LEWISTON – Mary Hughes-Greer was surprised by the detail of the Bates Manufacturing Co.’s business records.

Ledgers document every dollar spent between 1852 and 1950 and personnel files cover every person who worked there from 1935 to the 1960s.

It’s not only about Lewiston, she said, and it’s not only about Maine. It’s real data about the settling of America before and after the Civil War – history, economics, gender studies and all sorts of other sociological disciplines.

And it’s all there, waiting for a researcher with the time, the talent and the budget to dig it out.

“If there’s one thing I want people to know it’s that this work needs to continue,” Hughes-Greer said. Her year-long stint cleaning, moving and cataloging the archive is scheduled to end in March. She plans to move back home to Wisconsin when it does.

The city took control of the Bates Mill complex and inherited the collection in 1996. A $37,000 grant from the National Archives and Record Administration has paid for Hughes-Greer’s services.

Someone ought to keep it going, she said.

“I’m not making a pitch for myself, but for the archive,” she said. “I don’t think anyone realizes just how valuable this all is, or can be. It needs to go on.”

She didn’t realize how valuable it was until she was several months into the work.

“I was so impressed to find a community willing to preserve their local history,” Hughes-Greer said. “That’s all I thought it was.”

The more work she did, the more she realized the documents mattered for more than just local history.

They told of technological changes in the fabric-making industry. They demonstrated immigration trends, as French Canadian names began replacing English names in the registers of mill employees. Political trends showed up in the blacklist: employees fired from the mill for trying to unionize workers and for striking.

“A researcher might want to look at wages earned by women,” she said. “Did it matter whether you were a man or a woman or did it just matter how good you were at running a loom? That kind of information is in there.”

But the picture is only partially developed, she said. Her job has been to get the documents out of the basement of the old Lincoln Street Firehouse and into a safer place. That job will be mostly complete when she leaves. She’ll also leave behind a partial catalogue of the archive to help future researchers.

‘Breathtaking’ scope

It was almost 700 cubic feet of boxes, books and old papers when she began. She separated the good from the bad at the fire station and moved about 475 cubic feet worth of records to the basement of the Lewiston Public Library in December. She left about 40 cubic feet that had been ruined beyond recognition.

“There were some ledgers that were fused shut by all the mold,” she said.

She hasn’t touched another 186 cubic feet of employee records. A genealogist’s dream, the 17,500 records detail the names, Social Security numbers and work history of Bates Manufacturing employees between 1935 and the mid-1960s.

“We didn’t have the time or the money to even start there,” she said.

But the rest hold fascinating possibilities.

The archive contains the company’s payment ledgers mostly complete from 1852 to 1950. She also has payroll scales and company analyses of predicted wages, board meeting notes and stock records, notes from the treasurer’s office, sales orders and handwritten letters from founder Benjamin Bates.

“The scope of what we have here is breathtaking,” she said. “It’s not just one piece, or one series. Taken as a whole, this archive is just amazing.”

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