others) consider to be an evil operation.

But , of course, I had already fallen into an archival trap that Arlette Farge describes as “the imperceptible, yet very real , way in which a historian is only drawn to things that will reinforce the working hypotheses [he] has settled on” (Farge, 71).

The historical society’s Stone House was composed mostly of museum exhibits. But, thanks to my grandfather, I was allowed to see an office on the second floor where the archives  of Deep River (or at least, the majority of them) resided. It was small: there was the office and a walk-in-closet sized room adjacent to it. The walk-in-closet portion contained shelves of accordioned, bound, and stacked file folders of various sizes. These archives are not listed on the historical society’s website.

Jittery from excitement and coffee, I asked for the Pratt, Read, & Co. financial statements and company correspondence. Kathy, the volunteer archivist nice enough to let us enter her domain on a Saturday and shuffle through her documents, crooked her head in thought. She had gray hair and wore a sweatshirt with a Pomeranian running across the front. She told me matter-of-factly: “no, and I’ll tell you why. As soon as the factory closed down a man from the Smithsonian came and asked for everything from Pratt, Read, & Co, so, unfortunately, you’ll have to go there to see them”.

Damn. The archives I craved were in either New York or D. C. I never asked which.

I settled for the bound folders that contained mostly pictures and news articles about Pratt, Read, & Co. The grainy black and whites and sepia photographs were mostly like the one shown below.

 

There were white males lounging on piles and piles of tusks while Africans posed around the treasure; a lone man driving a mule with a cart of tusks dragging behind; and factory workers cutting, shaping, and smoothing the tusks into combs, pendants, canes, curios, and especially, piano keys.

Maybe if I had read The Allure of the Archives before looking through these photos, I would have kept my expectations distant from the pictures themselves. Maybe I would have been able to discern some key and unique detail that would reveal something new locked within this black and white world.

But I could see only evil. I saw colonialism, I saw slavery, I saw greed, and I saw rampant animal cruelty.

The archives that Arlette Farge refers to in her book are written archives. She does not write about pictures. Images operate much differently from accounting records or correspondence letters. Without words, a narrative can be composed according to the viewer’s expectations and subjective interpretations. There is no text to corroborate or defy their hypotheses. What I worry about here is the specter of “revisionist history” that Farge describes on page 98. In this case, there is not a purposeful revision, but without descriptive archives located in the Deep River area,  the pictures can  contort the “truth” about the ivory trade. The absence of words may remove some realities that should be remembered.

Deep River acknowledges that they profited greatly from the ivory trade. Its records, though, depict not the spoils of a cruel trade, but the wonders that allowed the town to grow: there were pictures, architectural news clippings , bronze commemorative elephant statues, and company magazines that included the then current club softball standings.

Everything except the actual records of the ivory trade.

This is not to villianize the townspeople or the historical society. In such a small town, volunteers do all of the work. They are understaffed, under-resourced, and underpaid, but they are incredibly knowledgeable and they care deeply for their community’s history. And anyway, how can they refuse the Smithsonian?

The question then is about the proper geographical placement of archives, if there is any. There are many who never visit the Smithsonian. Heck, there are people living in Deep River who have never left the town! What does the loss of archival information mean for them? Does it have the power to alter Deep River’s historical narrative? How?

An easier way to ask this is: where do archives belong? Where they originated? Or where they are desired? And how much are these questions impacted by the resources and desire of the town?

In the Summer I’m going to visit again. I’ve been promised that their archives will be in better shape  and I have promised to approach the archives with a new eye and a distant perspective. It’s impossible after all to read all of the archives, even those from a small town.