- [Alan] There is a collection of whaling logbooks here that researchers are using to mine data about shifting weather patterns and climate change.

This printing press is more than 150 years old, one of several here that offer insights into how information was disseminated in centuries past passed.

And later we'll travel to an historic farm where exhibits chronicle the many different peoples who have cultivated the land throughout history.

This is "Treasures Inside the Museum."

(bright upbeat music) (bright upbeat music) (bright upbeat music) (bright rhythmic music) In 1900, the city of Providence built a new public library in the heart of the city.

It was, and still is, an architectural masterpiece, with grand public spaces that welcome visitors.

From the beginning, the Providence Public Library was meant to also include an art gallery and museum of natural history.

(bright rhythmic music) - When people come in and say like, "Explain this place.

"What are you doing here?

"What is this for?"

we've actually said, "It's kinda like a museum, "but we let you actually touch the stuff "and handle the materials."

- [Alan] Like the city itself, the institution has evolved through the decades, offering resources and programs that serve the community.

It's a place of discovery for all ages, that includes access to thousands of historical resources.

- So, our collections range from 2000 BC up to, essentially, yesterday, cover a really wide range of topics.

Almost anything that somebody might have an interest in, we are probably gonna have artifacts that connect to that.

So if you have a favorite first edition from the 1800s or the 1900s, you can come in and sit at a table and read that on your own, turn the pages.

If you're interested in medieval manuscripts or 18th century French illustration or whatever it happens to be, we take the public library part of our identity really seriously.

So, we don't require letters.

You don't really even have to bring in an ID.

We try to make it as easy as possible for, you know, in my mind, somebody who has a lunch break and says, "I wanna go look through World War II propaganda posters," you know, "in my spare time."

We want that to be a resource that is available to anybody who just has basic curiosity.

(bright rhythmic music) - [Alan] Walk through one of the main hallways at the library and you'll come across a large printing press.

It stands about six feet tall and appears to be in working order, even though it's more than 150 years old.

This piece is actually part of a larger collection that often draws visitors from the region.

- This collection, I think, is a fascinating one for a lotta reasons.

We get a lot of artists who come in and visit.

You know, we try to make materials available digitally.

We try to provide resources however we can.

But we find that a lotta times people get different things outta the physical artifacts.

And that's what we're based around, is providing access to physical artifacts.

So if you are, for instance, a type designer, a graphic designer, and you wanna work with type, this is one of the four or five best places in the country that you can come to to see, type, to see typographic specimen books that show you everything, every typeface that was available throughout history, other artifacts, examples of printing.

If printing or graphic design or art are something that anybody is interested in, this gives you a chance to actually see those historical objects.

I'm standing in front of a, what's called an Adams Acorn Press.

This one dates from about the middle of the 19th century, kind of the 1860s.

And you'll see why it's called an acorn press.

It's shaped like an acorn in the frame here.

This is a press that, in a lotta ways, is really similar to what you would've found in the 1400s, when printing sort of came to the West via Gutenberg.

At that point it would've been all sort of a wooden frame, and this would've been a wooden screw.

And this one is a steel press, an iron-hand press.

These kinda got started around the beginning of the 19th century, around the 1800s.

And the major innovation was, in addition to the sturdiness of the frame, sort of a different type of mechanism to actually move this platen down.

And you can see that this one, this is a large space, so this kinda press allowed printers at that time to print larger spaces with a little less effort.

But in a lotta ways, this is pretty much similar to a press that would've been in an operation in, you know, 500, 600 years ago.

This is one of, I believe, three printing presses that we have here at the library.

This is the largest.

We have a smaller version of what is essentially the same kind of press in our reading room.

And then we have what's called a clamshell press, a Pearl clamshell press here.

So if people are interested in actual printing presses, they can definitely stop in.

You're welcome to come in and pull the lever and see how this operates and get a feel of what printing in the 19th century might've been like.

(country music) (country music) - [Alan] Another collection from the 19th century is now being looked at through a contemporary lens.

A team of researchers that include scientists from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute and a history professor from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, are systematically mining data from a collection of whaling ship logbooks.

- So this is a ship's logbook from the Good Ship Isaac Howland, which sailed out of New Bedford in July of 1835 on a voyage that lasted until October of 1838, which was about average for a whaling voyage.

And it records systematically, day by day, the weather that is happening around the ship.

And, of course, navigating a sailing vessel depends on wind and current, and recording the weather conditions was very important for the safe and successful navigation of the vessel.

So, a logbook, which is a legal document, records several times a day the weather around the ship.

And while people may not think that this kind of weather data would be valuable for science, it certainly is, because the weather that logbooks like these contain is unique data that isn't available anywhere else.

And so for our project, extracting weather data from logbooks of ships that traveled around the world, we can fill in blank spots on the map where modern science has absolutely no other source for the kind of data that these books contain.

And while the sailors who recorded the data probably had no idea that it would be used this way, looking backwards, modern scientists, who are very interested in the climate change problem, can use this data to very great effect to learn about how weather has changed over the last 100, 200, 300, 400 years.

- I could immediately see the potential.

It's a rare glimpse into the past that these logbooks allow us.

When talking about extreme events, the drought of the century or one in 100 year flood event, it's really important to have long records, and outside North America and Europe in many parts around the world, especially out over the oceans, we have very little data prior to the 1950s.

And so historic records can fill a gap in our understanding about long-term climate change.

And so, if you want to understand something about the drought of the century or one in 100 year flood event, you need records that extend that far back.

And historic records, in particular, these whaling logbooks, can tell us a lot about maritime weather conditions out over the oceans hundreds of years ago.

- Every single day we'll have some indication of climate data.

So, for example, on Saturday November 19th of 1836, the entry opens saying, "Fresh gales and cloudy, "working to windward, single reefed, "the Mizen topsails."

And so he is giving an indication of how strong the wind is by telling us what sails he's using.

And so he gives, in this case, two indications of the weather at different points in the day during the different watches that are on the deck, taking care of the vessel.

- And so we can use that information to try to start analyzing how are wind patterns changing today, compared to where the whalers were experiencing strongest winds.

So there's a belt of strong westerly winds that spans all around Antarctica.

And that wind belt, over the last 50, 60 years, has shifted further south.

- Among the five major institutions that hold logbooks, Providence is number two.

And even more importantly for our purposes, the entire collection has been digitized.

- One aspect is coming to the library to look at these beautiful logbooks themselves.

The other is also to look at the digital archive, and that makes it, having them digitized actually makes it available to anyone in the world.

And that has been a really big boon to us on the project.

- It's a great, great resource that exists here at the Providence Public Library.

(bright music) - [Alan] The whaling logbooks are just a small part of the special collections that are kept at the library.

Walking through the aisles here is like thumbing through the pages of an encyclopedia.

Additionally, just because the sign on the building says library, doesn't mean that everything here is a book.

Other collections of objects have been carefully cataloged and are stored in a climate-controlled area, where they await the next curious person's examination.

(bright music) One of the more recent collections was brought about as a result of a number of researchers looking for information about the history of the LGBTQ community in Rhode Island.

- We didn't have all that much, to be honest, at the time, but we also realized there were no other libraries and archives who were intentionally collecting that community history.

So, we built an advisory board who are people who are part of the Rhode Island LGBTQ community who help us kind of think through those strategies, what do we collect and how?

And we sort of really thought very intentionally about making this a true community archive.

So, letting that sort of be dictated by people within the, the sort of as identified within the queer community, what do they want us to collect and what does that look like?

The sort of ephemeral materials that are on display at the front are part of the Lionel Pires Collection.

Lionel owned Castaways Bar, which was the last gay bar open in Newport.

So, you sort of see some kind of very ephemeral examples of business cards or membership cards to different clubs, matchbooks for bars, but in particular two medals that Lionel won as a contestant in the Gay Games in 1990 and 1994 playing racquetball.

So competitive racquetball player and participated and then a bronze winner and a gold medal medal winner at the national stage.

So, really amazing to see that he was willing to kind of part with these really personal items to be part of the collection.

This album that's just in front of me is that the vacation album of an unidentified man, we don't know his name, and that was intentional.

The family who gave these materials to a dealer to sell did not want him identified, but they said he was a gay man, married to a woman, had children, that his wife was aware that he was a gay man and that this was in the 1920s, 1930s.

And that he had a group of friends that he spent time with a couple of times a year on vacation.

And so this is an album of his group of friends, and it's open to a sort of set of pages that are really interesting, because it documents what was referred to as a womanless wedding.

So these were not uncommon in the early 20th century as events, and they were certainly not just gay events.

But what makes this an interesting example is that it's a group of friends clearly in someone's backyard.

This is not for a public audience.

So, as you look through, it's just a bunch of people having fun, dressing up, putting on this sort of play.

But it's, you know, a series of folks in costume.

And then we've got political.

We're beginning to collect more papers representing the civil rights era for gay rights as well as really contemporary actions, civil rights or social justice actions.

So, for example, this, what looks like a really innocuous letter from 1980, which is from Mayor Buddy Cianci's office announcing the establishment of a gay task force.

But on the back of it, what's interesting is that somebody has taken various candidates who were running for office at the time and listed out their stances on gay issues.

So, what we've been told from people who were alive at the time was that that was one of the primary ways that people did political organizing was, you know, it was before the days of the internet, social media.

So, it was handing out flyers.

And so they would take a letter saying, for example, here's a letter announcing the gay task force, and here's candidates that you should or should not be supporting at the ballot box.

So, a really sort of interesting example of a 1980 kind of political organizing opportunity.

And, you know, alongside that we've got campaign materials for Mayor Brett Smiley, you know, an open gay mayor right now.

So sort of collecting very contemporary records as well as those in the past.

- [Alan] Back in the special collections reading room are examples of items pulled from another rather unique group of objects.

These items are part of the tattoo collection.

- It ranges pretty much across the board from the 1600s up to the 20th century.

It incorporates photographs, letters, documents, ephemera, actual artifacts, tattoo machines.

So it's a really wide-ranging collection.

The tattoo machine dates from 1890s, somewhere in that range.

It is a machine that was used by a man named Eddie Poferl.

And the machine itself is from a period where it really wasn't possible to just go out and buy a tattoo machine.

You really had to make them yourself.

So this one is one that was made using a component from doorbell, basically a doorbell mechanism of the time.

And that's what caused the vibration.

And was kind of the center of the mechanism itself.

But at this period, anybody who was tattooing with a machine was probably using one that they had kind of cobbled together themselves.

- [Alan] The collection goes on to include a book from 1653 with what may be one of the first mentions in English of tattooing as an art.

There is a Burmese accordion book from the 1890s, full of illustrations, and a more contemporary book that is rich with photographs.

These are just some of the examples from the tattoo collection.

It turns out that there are a lot of similarities between libraries and museums.

Each institution is a repository of collected knowledge, and each seeks to educate both their local communities and visitors from afar.

They both preserve important materials and are staffed with knowledgeable professionals that are dedicated to informing visitors.

(bright music) (bright rhythmic music) Every morning when the sun comes up over Narraganset Bay, it shines a light onto a piece of land that serves as a window to our past.

- The land that we call Casey Farm is part of the ancestral homeland of the Narraganset people who had been here for millennia before anybody named Casey got here.

- [Alan] In 1702, a farm was established on this land and would be maintained by eight generations of one family.

Today the property is under the stewardship of Historic New England, an organization dedicated to learning and discovery about all New England.

- Historic New England is the oldest and largest regional heritage organization in the country.

And so we specialize in telling all these different stories about the ways that people lived in the past.

- [Alan] The farmhouse on Casey Farm includes a small museum with exhibits curated to help tell some of those stories from the past.

- So we have all this wonderful material about the generations of the Casey family, but we wanted to represent all the people of the land.

And, of course, that means the first people of the land, the Indigenous people and Narraganset people.

This display case is the result of a partnership with Tomaquag Museum in Exeter, Rhode Island.

(bright rhythmic music) This case is called Walk In Their Footsteps.

And so we have things in this case that are for people to wear and also for people to play with, things of adornment.

We have some crumbling leather soles of boots that were found within the walls of the house.

The shoes date to somewhere around 1820, what's left of them, and we're showing them with some beautiful deerskin moccasins made by Silvermoon LaRose in 2018.

And you can see all the beautiful coloration that she put on these moccasins.

(bright rhythmic music) I think that Walk In Their Footsteps, we hope that it evokes the different people who are here.

(bright rhythmic music) - [Alan] Other exhibits include paintings, historical photographs, and these two documents recently discovered in the historic New England archives.

- Just a few years ago, the site manager and I went up to Boston and were doing some research, and we found these documents that were basically bills of sale for Silas Casey purchasing two male slaves in 1765 and 1766.

But I would like to read one of them.

"In order to satisfy and pay a certain judgment of court "recovered against the said Benjamin Fry "by Stephen Wanton of Newport "in the county of Newport, Mariner, "which said Negro, according to law, "was on the 26th day of October AD 1765, "sold at public venue and struck off to Silas Casey, "who was the highest bidder "for 55 pounds lawful money of the colony of Rhode Island."

(gentle music) - [Alan] These rare documents shed light on a dark and often untold chapter of Rhode Island history.

Few records concerning slave ownership have survived through the centuries.

New questions are continually being asked and research is ongoing.

(gentle music) - Historically, organizations would tell the history of the wealthy owners of properties, and yet there would've been hundreds of enslaved people or employees, indentured servants, that would've been really responsible for the maintenance, upkeep, the preservation of these beautiful places, and they should be recognized.

(gentle piano music) - This case represents objects that were owned and used by an African American tenant farmer named Henry Carr and his wife, whose name is yet to be recovered.

And they lived in a small house about a half mile away from the main house from 1804 to 1810.

So, in the 1990s, a team from URI went to this archeological site, and they recovered boxes and boxes and boxes of items.

And here in this case, we just have a few of those.

And so there are a number of things, like salt-glazed porcelain and part of a crock, that would've been useful for everyday storage, and a bottle for drinking.

But there's also some finer porcelain that's in here.

And so the blue and white pearlware, we have some fragments here, but here we have an intact bowl that didn't come from the Carr site.

This came from a another site within Historic New England's collection, but represents the kind of wares that they had.

(gentle piano music) - [Alan] A tour of the museum at Casey Farm wouldn't be complete without seeing this.

It's a small hole in one of the doors, and the story behind it connects this property with an early chapter of American history.

- The British occupied Newport for a few years during the Revolutionary War.

And in August of 1777, there was actually a skirmish here at Casey Farm.

They fired through windows, through doors, and most of the militia got away, but they did superficial damage to the house, lots of bullet holes and marks in the walls and score marks on the floors and tons of broken windows.

And afterwards, the family repaired everything except they kept this one memento, which is a hole in this parlor door made by a musket ball.

And the musket ball, this is a reproduction of one, and it's not made out of lead, it's made out of pewter, but it gives you an idea of the size of a musket ball at that time.

And you can see from the hole how much damage it could do to property or to a person.

And it's just a fascinating story about how the family preserved their connection to the Revolutionary War.

(bright piano music) - [Alan] One of the defining characteristics of the farm are the more than 10 miles of dry laid stone walls.

These were originally built to keep livestock in place.

- It was a man named Reynolds Knowles who built the stone walls in the 1780s, over a few years.

So, the way that the stone walls are constructed is with great big stones on the outside and on the top, but in the middle is rubble.

And inside the rubble was this delightful little fossil.

(bright piano music) Reynolds probably had no idea what it was in 1780, but we know from talking to our friends at the Rhode Island Natural History Museum, that this fossil is of a tree fern from the Carboniferous era, and it could be as much as 650 million years old, when this land was basically a rainforest and when the dinosaurs were still walking the earth.

When our mason found it in 2020, he kept it for us.

And we keep it now in the museum gallery in our hands-on cabinet so that people can pick up and touch 650 million years of history of this land.

(bright piano music) Casey Farm is 300 acres.

It's been continuously cultivated, we believe, since the time of the Narragansett people.

So here at Casey Farm today, we can tell that story by continuing to farm the land.

We run a CSA program, community-supported agriculture, where our members purchase a share at the beginning of the season, and through that, we're able to feed about 150 families.

Farmers have been cultivating this land and feeding the community and nurturing the community in different ways.

We have a number of reminders on the landscape and here inside the Museum gallery that help to tell those stories.

(bright music) (bright music) (bright music) (bright music) - [Announcer] This program and other episodes of "Treasures Inside the Museum," as well as digital extras, are now available to watch anytime by visiting rhodeislandpbs.org, or the Rhode Island PBS YouTube channel.

Take a private tour with exhibit curators.

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Whether you are interested in artifacts, paintings, photography, architecture, or history, you'll be inspired to learn more.