SCRANTON, Pa. — Pallets of boxes cover one floor in Scranton's Penn Paper building. Each is a chapter of history.
These boxes hold the archives of The Times-Tribune dating back nearly a century. The newspaper's current owners offered the archives to the Lackawanna County Historical Society and the Scranton Public Library system.
"How can anybody say no if you're a historical society this is your dream game," said Mary Ann Savakinus, executive director of the Lackawanna County Historical Society. "Somebody is going to give you all of the history of one community in one lump sum. That's what everybody wants,"
Historical Society assistant Director Sarah Piccini said they had roughly two months to get the archives boxed up and moved out.
"There were challenges in the packing, but it ended up being about 1,900 boxes in total, plus filing cabinets and the bound volumes," Piccini said.
The newspaper's archives — a record of the joys and tribulations of Northeastern Pennsylvania — were offered up after the paper's sale last year to Media NewsGroup, an arm of Alden Global Capital, from the the Lynett family owned Times-Shamrock Communications.
The archives, once housed in what reporters and editors called the "morgue," are already yielding surprising finds.
"We also found volumes of the Scranton Sun," Piccini said. "The Sun was one of 20 papers that existed in Scranton at the turn of the century. As far as we know, it doesn't exist anywhere else anymore."
Savakinus said the historical society ran out of space to sort through the archives. She was thankful the owners of the Penn Paper building can help out.
"We rely on our friends to borrow their space, but that's not the permanent answer," Savakinus said. "So we need a good plan moving forward."
"It's going to take us years," Piccini said. "We have a collection at the historical society now of about 10,000 photographs, which we thought was a lot. The Times had 115,000 photo headings."
The historical society plans to breath new life into the "morgue" and make the collection available for anyone to access once its been inventoried and digitized.