What’s the story behind the Charlotte County deteriorated loose court records housed in a miniature Plexiglas display case?
The answer to this mystery begins (or ends) with misappropriated Charlotte County circuit court records. The sources used to solve this mystery were found in the Library of Virginia’s Locality Receipt Files. The Locality Receipt Files, maintained by the Library’s Local Records Services, contain correspondence, receipts, and other documents related to Virginia’s city and county court records, the clerks, and their interactions with Library of Virginia archivists. Admittedly, the files are spotty the farther back in time we go, but they can be a good source of information when trying to nail down when records were conserved, microfilmed, inventoried, or transferred to the Library. Generally speaking, they offer a wealth of institutional information regarding court records and are a good paper trail between the clerks’ offices and Library of Virginia staff members going back to the 1920s, and in some cases, even earlier.
The deteriorated Charlotte County loose records in question are housed in a miniature display case and are used to demonstrate what can go wrong when proper preservation and environmental standards are not met. If the documentation in the Locality Receipt Files is complete, it should be simple enough to find out when they were transferred to the Library of Virginia.
On July 8, 1982, Louis Manarin, the state archivist at the Virginia State Library and Archives (now the Library of Virginia) wrote to the Charlotte County clerk of the circuit court, Stuart Fallen, informing him that the records transferred from his office to the Library had been processed and he would provide a final inventory of the material. He indicated that, unfortunately, there “was about one cubic foot of loose papers out of the bottom of the wooden box which were too badly damaged to be flat filed and saved.” So, I guess that ends the story. But maybe not.
The records were processed at the Library, but when were they transferred? It should be added that wooden boxes are not generally considered “archival quality containers.” To solve this mystery, I began something akin to backwards citation chaining. I found the end result (processed and inventoried) and began working my way backwards through the correspondences to get to the true source (transfer). But there was even more to the story.
Louis H. Manarin to Stuart B. Fallen, November 03, 1980
Library of Virginia Locality Receipt File, Charlotte County.
On November 3, 1980, over two years earlier, Manarin sent a note to Fallen acknowledging receipt of the “Charlotte County loose papers recovered from the Smiths.” The state archivist added that the records had been removed from the “wooden box” and had been “fumigated.” The Locality Receipt Files also include the court order from Judge J. R. Snoddy Jr. which ordered the “loose papers presently stored in the Clerk’s Office which were recovered in the case of Commonwealth vs. a county employee,” sent to the state archivist at the Virginia State Library, where they will be placed “with the papers previously delivered to him by the Clerk of the City of Williamsburg.”
It was “further Ordered that the State Archivist shall keep and maintain said records at the Virginia State Library until further Order of this Court.” OK, but who was the county employee? And why did the judge order the Charlotte County records “placed” with the records sent to the Library by the clerk in Williamsburg? What records was the City of Williamsburg/James City County circuit court clerk sending (and why combine them with the Charlotte County court records)? The plot thickens!
Documents in the Locality Receipt Files reveal a series of confusing and dubious events that led up to the transfer of these Charlotte County court records to the state library in 1980. Pieced together, it goes something like this: In late 1978, Manarin telephoned the Charlotte County circuit court clerk, Stuart Fallen, to make him aware that Charlotte County court records were turning up with manuscript dealers in the Tidewater area and that a Charlotte County employee and his wife were identified as the persons offering them for sale. The clerk began investigating and in court testimony later acknowledged that, while he had performed an inventory of the records in the upstairs storage area, he had not done so with the records in the basement, which included “loose papers, mostly old executions, commissions, and receipts that were … stored in wooden boxes.” The records in the basement appeared to have been claimed by no one in the courthouse, causing a local genealogist in 1975 to conclude that, “documents were going to waste under the clerk’s office.” According to one newspaper account, the basement space served as a furnace room and was subject to flooding. The wife of the former clerk, Edwin Hoy, stated that the records in the basement “had never been designated as records of the clerk’s office” and she described them as, “very much in disarray.”
'Case' of Missing Papers Creates Quite a Stir
Daily Press (Newport News, VA), December 07, 1980.
These convenient, somewhat flimsy interpretations of the ownership of what are obviously public records, an interpretation that appears to have been shared throughout the courthouse, inspired a county employee to, at his wife’s behest, bring some of the papers in the basement, “home for her to read.” After she was finished reading them, she took them to a manuscript dealer in the Tidewater area, who sold them to another dealer who, wanting to confirm their authenticity, reached out to the state archivist.
When confronted with the allegations, the county employee at first denied but later admitted taking the documents. The sheriff went to the couple’s home in Blackstone, where the wife “gave him a number of papers, some loose and some tied in bundles.” According to a newspaper account, “No explanation of how these papers came into the wife of the county employee’s possession was given.” The defense attorney described the basement where they were removed as “a repository for just about everything county officials had no immediate use for, including items that were being held in evidence by the Sheriff’s department.”
A trial was held in Charlotte County Circuit Court and both the clerk and the state archivist testified, among others. In his testimony, Manarin stated that he had been contacted by representatives from Colonial Williamsburg and the Virginia Historical Society who were suspicious when the county employee attempted to sell the documents to them. He also said that he had briefly inspected the basement area and noted the “condition of the papers from water damage, insects, rodents and ages. Some of the bottom layers in the box of papers,” he said, “had turned to pulp.”
A Subpoena for the State Archivist to Appear as Witness
Library of Virginia Locality Receipt Files, Charlotte County
During a 1980 trial deposition, 87-year-old Emily Holmes Watkins stated that fifteen or twenty years earlier, she and three others had gone through the “old papers” and determined that “they didn’t seem to be of any particular value.” She said that they “salvaged some” and took them to the Virginia Historical Society, “not knowing any better place to keep them.” She acknowledged that those doing these amateur appraisals took records that were of interest to them, knowing that whatever remained “was going to be thrown away.”
Charges against those who purchased the records were dropped and those items were “surrendered” to the City of Williamsburg/James City County circuit court clerk (and were eventually transferred to the state library). On September 5, 1980, the county employee and his wife, who had been charged with the theft and sale of public documents belonging to Charlotte County were found not guilty. It appears that, at least in these instances, the people who were involved in the removal, sale, and purchase of these public records were off the hook.
And that’s the story behind the Charlotte County deteriorated loose court records housed in a miniature Plexiglas display case.
Charlotte Co. Records:
I’m from Clarke Co. Va. and even though our Clerk of the Court and her predecessors were very sensitive to preserving records, I once found that one of county’s earliest Order Books, which I had used multiple times and wrote down notes on certain events I was interested in, this Order Book suddenly vanished in thin air. Needless to say, the Clerk of the Court was as baffled as I was. The only explanation is that someone had somehow smuggled this book out of the courthouse without being noticed. Why this book was stolen, which was quite large, is likely because this book contained the earliest account of the events in 1836 when Clarke was formed from Frederick Co. Va. So, even though the guardians of these records were honest and diligent, it shows that such historical records as those found in a courthouse can disappear without ever an explanation as to how and who.
As for the state of Virginia, they have ordered certain things in their possession to be removed and burned, rather than to give them to an organization or person who wanted to preserve a record. An example of what was ordered to be burned, were old election district voter registration books. One such book showed the names of some of the first African Americans who registered to vote after the Constitution provided them the right to vote. In this case, strangely enough, these books disappeared before they were burned and found their way to a proper home for them. I guess those who say that God works in mysterious ways might be onto something.