My blog just passed its third birthday, so here I am with my annual round-up of unexpected archival discoveries, anything from photos to drawings to letters. (Check out the first two round-ups here and here.)
A photo album was literally found in the attic of T.S. Eliot’s family home.
How would you like to find this in your garage — a Revolutionary War-era pamphlet by Thomas Paine (one of five copies known to have survived)?
City officials who were restoring the former home of self-taught artist James Castle (1899-1977) found never-seen-before drawings hidden in the walls. (In 2010 the previous owner found 150 artworks in the ceiling!)
While looking through some old boxes at his home in Surrey, England, David Hadfield found a cassette tape with the forgotten sole copy of David Bowie’s first song.
A curator at the Honolulu Museum of art discovered “a rare 19th-century manual on Japanese art that he didn’t even know existed in the museum archives.”
The earliest reference to tea in England was found on a note to an apothecarist dated 1644 in the West Yorkshire archives.
A collection of letters by Julia Rush, wife of American Founding Father Benjamin Rush, was discovered in a small library in Philadelphia.
Pretty sure there’s nothing valuable in our attic now. In the house we bought in Syracuse, years ago, we found a box of dirty dishes, carefully boxed up, a set a skis, and a huge brandy snifter full of change and a gold wedding band. The previous owner had agreed to store those things for a friend who never came back to retrieve them.
What a strange assortment!