Oregon Constitution no longer tattered, fading after months-long restoration
Connor Radnovich
After more than 137 years, the Oregon State Constitution is finally assembled in the sequence its authors intended.
When first bound in March 1880 — 23 years after it was written — whoever assembled the Beaver State's founding document put page 52 before 51, a mistake identified and corrected during a monthslong restoration process earlier this year.
Beyond that blunder, pages were falling apart in places, ink was fading and the leather cover was torn and beat up.
"It was well-loved, let's put it that way," State Archivist Mary Beth Herkert said during an unveiling event Monday morning.
Now the blue-tinted sheets find themselves beneath museum-quality glass in the Oregon State Archives building — a far cry from its discovery pre-binding, rolled up and stashed in the corner of a Secretary of State vault.
At Monday's unveiling, a handful of Oregonians got a peek at the restored document.
Among those present were Jane Evans and her sister Anne Miller, descendants of one of the signers, Richard Miller, who represented Marion County in the constitutional convention.
Miller is their great-great-great grandfather on their father's side (or thereabouts). Evans manages the Miller Cemetery Church off Highway 213 outside Silverton, built in 1882 and named for Richard.
"To see the actual document and see his signature was a neat experience for our family," Evans said.
The signature pages also happen to be the most interesting aspect for Todd Pattison, the senior book conservator with the Northeast Document Conservation Center in Massachusetts who restored the document.
On those two pages, some signers used a standard, brown iron gall ink, while others employed red and purple inks and two signers even used graphite pencil. Additionally, every signer would have had to touch the signing pages, unlike the rest of the document, creating, for Pattison, a deeper connection to the past.
"That's as close as you can get to them," he said.
But those variations did create additional challenges in the restoring process.
One major component of this document's conservation was neutralizing its iron gall ink. As this kind of ink ages it becomes reactive, breaking down and corroding the very paper its written upon. The solution (no pun intended) is a chemical bath, but some ink is soluble and some of the pencil markings might turn purple when exposed to water (as some did back then.)
Tests are conducted on each piece of writing before the bath is performed, but it's still a heart-rending moment, Pattison said.
"You're 100 percent certain, but there's always that 'what if' in the back of your mind," he said.
Among the other challenges were the sewn bindings that broke pages and constricted their turning, and the binding itself.
Pattison unbound the document, cleaned the pages, tested the inks, performed chemical baths, mended the paper, rebound the pages, fixed the binding and repaired the leather book itself. The whole process took about four months.
"It was an incredible document to work on," Pattison said. "I wanted to make sure I did the best job I could possibly do."
Pattison has worked at the Center since 1990 and restored documents including T.S. Elliott's high school physics notebook and Abraham Lincoln's family bible.
But this was his first work on a state constitution, a document that has a particularly special significance, he said.
"This is the document that led (Oregon) from being a territory into being a state," Pattison said. "It was really an honor to be the conservator treating it."
In its brand new case, the bound constitution lies propped up, opened to the preamble, flanked by digital before and after photographs showing the restoration results. Small paper scraps from the book laid out represent the few bits that were removed during the process.
While the $20,000 restoration itself took a few months, Herkert, the state archivist, has been spearheading this project for at least three years, foiled by a lack of funding. But that changed when Secretary of State Dennis Richardson took office and suggested a crowd-funding campaign, which raised more than $100,000.
They expected the money would pay for just the restoration and two display cases — one at the Archives building and another at the state Capitol. But they found a much better deal on display cases, so the whole project only cost a little more than half of what they initially budgeted.
This money will go into a fund to pay for repairs and, primarily, a travel case so Richardson can take the document to schools and communities across the state that aren't able to see it in Salem.
The hope, he said Monday, is to instill in kids an understanding and appreciation for how Oregon came to be. The founders created this document two years before the United States accepted Oregon's statehood application, and many of the disagreements happening in the state today can be found in one form or another in those pages.
"The freedoms that we have ... are the result of sacrifices pioneers made 160 years ago," Richardson said. "This was the starting place to establish Oregon."
Contact the reporter at cradnovich@statesmanjournal.com or