Vault, city clerk unexpected guardians of Cd'A history

COEUR d’ALENE — Hanging on a steel door at the end of a second-floor hallway at City Hall boasts the non-descript label “Vault.”

Inside, amid the artificial light of the windowless, fire-safe room, City Clerk Renata McLeod’s cheerful personality shined an even brighter-than-usual smile as she stood among the vault’s dusty and deteriorating contents.

“In my youth I worked for a city attorney,” McLeod said. “So I knew these existed.”

“These” — tucked away in the upper corner of a room lined with file folders, office supplies and the occasional stack of paper plates — are volumes upon volumes of leather-bound books detailing the infancy of the city’s government.

“You can see it here,” she pointed out, opening what turned out to be the first Coeur d’Alene council notes ever recorded. “See that? See that fancy handwriting? That cursive? It’s amazing. It’s just gorgeous.”

Just as McLeod now summarizes every Coeur d’Alene City Council meeting, these books kept in a corner of City Hall once detailed Coeur d’Alene’s earliest years. The book she held in her hand, for example — “Book One,” she called it — documented the first city ordinances and meeting notes from 1887 to 1891.

“Here,” she highlighted with a delicate turn of the page. “These are the city’s articles of incorporation.”

McLeod said she is by no means the only person to marvel at the historical artifacts. She said the documents have served as a resource for many local historians looking to more closely examine the earliest days of Coeur d’Alene.

“For me, really, it’s helping other people find stuff,” she said. “It’s really turned into a library of sorts for folks that are really looking for specific city government stuff that happened in the past. [Mayor Steve Widmyer] went through these for his State of the City address. But people get fascinated by this. I think sometimes you get absorbed when you start reading. You start on a thing and discover, ‘They were talking about what back then? I gotta see how this ends.’ So I think a lot of people get sucked in. You can just get absorbed.”

McLeod said Coeur d’Alene’s past, detailed through exquisite penmanship and careful craftsmanship, can actually be measured to a certain degree through the books themselves, albeit often spelling out more questions than answers.

“Imagine Coeur d’Alene back in the late 1800s,” she said. “Who did they have back then who was doing leather binding? How did they put these together?”

As time went on and life in Coeur d’Alene improved from its Wild West infancy, so too did the technology behind the city books. Clerks and their staffs eventually switched from glue bindings to a metal hook-and-hinge system, allowing for easier page insertion. The proliferation of the typewriter eliminated the need for handwritten dictation. It was only after page turners noticed another technological advance — the switch of typewriter ink from black to blue — that McLeod realized there was a problem.

“The handwritten [books] seem to be holding up better than the typewritten ones,” she said. “Then, at some point, they switched to a blue type print. We saw that the blue print is diminishing even worse than the black print. That’s what started us on this project: We started seeing this blue print, and we said, ‘Oh, it’s disappearing. We have got to do something to protect this data.’”

McLeod said she and staff have casually brainstormed since she first took her position as clerk eight years ago about somehow restoring the books. But in the last year — since noticing how the blue print has begun to fade and how the spines are starting to fall apart — the conversation and priorities switched from eventual restoration to the more immediate push to salvage what was written through digitization.

“We contracted that out to a company,” she said. “They have flat scanners, so they’re able to put the books down and flat-scan each page. And then they’re trying to [use optical character recognition] so people can do searches on them by word.”

That company — Integra Paperless Business Solutions — has seen its share of history, as well: The Boise firm started out as Mountain State Microfilm in 1975. Integra’s Lisa Kruger said dealing with historical books as old as Coeur d’Alene’s requires extra attention.

“Scanning the old handwriting like that and making it searchable is tricky,” Kruger said. “It takes special technology and special care. We want to make sure we maintain the integrity of the books. So we handle them with special care. We have special book scanners to scan the pages right in the book without having to take it apart. That preserves the integrity.”

The digitization process is just beginning and will likely take upward of a year to complete, according to McLeod. The reason? The clerk admitted the biggest delay was an unexpected complication stemming from transporting the books from here to Boise: her own fear-driven paralysis. It’s a problem she said she looks to overcome before city staff hand-delivers the next few books in the stack to Kruger and her team.

“We are very protective of these books,” McLeod said. “It’s not like I’m shipping them through the mail. Anytime [someone from our staff is] going down to Boise, I ask, ‘Hey, can you take a couple books in your carry-on?’ Not even in the luggage. It’s physically going on carry-on with them … It’s just a little terrifying to let go of them. So that’s our plan.”

She said that while the books are available for the public to view, the procedure is vastly different than checking out a book from the library next door. Interested parties can call McLeod, at which point the clerk will arrange an appointment time and appropriate place for viewing the artifacts. Don’t be surprised, however, if the answer is no.

“We’re trying to keep [viewing traffic] to a minimum,” she said. “The bindings are really starting to break down. They’re carrying a lot of history.”

McLeod said the volumes open up a unique window to Coeur d’Alene’s past.

“You can see almost immediately, they’re talking about the rules of how to run a city,” she said. “The ordinances and resolutions they’re going over: issues like how many cows you could have, and where you can have them. Here they talked about houses of ill-repute.”

As steward of the books and the effort to save them from the ashes of time, she said looking back at that history captivates her imagination.

“I can’t even imagine,” she said. “In the 1800s they were changing over from a military encampment to becoming a town. And it was so small.

“It’s a different day and age. Now we have to worry about how many tables you can fit on a sidewalk. That wasn’t even a thought to them back in the 1800s. I think it tells me Coeur d’Alene evolved probably just as it should have, as a city that’s this tiny little thing growing. You just couldn’t have predicted then to where we are now, just like we can’t imagine what it’s like to go back from now to then.”

Except, she added, through those books behind the vault.