Scrapbooks hold keys to unlocking county history By CAROL U. SISLER Special to The (Ithaca) Journal Jan 25, 2003 In the collection of the Tompkins County Museum are 440 scrapbooks; some are fragile, some are sturdy, and one is made of fabric. The oldest is an account book dated 1823 whose pages are covered with poems and news articles. Another is dated 1857 with newspaper clippings about Abraham Lincoln. Lacking access to books, I think people maintained these early scrapbooks with meaningful clippings so they could read them over and over. Toward the end of the 19th century, prominent Tompkins County residents clipped the newspapers and pasted the articles in their scrapbooks to use as a reference. For instance, J.W. Dwight's scrapbook dated around 1880 contains local articles and stories about his experiences in Dakota territory. He was a prominent resident of Dryden. Arthur G. Adams, Ithaca lawyer and father of the late Armand L. Adams, kept a scrapbook from 1897 to 1918 and George R. Williams, lawyer and businessman, saved clippings from 1877 to 1881. Composed of decorative cotton on which animal pictures were pasted, the fabric scrapbook was made for 2-year-old Priscilla C. Ogden, as a Christmas present in 1901. Other scrapbooks record pleasurable events such as Edward G. Wyckoff's 1896 trip to the Henley Regatta in England. Among the many Cornell scrapbooks is that of F.J. Knight, a member of the first class, which contains programs, class schedules and checks during his student years, 1869 to 1873. There are five scrapbooks containing ads, reviews and flyers from the Star Theater, dated 1908 to 1917. Eight scrapbooks contain wedding descriptions from 1899 to 1945 and nine include obituaries from 1857 to 1945. One of my favorites is the Pee Wee hockey record maintained by the late Clayton Smith because it contains a photograph of my son Steve, who played on the Mosquito level Blue Lions team in 1967. In 1935, the late J. Lawrence Smith, an Ithaca meat cutter and devoted Boy Scout leader, began a newspaper clipping scrapbook which continued until 1983 and included 64 books. In December 1989, I started clipping the newspapers for stories of local interest and my count is up to 25. As valuable as the scrapbooks are for the historical record, they were unusable for a researcher because they were not indexed. I began that task about 1990, slowly typing the article headline onto 3 x 5 index cards and placing them into logical topics like aviation, Ithaca Commons, Enfield, NYSEG, taxes, World War II. They now fill three drawers in the card index file and a fourth is needed. While the scrapbooks are a wonderful research source, they also provide a yearly record of what has happened in Tompkins County. For instance, a friend who was away during the 1980s caught up with the news by thumbing through the 1985, 1987, and 1989 scrapbooks. Recently, the county museum received funding from the New York State Library's discretionary grant program to preserve the scrapbooks by stabilizing them as needed and placing them in custom-designed boxes. But first -- what's in the unindexed scrapbooks? Volunteers are going through them page by page, noting on special reference sheets certificates, programs, photographs which should be added to the scrapbook index. Recently, Ithaca native John Perko found a photograph from about 1934 of his Cub Scout troop, which was sponsored by Beebe Chapel and the Veterans of Foreign Wars. Everett Morse was chuckling as he recognized so many familiar names, and staff member Louise Matosich found herself in a photograph of Camp Fire Girls. These scrapbooks are real treasures. Carol U. Sisler is a local author and Board Advisor to the DeWitt Historical Society.