As buildings at the Marshall Street site are renovated for MassMoCA's scheduled opening, materials left behind by Sprague Electric are being collected and stored on the first floor of Building 17. The first floor is massive, with two main rooms (east and west) and assorted workshops and offices connected by a common hallway.
On the eastern side, materials include signs, posters showcasing Sprague products, bulletin boards, and many rows of Sprague electronic components. The room is mostly open, and may have doubled as storage space during Sprague's operations. (There also appear to be a small number of props from Williamstown Theater Festival Productions.) This side is fairly well organized, and the posters and signs would contribute wonderfully to an exhibit on the workday experience at Sprague as very tangible and nostalgia-provoking items.
Materials stored in the western half of the building are stored in a somewhat haphazard fashion, to the extent that the large main room is covered with discarded lumber and piles of paperwork and office supplies which appear to have been dumped on the floor. Still, there are numerous treasures here as well, with graph readouts, coffee supplies, and invoice slips amongst the items which could be used for a Sprague-related exhibit. In addition, the offices and workshops lining the sides of the midsection of this room contain catalogs, sample sets, more posters, office equipment, and many (mostly rusting) tools.
It is important that someone at least perfunctorily assess this collection and prioritize which artifacts should be saved first-- for storage in this facility can't equal that which might be provided by an archival institution or a climate-controlled room within the museum. Possibilities for small exhibits should also be made and incorporated into the museum's local history section, possibly with the support of the local North Adams Historical Society. Finding adequate storage facilities for the company's business records, which are currently held by the American Annuities and the Vishay Corporation (Sprague's corporate owners) be evaluated to see which of the 2000 remaining boxes should be salvaged and archived in a facility such as Harvard's Business Library,instead of the warehouse where they are currently.
These pages are written and maintained by Christia Mulvey.
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