It is absolutely the most unseen room in the library, according to Jim Allard, a reference librarian at the Lewiston Public Library.

The climate-controlled Archives Room stores some of the most delicate and treasured pieces of city history. A major portion of the space is taken up with hundreds of tin tubes storing maps and graphs from the Union Water and Power Company from the 1800s on.

Among the rest of the material is a set of Lewiston-Auburn directories dating back to the 1860s. The annual listings of almost every city resident are now primarily used by people researching their genealogy; the books provide valuable information on where their ancestors lived and their occupations.

The directories are the most used books in the archives, but no one is allowed into the Archives Room due to the fragile nature of the documents. On request, a librarian will retrieve the book for public research.