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“It was a nightmare,” Hoyt, a member of the Windsor Historical Society, recalled. “You used to pull out a newspaper volume and there would be mouse droppings on it. It was nasty.”
Though it was open and used, the space remained uninviting over the years and continued to deteriorate with mold and mildew getting progressively worse.
“You could be in here, but it wasn’t pleasant,” Tom Haushalter, president of the library’s board of trustees, said. “Nobody booked it for space.”
A few years ago, the trustees decided to undertake a renovation project and on Thursday evening, celebrated the completion of the work with an open house.
Hoyt was more than impressed with the transformation.
“Wow, this is fantastic,” she said to Haushalter, while marveling at the bright, clean appearance. “The windows are beautiful. The walls are not crumbling and look at all the light. Now we have a usable room. You did such a nice job.”
Nearby, Pamela Bagley, a library trustee, was equally impressed.
“It is almost unrecognizable from what it was,” said Bagley.
Added her mother, Alice Bagley, a library volunteer, “It wasn’t a space you wanted to go into.”
In a couple of weeks, the historical society’s collection of old newspapers, dating to the early 1800s, will come out of storage and go back on the shelving in the room, said Library Director Christine Porter.
The renovated area of about 430 square feet includes a meeting room across the hall. It will have video conferencing capabilities with a large, flat screen TV mounted on the wall.
“I am so glad to see this happen. The transformation has been amazing. This opens up a lot of possibilities and gives us more usable space,” said Porter, explaining that meetings upstairs in the middle of the library’s main room can be disruptive to other patrons.
The library has other pressing needs, including the addition of an elevator and a handicap-accessible bathroom, but the trustees agreed a few years ago it would be more prudent to address existing space problems before trying to tackle the more expensive plan, Haushalter said.
“We felt like this was the responsible thing to do. This is a victory for us at the library and for all of Windsor. These (newspapers) are a valuable resource for anyone doing research.”
Before renovations began in early January, Porter said she and a volunteer spent a couple of months cleaning a considerable mess out of both rooms, from mold and mouse droppings to items that sat untouched on shelves for decades. Haushalter described the two rooms, entered through a door from the children’s room, as “moldy and musty, dark and inaccessible.”
Contractors stripped both rooms to the stone foundation, removing old paneling and shelves, then put up new walls with moisture-resistant foam insulation along with new ceilings, recessed lighting, duct work and carpeting.
In the documents room, three separate wooden shelving racks that hold the bound newspaper volumes were refurbished. The largest stands against one wall and has four glass doors on the top section. Another sits about waist high in the middle of the room with a refinished oak top. Haushalter said the contractor, Nick Carter of Carter & Carter Construction in Windsor, recut the shelving sections so the newspapers will be stored horizontally instead of vertically.
The roughly $30,000 needed for the work came from multiple sources, including two donors and a fundraising campaign from area businesses.
“There was a lot of local support,” said Porter.
While library patrons can view newspaper back issues using a microfiche machine on the main floor, the editions in the documents room are from an earlier time and include The Vermont Chronicle, the Vermont Republican, the Windsor Federal Gazette and Washingtonian, all published in Windsor in the 19th century, and The Vermont Journal, from the 19th and 20th centuries.
The documents room is open to the public, but Porter said patrons will have to be supervised in the handling of the newspapers because of their fragile condition.
“We want to preserve them as long as possible.”
The trustees’ next project could be an adjoining storage room where the library’s furnace is located, Haushalter said. He envisions a smaller furnace moved to a corner of the room separated by new walls with an area that could be used for a meeting room or other purposes.
Among the people who attended the open house was Diane Foulds, who came to Windsor just three years ago from Burlington.
Though she didn’t have the perspective of recalling what the historic documents’ room looked like, Foulds said she is glad Windsor’s past will be more accessible.
“I think it is important because Windsor has so much history,” Foulds said while enjoying some of the evening’s refreshments. “I am beginning to appreciate how far back it goes, its nuances and ramifications, from manufacturing to democracy. Scratch it and unbelievable things emerge.”
Patrick O’Grady can be reached at pogclmt@gmail.com.
