Yuma’s history comes home

True West has an article by Arizona’s Journalist of the Year, Jana Bommersbach, who won an Emmy and two Lifetime Achievement Awards and also cowrote and appeared on the Emmy-winning Outrageous Arizona, and has written two true crime books, a children’s book, and the historical novel Cattle Kate, about saving a town's history:

Valuable items documenting the history of Arizona’s border city of Yuma are ready for researchers to delve into, including files about pioneer Eugene Francis Sanguinetti, shown above holding his daughter Rosemarie and standing next to his wife, Lilah.

(Photo courtesy Sanguinetti House Museum and Gardens)

Yuma, Arizona’s “attic” was all over town: sixty years of historical records, photographs, and family histories dating as far back as the Gadsden Purchase in 1853, and gathered by the Yuma County Historical Society. Some of it was in boxes; some in green garbage sacks; some stored wherever extra space could be found.
“Those records were inaccessible; they didn’t know what they had, and what they did know couldn’t be accessed,” librarian Laurie Boone said.
Then, in 2012, the Arizona Historical Society came to town, gathered up everything and transported it across the state to the society’s headquarters in Tempe.
“We took eight hundred linear feet of documents out of Yuma,” says Linda Whitaker of the Arizona Historical Society. That’s the equivalent of two-and-a-quarter football fields.
“They were in miserable condition,” she adds. Nothing was properly preserved, most items were dusty, some included rat droppings, much was bug eaten.
After three years of constant work by the Historical Society, the documents are back home, cleaned up and cataloged into preservation boxes. Anyone interested in any of the seventy categories can retrieve what they seek. “Discoverability”, archivists call it.
Home now means a beautiful reading room with archival shelving in the basement of the Heritage Library, Yuma’s original Carnegie Library, built in 1921. The Rio Colorado Division Archives, overseen by Boone, is open twenty hours per week.
The eight hundred linear feet was not all that returned home. The historical society plucked Yuma-rich items from its other archives in Tempe and Tucson, bringing back twelve hundred linear feet, the equivalent of three-and-a-third football fields. Most notable are the seventy boxes documenting Yuma County lawmaker Harold Giss, who was intimately involved in state and national politics from 1948 until his death in 1973.
The almost eighty-thousand-dollar project was funded by grants from the Yuma County Historical Society, the Yuma County Library Foundation, local family trusts, and library grants.
Librarians  have already discovered international interest in the irrigation collection, a bedrock of Yuma, where agriculture is a multi-billion-dollar yearly industry.
Want to study the Oatman Massacre of 1851? This collection has the story. Documents also reveal the county’s experience during the Crash of 1929. The darker side of regional history rests in the Ku Klux Klan file. A great story could be uncovered in files about a go-getter who had his finger in every Yuma pie from the 1880s until his death in 1945: pioneer Eugene Francis Sanguinetti (photo, above), posthumously named Yuma’s Citizen of the Century in 2000.
Boone is anxious to share the incredible collection. She applauds the dedication of Whitaker and her crew and the foresight of Yuma County Library District Director Susan Evans to create the unique partnership that not only cleaned up Yuma’s “attic”, but also built a new home for it, where everyone can learn about the area’s history.

Rico says sometimes people do get their act together...