STAMFORD — It will cost around $16,000, the town clerk has estimated, to restore and preserve a book full of Stamford documents from the 1700s.
So she recently appeared before the Finance Council and asked for it. And I got it.
Historic preservation has been a priority for City Clerk Lyda Ruijter. With a state grant, she hired a professional consultant several years ago to help her navigate the volumes that had been preserved in an abandoned former police building on Haig Avenue in Springdale.
The consultant also took a look at the books that are in the basement of the Stamford Government Center.
“There are quite a few books from before 1800 that are in very poor condition and have a lot of value,” Ruijter, who was first elected in 2017 and re-elected last year, told the Board of Finance.
The finance board and the board of representatives gave him the go-ahead to use $16,100 from a historic preservation fund to preserve one of the “miscellaneous” books in the archive.
“‘Miscellaneous’ at the time meant – everything,” Ruijter said, including tax and land records. “They have everything the city has decided.”
The miscellaneous books each come with a letter – A, B, C and so on. Two others have already been restored by the Northeast Document Conservation Center, the same organization that worked on a 1600s deed for the city.
Restoring the books – which involves cleaning the pages and repairing tears – cost more than $10,000 per volume.
“Part of the reason our vault is in shambles is that we don’t have funds and we don’t get enough of them,” Ruijter told the Stamford Advocate.
For historic preservation, the City Clerk’s Office has two sources of funding. Each year, the city receives a grant of approximately $10,000 from the state for the preservation of historic documents. Additionally, Ruijter said, his office receives $1 for certain transactions, and that money goes into a historical preservation fund.
She said she would like to see state law changed so that the amount of money set aside for the historic preservation fund is based on a percentage instead of a dollar amount.
In the meantime, she’s working with the University of Connecticut’s history department to assess the archives.
Caroline Nicholson, a sophomore at UConn with an interest in historical books, recently joined two of her professors for a tour of the vault.
Nicholson said she was trying to help Ruijter’s preservation efforts by writing letters “explaining why these books are important and why they need to be protected,” which Ruijter could then use to try to get additional grants, said. she declared.
“We’ve also talked about creating an index to make all of the material easier to access,” said Nicholson, who is seeking a double major in history and political science. “But it would be a very, very, very huge project, and it’s really me kind of helping him, at least for now.”