Saving America's Treasures: The Dinwiddie Collection
Acknowledgments and Future Plans
This is the second project undertaken by the VHS with funding from Save America's Treasures. During the inaugural year of that program, the Society received financial support to restore a major collection of Custis Family Papers, which also featured significant amounts of material relating to George Washington, as well as to his wife, Martha (Dandridge) Custis Washington.
The current project benefits from almost $80,000 in matching federal grant funds, which are being provided through the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the agency that is overseeing manuscript and published materials conservation and restoration projects for the Save America's Treasures initiative. Along with this crucial financial support, the VHS also wishes to note the generosity of the National Society, Daughters of Colonial Wars in providing a substantial sum toward the Society's required cost-share match.
The current project is directed by E. Lee Shepard, Director of Manuscripts and Archives and Sallie and William B. Thalhimer III Senior Archivist at the VHS. Stacy G. Rusch, chief conservation officer, is overseeing the day-to-day conservation work described elsewhere on these pages, much of which is being undertaken by Wendy Cowan, a contract paper conservator of Richmond Conservators of Works on Paper.
Once the Dinwiddie collection has been stabilized, Society project staff will digitize the restored contents, making images available for researchers both in-house and online. A select group of those images, consisting primarily of George Washington's correspondence with Dinwiddie, will be presented through this updated web site, as a complement to the Washington papers currently available through the Library of Congress's American Memory web site. Those pages will include transcriptions, introductory and explanatory matter, and lesson plans for teachers. The preparation of those pages will be undertaken by members of the Manuscripts Department staff, along with the head of the VHS Education Department, William B. Obrochta, and the VHS web designer, Ann de Witt.
What's related:
• The Custis Family Papers: Saving an American Treasure
• Learn more about the Save America's Treasures program
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