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The old South Blockhouse at the Fort Recovery State Museum underwent repairs last year.
FORT RECOVERY - More than 75 newly digitalized photographs of locals dating back to the late 19th century will be on display when the Fort Recovery State Museum opens for the season this weekend.
Visitors will have the opportunity to examine a trove of former Fort Recovery Post Master Harry McDaniel's images of everyday life and meet Pulitzer Prize-nominated novelist and professor emeritus Willam Heath.
Museum admission is free Saturday and Sunday.
There are many different images in the McDaniel collection, chiefly people of the time engaged in everyday activities at home or work, according to Kim Rammel, the museum site manager and president of the Fort Recovery Historical Society.
McDaniel was born around 1868. He served as postmaster for the village from 1900 to 1914, according to the museum. McDaniel took hundreds of glass negative photos in Fort Recovery and surrounding areas.
After McDaniel's death in 1943, his family kept some of the glass plates and sent the rest to the town dump. Amid WWII rationing, residents Ralph and Jerome Ranly were scouring the dump for valuables when they stumbled upon and recovered the plates.
The plates were passed down before being donated to the Fort Recovery Historical Society in the 1980s.
The glass plates are very large and heavy, yet fragile. Steps were taken to create digitized versions, since the images degrade with each passing year, Rammel noted.
"This makes sure to capture all the images before they are gone," she said.
Ohio History Connection personnel gathered the more than 650 glass plates and transported them back to Columbus, where they scanned the images and put them on an external hard drive.
"The goal is to have a comprehensive collection to pass along," Rammel said.
Rammel wants to make the collection useful for both historians and community members.
She is currently in the midst of a six-month program with the State Library of Ohio which will finish in September. She is one of 15 staff members from across the state who will earn a Digital Curation Certificate.
The DCC is designed to build skills for work in digitization, digital preservation, metadata creation, and more, per the state library website.
From 1-2:30 p.m. Saturday, Heath, a novelist and professor emeritus of English from Mount Saint Mary's University in Emmitsburg, Maryland, will sign copies and answer questions about his books "Blacksnake's Path: The true adventures of William Wells" and "William Wells and the Struggle for the Old Northwest."
Wells, whom Heath regards as a historic unsung hero who captured the essence of the time, was an American who was captured at 13 by the Miami Indians and adopted by the village chief called The Porcupine.
Wells became a warrior known first as Carrot Top for his orange hair. After completing the obligatory vision quest, he was renamed Black Snake.
According to one of Heath's books, Wells fought by the side of Miami War Chief Little Turtle against U.S. Gen. Arthur St. Clair and the American troops. The battle became the greatest victory the Indians ever won against the U.S., Heath told the newspaper in a past interview.
The museum will be open 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday and Sunday.
It is open on weekends during May, then Wednesday through Sunday from June to August. It will continue to be open on weekends in September and October.
For more information, visit fortrecoverymuseum.com, or call 419-375-4649 or 1-800-283-8920.
