WORCESTER, Mass. - It’s the job of a City Clerk to preserve city history.
Creating Worcester’s first-ever City Archive is a project City Clerk Niko Vangjeli and Mary Terese Vigliotti have taken head on.
“You don’t want to lose any kind of historical information,” Vigliotti, principal staff assistant in the City Clerk’s office, said.
There’s no shortage of records and artifacts locked away in a vault in the basement of City Hall. Every piece of history they have in the collection tells a story, including a Worcester fire manual from 1905 and a petition from residents in 1896 to move City Hall.
Vangjeli says they also came across a town record from before the American Revolution dating back to 1774. The record shows patriots made Worcester’s town clerk, Clark Chandler, remove the “Tory Protest” from the town records. The Tory Protest was a letter from British loyalists voicing their displeasure of not being included in the political process in Worcester.
“There’s more, maybe even dozens of books of this nature, that this archive project will let us see,” Vangjeli said.
Everything in the Clerk’s vault, as well as historical documents from other city departments, is moving to a new space for the first City Archive in Worcester, at the old Becker College library on Sever Street.
“If we had an archive say 100 years ago created, some of the stuff dealing with COVID, we’d be able to pull up the reports from the last epidemic we had here in the U.S.,” Vangjeli said.
Vangjeli says the project is about preserving the past, but he’s also looking ahead to the future and how things like the construction of Polar Park is studied in the years to come.
“Three hundred years from now, people will ask, ‘How did we get to have Polar Park? And if we don’t have the documents and all the plans, then we wouldn’t be able to tell the story,” Vangjeli said.
Preparing the documents and materials for the City Archive is helping the City learn more about its history as it prepares to celebrate Worcester’s 300th birthday on June 14,2022.
