Marconi Center Expands Access To History With Digital Archive

CHATHAM – There are logs that show when Chatham radio operators communicated over decades with warships and luxury liners out at sea. Photos of U.S. Navy staffers working on the Cape coast to intercept coded Nazi messages during World War II. Recordings of reminiscences by people who watched 20th century maritime history unfold.

Those are among the pieces of history that visitors can explore on computers at the Chatham Marconi Maritime Center now that its collection of artifacts has been digitized and made available through a newly built archive area.

The space on the Chathamport campus’ Education Center’s second floor recently opened to the public for study or personal curiosity. There are computer stations for searching through digital versions of items, and, if needed, the database indicates where to find the actual artifacts preserved nearby on shelves and in drawers zipped behind plastic for protection.

A January open house followed more than four years of work by an archival consultant to digitally catalog the thousands of items through PastPerfect museum collection/management software, plus months of planning and renovation of what had long ago been dorm-like residence space in the century-old building.

“There’s a lot of fascinating history…and the early data we have is unique,” said David Smith, museum committee chairman and secretary/clerk of the center’s board of directors. “We had received a grant to digitize much of the archive, but then we needed to have a space where people could actually access that digital archive.”

Past research required handling often-delicate items themselves with help from archivist Edee Crowell. Artifacts were carefully stored in her small office, an attic or even — in the case of maps and charts now housed in metal drawers — across town in borrowed space at the Atwood Museum. The new archive is triple the size of Crowell’s old office, says executive director Mary Taylor, and officials have a future goal of making the database accessible online from anywhere.

What became an 11-acre, 10-building campus across Route 28 from Ryder’s Cove started in 1914 as the site of radio pioneer Guglielmo Marconi’s wireless receiving station. Now on state and national registers of historic places, the property in 1921 began operations for marine service as the Radio Corporation of America’s Marconi-RCA Wireless Receiving Station. Before closing in 1997, the installation, known by call letters WCC, was the busiest ship-to-shore station in the country, communicating around the world.

During WWII, Smith says, the campus was a naval site employing up to 300 personnel working 24/7 to capture enemy U-boat communications and send those to Washington, D.C. for decryption. Most buildings were used for housing and offices.

The hub of the current center, founded in 2002 and opened in 2010, is the Marconi-RCA Wireless Museum, which offers — during seasonal hours, by appointment in winter — exhibits on maritime wireless communication set up in the former operations building where the communications took place. The “Golden Age of Trans-Atlantic Ocean Liners” exhibit shows how Chatham Radio WCC linked passengers on six famous 20th-century passenger ships to people and businesses on land. WCC also communicated with pioneer aviators, including Charles Lindbergh, Amelia Earhart, and Howard Hughes.

“The importance of Chatham Radio in the history of global maritime communications is rivaled by few other places in the world,” officials noted in a 2017 application for Chatham Community Preservation Act grants. The town bought the campus in 1999, and invested CPA funds to restore and preserve the grounds and buildings. The archive project was made possible by three conservation grants, Crowell says: a total of $45,000 from 2017 and 2018 for the software and digitization time, then last year’s $142,000 to create the archive space upstairs from where the center offers STEM education programming for families and schools. The building was once known as the Nautilus Hotel, where single staff members lived.

The collection’s core is material saved by final WCC superintendent William Farris, said Crowell. The 2017 grant application cites 920 photos dating from the 1920s; 149 documents, including correspondence between station and naval staff around the world wars; 52 maps and site plans dating from 1914; and log books and other printed material from the RCA era.

There are also hundreds of artifacts donated by families, groups or former workers, including WWII research from the National Archives and reports sent in 1945 to Washington, D.C. obtained from the National Cryptologic Veterans Association.

The information has been accessed for various projects. Taylor notes another museum recently obtained data on women serving in Chatham during WWII for an exhibit about women at sea. Smith is most fascinated by superintendent diaries chronicling communications with ships at sea.

“The six ships we feature in the ‘Golden Age’ exhibit all have multiple entries from superintendent logs about interactions we would have with them,” he says, “[like] being able to say we communicated with the Queen Mary on her final voyage.”

With the archive room opened, Crowell and Taylor are hoping for more donations of historical artifacts, like two bins of WWII material recently brought in from a family’s attic clean-out. If eventually needed, there are plenty of former bedrooms left that could potentially be renovated into even more storage space as the archives grow.