News
The New Bedford Whaling Museum has been awarded a federal grant to catalog and preserve more than 1,800 books and ledgers spanning a century of financial activity at the Merchants Bank.
The $147,500 grant was announced Wednesday at a news conference held at the whaling museum's research library on Purchase Street and attended by Rep. Barney Frank and other elected officials.
"This is going to allow us to tell the story of capitalism," said James Russell, president of the whaling museum. "It's a window into our history at a very detailed and intimate level."
The museum's grant was one of 167 awards given out by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, which received 433 applications for the competitive Museums for America grant program, according to a release on the institute's Web site.
The grant awards were first announced in July, according to the institute's release.
"We have needs that are best met by money in our own pocket," said Frank, D-Mass., during the news conference. "But we have needs as a civilized people ... that can only be met if we pool our resources."
Frank said people have fallen into the habit of denigrating government across the board.
However, there are projects — such as the preservation of the Merchants Bank financial records — in which government, society's pooled resources, plays an important role, according to Frank.
"No tax cut could have saved these records," he said.
The grant will create three new jobs at the museum — two archivists and a consultant with expertise in historical bank records — and will secure an existing staff position, according to Russell.
The archivists and historians working on the project will catalog and preserve the collection and will also create a publicly accessible database of the information contained in the volumes, said Russell.
The bank records were discovered last fall in a former Merchants Bank building on William Street that now houses the United Way.
The records date back to 1825, the year Merchants Bank was started with an initial capital investment by John Avery Parker, and cover more than 100 years of the bank's history, said Michael Dyer, the museum's marine historian and librarian.
The records should shed light on the business of whaling, or what happened once whaling vessels arrived back at port, a subject about which little is known, according to Dyer.
Additionally, given the extended time period covered by the collection, other researchers are likely to find other topics of interest, he said.
"If it only brings in a dozen people a year, those dozen people are going to write significant historical articles and books," Dyer said.
