Titanic talents get city history
Saturday, January 22, 2005
By JOHN PECK
Times Staff Writer jpeck@htimes.com

For half a century, tokens from Huntsville's yesteryear were buried in a time capsule to be exhumed in 2005 when the city turned 200. Thursday, the time capsule was unearthed, its sealed bags dripping muck as they were plucked from their grave on the southeast lawn of the Madison County Courthouse.

The items are now in a freezer in preparation for an 800-mile trip to the same documents processing company in New York that helped dry artifacts from the Titanic. There, a cryogenic vacuum freeze process will extract any moisture and then reacclimate the materials for public display.

Huntsville Bicentennial organizers say the delay is worth it given the historic nature of the documents. "I feel good about what we're doing," said Mary Jane Caylor, director of the Huntsville Bicentennial Commission. Among the items are school rosters, a film reel, future predictions, sesquicentennial memorabilia and letters from local business executives, military officials and elected officials to their counterparts in 2005.

Document Reprocessors Inc. of Middlesex, N.Y., near Rochester, will process the contents. Caylor said she's especially happy that a company reputable enough to have worked on Titanic artifacts has agreed to do the job for free. The only cost to Huntsville bicentennial planners is for shipping. The items are sealed in thin pouches made from then state-of-the-art material. Caylor said she hopes the wraps remained air and water tight.

Eric Lundquist, president of Document Reprocessors Inc., said he was familiar with Huntsville when contacted by The Times at his company's headquarters in San Francisco on Friday. He and his wife made separate trips as chaperones when their children attended Space Camp at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center roughly a decade ago. Lundquist said he's glad to help out. "I do yearbooks and Bibles at no charge. This seemed to fall into that category," he said. Friday, Caylor, Jim Poff of the city's landscape management division, and bicentennial planner Sharon Tyson and others gingerly transferred the items into individual plastic bags. The bags were then placed in cold storage until Monday when they will be shipped, still frozen, to the New York firm.

Lundquist said the contents will be opened individually and immediately placed in a cryogenic freezer chilled to minus 50 degrees. Using a patented process called Thermaline vacuum freeze drying, the items will be gently introduced to heat to help vaporize the frozen moisture. The vapor is removed by a specially designed vacuum pump. Founded about 25 years ago, Document Reprocessors has restored water-damaged X-rays, rare books and family photos, computer discs, even relics from the Titanic.

In 2002, the company got a call from historic preservationists at Eastern Michigan University wanting to deliver some artifacts from the Titanic for restoration. The luxury ocean liner sank April 15, 1912, and remained undiscovered until 1985. Postcards, books, ticket stubs, photographs and a suitcase full of possessions were among the articles the firm processed. Lundquist said the drying process typically takes a week to 10 days in the deep freeze. When the time capsule items return to Huntsville, they'll be displayed at the historic Weeden House downtown. The Feb. 1 target date for the public display to begin may be delayed a week or so because of the restoration process.