Chloe McCormick, Richmond Public Library’s community memory fellow, in the Richmond Room (Photo by Ash Daniel)
One of the weirdest Richmond stories Chloe McCormick encountered since moving here last year from Indiana is about how the city’s first mayor, William Foushee, got an eye yanked out when he was younger by a Revolutionary War street tough. Then, being a physician, he managed to shove the dangling ball back into the socket.
The image makes her shudder a bit and laugh. “I’ve never lived anywhere so steeped in history,” she says.
McCormick is the Richmond Public Library’s community memory fellow, a one-year, grant-funded position through the Commonwealth History Fund, which is administered by the Virginia Museum of History & Culture. Her fellowship complements a five-year, $900,000 Mellon Foundation award to the century-old library to expand and modernize the Memory Lab at its Main Library branch. The Memory Lab is part of the national Memory Lab Network and Central Virginia’s first.
Recollective Powers
Library Director Scott Firestine puts it this way: “Say you find in your attic a shoebox full of photographs and you want to preserve them. Now, a shoebox can be a great way to do that — nothing beats the thing itself — but in terms of sharing that material and preserving it long term, we’ll be able to scan and digitize them.”
For those without resources to digitize their materials, they’ll be able to come to the library to get this accomplished, and not only pictures, but fragile documents, too. Oral histories are also part of this vision.
McCormick’s department has recorded 10 videos of library memories and more than 30 for patrons, who filled out forms that are available at the 100 tab on RPL’s website (rvalibrary.org/rpl-100/).
Stories About Stories
McCormick came across the posting for her position online in September 2022. Her degrees from the University of Indiana are in anthropology and urban folklore. Her training includes the presentation of traditional arts and culture using community input to organize festivals and exhibits, similar to arts administration and museum studies.
She felt the job description of a community memory fellow aligned well with her interests and experience.
Her fellowship placement coincided with the library’s centennial. McCormick went to work initiating the Stories and Memories Program and reorganized local history materials. This entailed consolidating collections and also diving into the depths of unexamined materials.
It turned out to be an immense yet rewarding task and, in some cases, revelatory.
Chapter and Verse
The new Richmond Room holds personal memories: Some patrons came to know the space as the children’s room and, most recently, the law library. The Richmond Room is also home to law, business and nonprofit resources. Law Librarian Charlie Schmidt leads a kind of tag-team effort running the Richmond Room.
McCormick consolidated the history collections and brought the Richmond City Directories to the first floor where patrons can, for example, trace the residents of their houses over the years.
Computer terminals are available with links to Ancestry Library, Heritage Hub, African American Genealogy Source and other family research databases.
The adjacent space, by the Gellman Room used for exhibitions and presentations, for years contained records and music that are now stored downstairs. Today, as McCormick says, “It’s affectionately called the Time Capsule Room.”
The time capsule is a box slid into an upper niche above neatly arranged, leather-bound volumes of curious and near-forgotten lore. Its contents are labeled as “Sealed Records of the Virginia Capital Bicentennial Commission To Be Opened In 2037 By The Tercentenary Commission.”
With McCormick’s guidance, the chamber has been lined with shelves of civic reports and rare or antique state and city histories. Vitrines display library artifacts that include, as signage indicates, “Old, Un-Digitized, Rare, Small & Hyper Local Publications.”
Also on display are documents and images of the Rosemary Library. The private reading room began in 1890, founded by Thomas Nelson Page, a “Moonlight and Magnolias” novelist and lawyer, to memorialize his wife, Ann Seddon Bruce Page, as the Rosemary Reading Club for Boys. The library grew and moved until its 1916 merger with then-downtown John Marshall High School. This library remained open in the evenings for after-work use by white adults.
Richmond was one of the last Southern cities to build a public library, due in part to services divided by race.
McCormick created the Ephemera Files after spending weeks in the basement sorting through newspaper clipping folders assembled by generations of librarians — “mountains of paper,” she says. “And, yes, basically I pulled out everything that wasn’t a newspaper clipping and categorized them. A lot of things we found as ephemera we didn’t know we had.”
Some of her finds are displayed in an exhibition, complete with QR codes.
While some items may seem obscure and niche, there’s no telling what a researcher on the hunt for an academic paper or trying to connect to a family member may need. “It’s absolutely like sleuthing,” McCormick says.
She often fields research questions, ranging from the name of a tobacco company on an old sign that a restorer is working on to the address of a missionary to China who had lived in Richmond. She answers what she can, but counsels, “I won’t claim to say that all the information I provide to patrons comes from our collection, but a big part of what I do is knowing how to navigate Richmond’s various historical institutions and pointing people in the correct direction.”
