A Century of History Solved With Efficient Archival Storage

Blithewold Mansion, located in Bristol, Rhode Island, was once the summer home of the Van Wickle family. After a fire destroyed the original shingle-style house in 1906, it was rebuilt in stone as an English Country-style manor. Originally, the property boasted over 70 acres of land located on the shores of Narragansett Bay and included a tennis court, golf course, arboretum, and extensive gardens. Bessie Van Winkle and her daughter Marjorie were keen horticulturists and remembered for their gardening accomplishments.

Today, anyone who visits the home will see it almost exactly as it was in 1910. Recreated from family photographs, the rooms are arranged as they might have been over 100 years ago, with all of the original furnishings and most of the original wallpapers. The gardens also remain much as they were designed over a century ago.

One of the most interesting things about the Mansion is the wide breadth of history that has been preserved by the families who have occupied it. Margaret Whitehead, the Curator at Blithewold, has been in her position for 23 years—and over the years, has worked to amass a collection of over 8,000 letters and 5,000 photographs in addition to diaries, costumes, and artwork.

With the collection growing each year, Whitehead and her preservation team knew they needed a better way to keep track of all of the materials being stored. When cataloging each piece was not enough, they looked at ways to create better archival storage solutions within their limited space. “We wanted to put our storage in a better position for retrieval,” Whitehead explains.

That’s where we came in. Working with Whitehead and the Mansion’s management team, we measured all of the box sizes most frequently used in the archival storage space as well as all of the objects in the collection, and came up with a plan for three of the facility’s rooms. Turning a closet space, an unused hallway, and an old bathroom into storage space, we were able to utilize static, museum-grade shelving in the existing footprint, making it possible for the Mansion to do something else they’d been wanting to do for a long time—make the move to an electronic cataloging system.

“Having every item’s information on a computer means that anyone who comes in can figure out where a piece is and find it very quickly,” Whitehead says. Items that are alike—such as letters, photographs, and the Van Wickle’s horticulture information are kept together and in chronological order. Each piece is now safe, accessible, and in logical sequence for interpretation, which makes it easier for Whitehead and other employees to compare and cross-reference material.

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