This interview originally appeared in the AMC New Hampshire Chapter’s Spring 2024 Mountain Passages newsletter.
Becky Fullerton in the Alpine Garden on Mount Washington.
What is the origin/history of the archives at AMC?
Having an official club Archive is a fairly recent thing for AMC. We have had a Library of sorts from our founding in 1876, first in the form of a few shelves on which to store books and maps at the Boston Museum of Natural History. Later we maintained a simple reference library wherever we had office space, eventually leading to the designated Library on the fourth floor of 4 Joy Street from about 1975 until AMC moved its headquarters to Charlestown in 2017. Along the way we’ve picked up a lot more material beyond books, maps and other publications. Members have donated thousands of photographs, collections of personal papers, and pieces of memorabilia. At some point the library became the repository of club records as well. Eventually it made sense to start storing other departmental records there as well, as they went out of current use.
When I arrived in 2005, it was apparent that we needed to manage the collections more as an Archive than as a Library. I was trained in museum collections management and library cataloging, so I combined those two practices and did a lot of independent study to figure out how to be an Archivist. Today the library collections are a minor part of the operation, the focus being primary source documents relating to the history of the club. The full title of the department is therefore the Appalachian Mountain Club Library & Archives. Our mission within the mission of the greater organization is to collect, preserve, and provide access to sources that document the history of AMC. We encourage and promote the use of these materials for teaching, learning, research and public service.
What are some of the items of interest in the archives?
In my opinion, one of the most interesting aspects of the collections is the completeness of some segments of our records. For example, we have all the minutes from every Council / Board of Directors meeting, dating back to the very first preliminary meetings around forming the club in 1876. It’s great that we have been able to keep that record intact for almost 150 years. There are many other wonderful collections on some of our camps and chapters that give a rich picture of their decades of activity.
A few individual items of interest include a recently donated journal of a party of six hikers who were trapped at Lakes of the Clouds Hut from September 25 to 30, 1915, by an early autumn snowstorm. The recently constructed hut opened to the public in August and was staffed by a single caretaker. It served as a refuge as the snowbound group waited out a multi-day blizzard. The party occupied its time by curling up under mountains of wool blankets, dancing around the hut to stay warm and carefully rationing their small food supply until the weather let up enough to make their escape.
The journal serves as a chilling counterpoint to a small summit logbook we have from Mount Pierce, a few miles down the Crawford Path from Lakes of the Clouds Hut. A logbook entry from June 30, 1900, records the signatures of William B. Curtis and Allan Ormsbee, on their way to a Field Meeting of the Appalachian Mountain Club at the Summit House on Mount Washington. The pair failed to turn back when the weather turned foul further up the trail. Curtis collapsed near Lakes of the Clouds while Ormsbee continued on, trying to reach help at the summit. Both died of exposure; Ormsbee about a quarter mile from the top. The following year an emergency shelter was built at Lakes of the Clouds. In 1915 the full-size hut was built, just in time to shelter six hikers in need.
And although we don’t intentionally collect a lot of three-dimensional objects (since we’re not a museum) a few curiosities have worked their way into the collection, including a piece of whale baleen collected during Admiral Richard E. Byrd’s first Antarctic Expedition of 1928-30. We are not entirely sure how it came to be in the Archives, but it is possible Arthur Walden of Tamworth, NH gave it to AMC after joining Byrd’s expedition as chief dog handler, bringing many of his Chinook sled dogs along to haul supplies.
What is your background and interest that led to becoming AMC archivist?
I have a background in art history and museum studies. My interest in history was driven a lot by my high school history teacher Tom White of Keene, NH. I’ve also always been a big fan of hiking, cross country skiing and paddling thanks to my parents who encouraged all my outdoor pursuits. In college I took my first summer job with AMC, working on crew at Bascom Lodge on Mount Greylock in Massachusetts. That led to seasons at Crawford Notch Hostel and Cardigan Lodge before going off to work in a couple museums and libraries in Boston and Vermont. When the role of AMC Archivist came along, I knew it would combine everything I love about working in the history field and outdoor recreation. It has definitely fulfilled that promise! Where else would I get to dress up as an early 20th century ‘tramper,’ hike to a hut and give a presentation on the history of the club based on primary source documents that we hold in the collections?
Any memorable requests or perhaps notable characters interested in info from the archives?
For many years I corresponded by air mail with a writer living in Barcelona, Spain who was working on several guidebooks to the Canadian Rockies. He would write long letters and lists of articles and other materials he was looking for and I would send back big packets of photocopies. I always found it absurd that he should be on the other side of the world from the place he was writing about, but his guidebooks are excellent and incredibly detailed!
Who can access archives and how
Folks can access materials in the Library & Archives in three different ways:
The first is through direct communication with me! Typically, I receive about 350 reference requests per year via email or phone ([email protected] or 603-374-8515). These run the gamut from requests for a single article from a back issue of Appalachia to locating all the primary sources we have on a topic for a major writing project. It could take an hour to fulfill a simple request, or we could correspond for months as we ferret out all the documents to be found.
For some requests (especially if they involve photographic materials) I refer folks to our online catalog at outdoors.catalogaccess.com. This is a giant, searchable database that holds just over 7,000 records of materials in the collections. Most are item-level records of individual photographic prints dating from the 1870s through about the 1940s that you can browse and get a clear look at. Numerous photo albums, scrapbooks and journals are listed here as well. It is ever-growing and I hope to have over 10K records in the system by the end of this year. Other records include finding guides to paper collections. This is a document that describes what is in a collection of papers with an inventory of files to help you locate material that might be of interest. The papers themselves are generally not in digital format and that may prompt you to use the third point of access…
Visiting the Library & Archives in person! They are generally open Thursdays through Sundays, 8am to 4pm. I strongly recommend folks make an appointment to visit in advance and contact me with specific research queries beforehand. That gives me the chance to a) find out if we have materials on your topic of interest, and b) be here to pull materials for you to see and help with any other questions you might have. Just dropping in to say hello is okay too, though I can’t say there’s a lot to see upfront. Plenty of boxes on shelves to look at if that makes your heart sing!
Any future projects?
With the Appalachian Mountain Club’s sesquicentennial coming up in 2026, I am in full research and writing mode, compiling as much of a comprehensive history as I can based on all our accumulated documents. From handwritten meeting minutes, reports in Appalachia, committee files, maps, architectural plans, memorabilia, press clippings in decades-old newspapers, the diaries of people on past AMC trips, and every other corner of our collections, I am mining the history in an attempt to tell our whole story. I will be working with our Communications Team over the next couple of years to develop an online resource of 150 years of AMC history. It’s going to be amazing!
Any other information you would like people to know?
I get asked quite a lot if we have “digitized everything yet.” Firstly, know that the Archives are working in that direction, but it does take an incredible amount of time and resources to create a complete digital copy of our holdings.
Picture a single photographic print. To ‘digitize’ it, you need a scanning device set up to capture the image as clearly as possible. Once the digital file is created, it must be named with a unique identifier tying it back to the original and everything about it recorded in a database. The file is in .tiff format (i.e. many megabytes of data) and a smaller reference copy needs to be made. The reference copy and all the info about the image is manually entered into our online catalog. The files themselves need to be carefully stored and backed up in multiple places to protect against the loss of files from disasters, technology obsolescence or digital storage failures. Now, multiply that process by tens of thousands of photographs and you’ll see the scope of that process and the huge amounts of resulting data to be stored and maintained. Throw in millions of pages of documents that could be run through optical character recognition (OCR) software or transcribed by hand so that the resulting text is searchable on the web, and you have a digital project of gargantuan proportions.
I plan to stick around for many years to come and although it’s a slow and costly process, I envision a time when many of our high priority and most sought-after collections are easily accessible on the web, and everyone can explore the simply astounding history of this organization.