The Van Dorn Collection comes to IRM

Frank writes...

Sunday was chilly, overcast, and very windy. It was a perfect day for a drive up to Hartland.

Where, you ask, is Hartland? I didn't know this myself until just recently, I must admit, but Hartland is a railroad flag stop just northwest of Woodstock along the C&NW. It's almost directly due north from IRM maybe 10 miles or so. And it's the home of Larry Larson's company that paints and coats steel coils. Larry is the one who has brought us three different batches of Van Dorn Collection drawings, photos, and other artifacts (click here to see a lot of what has been donated) and he asked us to drive a museum truck up to the factory in Hartland to pick up the rest of the collection.

Here's why we needed the truck: we see here a quartet of four-drawer filing cabinets, all chock full of Van Dorn blueprints. We haven't even started going through what's here but it's a gold mine of drawings of many, many different couplers and other components built by that company. All of these items were up in the attic above the factory's office and they were not easy to get out; the attic was accessed by one of those narrow drop-down-from-the-ceiling stair/ladder contrivances and it looked like very little up in that attic had been touched in years.

We actually brought two trucks, the flatbed "McAlpin truck" plus a pickup truck with a covered bed so that we could bring home uncovered items without loose papers blowing all over Franklinville Road. Besides what was in the cabinets, shown here are a couple of large wooden crates with more blueprints, a bunch of ledger books, plus there was a pile of photographs (additions to the existing Van Dorn Collection pages are coming soon!).

Larry also gave us a brief factory tour, showing us how they paint large quantities of steel that is then used for applications like gutters, down spouts, and window blinds. And we learned a bit about the factory building itself. It started out as a Bowman Dairy facility and we think it was used in that capacity until the 1940s or 1950s. The drawing above, an original building elevation drawn on linen, was framed by Larry. The factory was bought from Bowman by a wallpaper manufacturer owned by the Maxwell family, and they sold it to Larry in 1969. His company is only the third occupant of the building. All of the Van Dorn files were in the attic when he bought the building so our best guess is that someone in the Maxwell family may have worked for Van Dorn and rescued these items when Van Dorn failed. The most recently-dated items in the Van Dorn stuff date to 1952 so that's our best guess for when the company went under.

So we drove the two trucks back to the museum and loaded the filing cabinets and all of the other Van Dorn Collection items into one of our library storage areas. Many thanks to Joel, Richard, Greg, and Good Nick, who made it possible to get all of the items safely back to IRM. And of course many thanks to Larry Larson for donating this priceless trove of information.

After all that, it was already getting dark, but I went over to Barn 7 and traced the car number off of the 18 using some Mylar that was left over from tracing the lettering off of the CB&Q scale test car a couple of weeks ago. Now that the numbers have been traced off of the car, I will be able to sand and paint the rest of the thing from the belt rail down - in the spring, of course!