Death of a Non-Profit: A Lesson to be Learned...

From The Concord Monitor: Archaeologist's cache passes to museum One million artifacts are now being sorted By CHELSEA CONABOY Monitor staff April 18, 2008 - 7:16 am A portrait of Howard Sargent, one of the state's pre-eminent archaeologists, hangs on the wall near the entrance of the Mount Kearsarge Indian Museum in Warner. Soon, the result of Sargent's work - a little bit at a time, at least - will fill the exhibits there. The museum, which had a collection of about 2,000 American Indian artifacts, recently acquired Sargent's collection. All 1 million pieces. The museum became the court-appointed successor to the collection after the nonprofit that controlled it was dissolved over mismanagement. During the next several months, board members and volunteers will sort through the many boxes to prepare an exhibit for the public scheduled to open Sept. 19. Sargent's collection is valuable for its vastness and documentation, said State Archaeologist Richard Boisvert. It includes Sargent's field notes and artifacts from 66 sites in New Hampshire covering more than 12,000 years of prehistoric life in New Hampshire. Some of the pieces, like an almost-translucent quartz arrowhead or an intricately etched clay pot, are tangible relics. Other pieces - bags of soil, chips of rock or containers of plant and bone remains - won't likely be on display but could draw attention from graduate students and researchers. "It isn't just the artifacts, it's the records that go with the artifacts that make it so valuable," Boisvert said. "Howard's collection has the context. We know how deep things were. We know what goes with what." From boyhood growing up in Georges Mills, Sargent dreamed about running a museum. When he died in 1993 at age 71 of an acute asthma attack, he had amassed a huge collection from this state and others, earned recognition as the grandfather of New Hampshire archaeology, and written no will. A nonprofit formed to build a museum. The group acquired the historic Old High School on Lowell Street in Manchester and planned to renovate it. In 2005, the attorney general's office asked the probate court to dissolve the nonprofit's board. According to court documents, the group had effectively stopped operating. Reduced from the required five members to three, the documents said, the board had stopped holding meetings and done nothing with the Manchester building, even after receiving a grant from the state Land and Community Heritage Investment Program. The artifacts remained away from the public eye in a state building on Airport Road in Concord. The court appointed Todd Fahey, a lawyer with Orr and Reno, to decide what to do with the collection. He said he and state officials considered sending the collection to the Smithsonian or another national museum. "We felt that this was a New Hampshire collection that needed to stay within the boundaries of New Hampshire," he said. Fahey called the Warner museum an "ideal match" because of its focus on Native American history and its connection to Howard Sargent, who had been a founding trustee and friend to owners Bud and Nancy Thompson. Now, Executive Director Krista Katz and others face the welcome task of sorting through the collection and determining what will be displayed from the museum's collection of canoes, beaded garments, baskets and birch-bark containers. "This provides a depth to the story that we didn't have before," she said. There are 900 boxes in all. Of those, 160 boxes containing artifacts from the important Smyth dig near Amoskeag Falls are headed to the Manchester Historic Association on permanent loan. The rest fill Katz's office, the museum library, and a just-built storage area. "This is almost like its own little excavation," Katz said. Katz cracked open a few boxes yesterday. One contained bits of rock wrapped in manila paper and buried in Boston Globe newspapers from 1997. Another contained bags full of envelopes labeled with dig sites and details. One box was curiously labeled, "Peruvian, Bolivian, Egyptian stuff. Contemporary trash." Its contents included pottery pieces from Peru, a tiny carved terra cotta bust from Egypt and a Schlitz beer can. Boisvert, the state archaeologist, was a sophomore in high school when he met Sargent. Sargent was digging the Hunter site in Claremont, a deep dig that revealed layers of civilization, and Boisvert convinced him to let him help. He said Sargent, then a professor at Franklin Pierce College, had an "overgrown sense of responsibility" to history. He was an archaeologist in a time when there was little grant money available for digs and even less for preserving and analyzing what was found. His home became his storage, he said. In field journals, Sargent wrote about embarking on digs, setting up camp, learning about the locals, and a day when the crew started drinking beer at 9 a.m. He wrote about lobbying for the establishment of a state archaeologist's office, and he left artifacts of his own. "The price of gasoline is awful; 29.5 cents per gallon for regular, 31.5 for high test," he wrote in July 1951. [LOL! Actually, he was right. I remember gasoline prices averaging about 23.5 cents per gallon during my high school years, 1966 - 1969.] Bud Thompson said Sargent's wife told him once that he considered the Warner museum "his museum." "I'm sure he's smiling," Thompson said.