Brothers’ gift begins Behrend archives
organization, preservation and interpretation effort
Two-phase project will feature historical records
from Behrend family and Hammermill Paper Co.
A gift from Ernst and Mary Behrend’s grandsons will support an intensive effort to preserve, interpret and display historical objects and documents related to the Behrend family, the paper company it founded, and Penn State Erie, The Behrend College, which was established on the grounds of Ernst and Mary’s estate.
Richard H. Sayre of Winchester, Mass., and his brother, William B. Sayre of Williamsburg, Mass., have agreed to support the first phase of a two-part project that not only preserves the intertwined history of the family, Hammermill Paper Co. and Penn State Behrend, but will create useful, accessible resources for professional and amateur historians. The Sayres are the sons of Ernst and Mary Behrend’s daughter, Harriet. Ernst, along with his father, Moritz, and brothers, Otto and Bernard, founded Hammermill Paper Co. on the Lake Erie shoreline in 1898.
“We are grateful that an opportunity has been recognized to preserve both a significant story in our family’s history and an inspirational chronicle of what the notion of community, industriousness and charity can do for a region and a nation,” Richard and William Sayre said of the undertaking. “These items, which will now be preserved and available to all, will serve Behrend College well as a resource for those who would know its roots.”
The Sayres’ gift will be used to process, arrange, describe and preserve two collections in the Behrend archives, those relating to the family and to the college. The family collection contains birth certificates, wills, deeds and some three-dimensional objects, but the bulk of the collection is photographs, scrapbooks, portraits and home movies. Some of the memorabilia relates to the family’s hobbies and extensive travels, including 16 mm film shot by the family during the 1932 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, NY.
The college collection begins with Mary Behrend’s 1948 donation of Glenhill, her 400-acre estate, to Penn State so a permanent University presence could be created in Erie. (Penn State had offered graduate education courses in the area since 1927.) It includes documents associated with the donation, Mary Behrend’s correspondence with college administrators, early advisory board minutes, records from the Faculty Women and Wives organization, two dozen scrapbooks, videotapes, oral histories, and thousands of photographs. In addition, the college’s student newspapers from 1948 through 1979 will be digitized and made available on the Internet.
A grant application has been submitted to the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission seeking funding for the second phase of the archive project, cataloging and describing the enormous Hammermill Paper Company Collection.
“This is the most document-intensive portion of the Behrend archives,” Jane Ingold, a reference librarian at Penn State Behrend who is coordinating the project, said. “There are business correspondence, family papers, personal letters, annual reports, ledgers, and company magazines. Fittingly, most were printed on high-quality Hammermill stock and are in excellent shape.”
The company collection also includes photos and negatives, advertising posters, tensile strength testers, Army and Navy production awards, and the original Hammermill watermark seals.
“Hammermill always had a reputation as an innovator in paper production, but it was a progressive employer, too,” Ingold said. “It’s fascinating to read that Ernst Behrend championed, then implemented, the radical idea of giving workers benefits.
“Hammermill’s records are a first-person walk through the early part of the last century,” she added. “They touch on the influenza epidemic of 1918, the Mill Creek flood of 1912 and the World War-era bias against German-Americans. There are files on a number of local organizations that the family was involved with, such as the Erie Playhouse and what was then called Hamot Hospital, and records of early efforts to protect Lake Erie from industrial pollution. There’s material of historic significance to a number of audiences.”
The second-phase organization of the Behrend Archives would include a comprehensive historical Web site that mixes text, photographs, video and audio materials. Artifacts and documents from all three collections eventually will be used in displays in the Hammermill Room of the John M. Lilley Library at Penn State Behrend.