Holding the key to shipyard ‘attic’

Curator find treasure as he inventories Navy artifacts

PORTSMOUTH, Va. — Rifles from the two world wars are lined up on a gun rack and old naval officers’ uniforms hang from an open wardrobe. There is a time clock that logged workers in and out of the shipyard 100 years ago. Cannon balls sit on the floor like rust-pocked bowling balls.

The windowless space on the second floor of the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard Museum may be the city’s best attic, and for the past two years, Corey Thornton has had the keys.

The assistant curator was charged with taking inventory of about 2,600 Navy artifacts on loan to the museum.

“I hesitate to even call it a job,” said Mr. Thornton, who just earned a graduate degree in history.

The work is part of an assessment that the Naval Historical Center has mandated for all museums with loaned items.

“The first thing I was doing was going, ’Wow, look at all the great stuff,’” he said.

His graduate studies focused on American social history of the 19th century, and he has a strong interest in the Civil War and Reconstruction era.

“You can see the dates on these,” he said, pointing to Civil War official records in the library. “So those kinds of things fascinate me.”

One of the artifacts that first caught his eye was the flag from the Hartford. Commissioned in 1858, the Hartford was the flagship of Adm. David G. Farragut, famous for the battle charge, “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.”

“I don’t know; it’s like a connection to an event that made history,” Mr. Thornton said. Everything in the room feels that way, down to the old wooden cabinets once used in the shipyard.

When Mr. Thornton started, there was hardly a path to maneuver around the collections area, he said. He has shifted things to make room for pallets that keep historical items off the floor.

Now there is a conservation area where he and other staff members work at tagging and storing items according to museum standards. Historical items have been photographed and entered into a database with additional information.

The 30-year-old, who is looking forward to a career of research and writing, has approached the work with barely contained glee.

Mr. Thornton took the lead on the inventory, which had not been done in 40 years, said Nancy Perry, director of the Portsmouth Museums.

“He’s done a wonderful, wonderful job,” she said.

With ongoing waterfront development, at some point the museum probably will be relocated from the foot of High Street, Miss Perry said. She thinks the collection should become part of a larger museum that tells the city’s whole story.

The shipyard museum needs better display cases, improved lighting and new and changing exhibits, she said. Many of the items in the collection are old photographs, including views of the shipyard in earlier times. One of the images shows wooden masts rising at the shipyard’s piers like a scene from Harborfest.

Weathered journals chronicle the daily details of shipbuilding, and aging documents tell of dry dock openings, even the evacuation of the Confederates from the shipyard.

Mr. Thornton picks up an archival box and lifts the top as if he is getting ready to reveal treasure. It’s the jacket of a Confederate private that was pulled for a Civil War exhibit at the Courthouse Galleries. The uniform has faded to a tan color.

“Being under blockade, the Confederacy didn’t have all the elements they needed to make proper dyes,” he said.

Mr. Thornton’s work frequently generates ideas for other exhibits. He is helping plan one on Portsmouth and the Revolutionary War. Another exhibit, to open during the Jamestown 2007 commemoration, will tell about the city’s growth during 400 years of shipbuilding. The exhibit will include artwork by shipyard workers.

There are huge paintings of ships and even the making of the CSS Virginia upstairs at the shipyard museum. Most were painted in the 1930s and 1940s by shipyard workers, he said. The paintings amaze him.

“They’re helping to build ships,” he said. “But these guys would go to work, and then in their spare time they would paint these pictures.”

Some of the ship models at the museum were made by workers, too, he said.

“So that’s another part of the artistic side of these guys,” he said.

Like everything else in this museum, it’s a part of the story that someone thought to pass on. It has made Mr. Thornton more mindful of his responsibility to make things available for future generations.

The loud ticktocking of a nearby 19th-century clock breaks the quiet — the music of time and preservation marching on.