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Here at the library our archive is full of one-of-a-kind accounts of local history. If you weren’t fortunate enough to visit it in its heyday, you may not know that we have thousands of photographs, documents, logs, yearbooks, scrapbooks, and City of El Reno records. During the renovation of our beautiful historic building, the archive left its original home where the teen room now resides, and moved down the hall near the west entrance. Little by little, we have been sifting through almost 140 years worth of El Reno and Canadian County history. We simply ran out of room!

Prior to my time here, there was a group of dedicated women who helped the community with genealogical research questions and compiled information about El Reno’s past. Many wonderful documents and manuscripts that this group, primarily Carolyn Barker, created exist in our archive today. The archive was a pet project of theirs, including the maintenance and organization of items in our care. To my knowledge, the library has never had an archivist on staff and all work in this area has been done by volunteers. We are incredibly thankful for the preservation efforts they made. Without these volunteers, many crucial pieces of our history and glimpses into our past would be gone.

Over the years, this group dwindled and the archive became somewhat neglected. Without dedicated staff, items were borrowed and never returned, photographs succumbed to age, and the archive fell into disorganization. During my time here, we have been working slowly but surely towards making the archive available to the public. Part of that effort is the digitization and preservation of the items within.

Over the course of the next year, 23 manuscripts will be transformed into searchable documents and a large collection of photographs will be made available digitally. These manuscripts include the first ever El Reno City Council minutes, the original handwritten coordinates mapping out our county lines, and employment logs from the Cheyenne-Arapaho Agency in the late 1800s. The collection of photos features local events and neighborhoods through the ’30s and ’40s.