Documents that survived the Great Fire sit in a climate-controlled vault in the state archives. But it will take special technology to decipher them.
What could be among the oldest surviving Chicago city records sit inside a special climate-controlled vault at the Illinois State Archives, largely indecipherable.
These are volumes that survived the Great Chicago Fire 150 years ago. Some appear to contain early property assessments or official confirmations. One is in a box labeled “General Ordinances A, March 4, 1837 to July 8, 1851,” potentially dating back to Chicago’s incorporation as a city.
But they are blackened and damaged from the fire, and what exactly they contain remains unknown. It could take infrared technology to read their contents and determine their legal, genealogical and historic implications.
“The fact is they’re legal records, and you never know what kind of a situation might arise where you need these records,” said Dave Joens, director of the state archives.
They are not the only city records that survived the fire, but these volumes are believed to have ridden out the flames inside a safe, where they were “baked” in the heat instead of turning to ash. The pages are crisp, and some are shattered into pieces.
They likely arrived at the state archives in the early 1970s, after workers in the Chicago city clerk’s office found them in a warehouse, the archives told the Tribune in 1987.
Today, they are stored in large wooden boxes in an extra-secure vault, where the temperature and humidity are controlled to prevent further deterioration. The vault is where what Joens calls the “holiest of holies” are stored, including documents related to Abraham Lincoln, all versions of the Illinois state constitution, correspondence with presidents and every act passed by the Illinois General Assembly.
“You hesitate to even move those (Chicago documents), quite honestly,” Joens said. “But it might behoove us at this point to go through and see a little more about what’s there.”
With the Chicago documents stable in their vault, the archives is waiting for technology similar to what’s being used at the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis to become more widely available. There, experts are piecing together military records badly damaged in a 1973 fire.
Specialists use infrared photography to read some of the charred documents, said Noah Durham, a supervisory preservation specialist with the National Archives who oversees the lab working to recover the documents. Carbon-based ink on the charred pages absorbs the infrared spectrum while the paper reflects it, so the infrared process makes the ink show up or become more legible.
Infrared technology has been around for decades. It was used to recover content from the ancient Dead Sea Scrolls, ancient manuscripts found near the Dead Sea, and in forensic work, such as investigating check forgeries, Durham said.
But the technology in St. Louis is more advanced. Around 2015, the facility got a customized infrared camera that provided a sharper digital image and automated some of the process, allowing the work to be replicated on a larger scale.
The St. Louis fire and efforts to put it out destroyed as many as 18 million military personnel records, and about 6 million have been recovered. But only some of the records are candidates for the infrared process.
That is partly because it works on pages with intact char, which is difficult to find on paper that turns to ash when exposed to flame. Baked paper, such as the early Chicago records, would likely have this type of char, and could be a good fit for the infrared process, Durham said.
More difficult would be separating fragile pages that have fused together, which would be necessary for the infrared process to work, he said. Broken pages would need to be pieced back together.
Another challenge could be the cost. The custom equipment in St. Louis runs between $60,000 and $80,000, but smaller, consumer equipment is available for about $2,000, he said.
Future technology could break some of those barriers, Durham said. For example, one day, instead of manually piecing together shattered pages, an algorithm might be used to connect digital images of document fragments.
If that technology ever comes, it would take the right justification to use it, he said. But the broad research value of the Chicago documents might call for it.
