Treasure in a church closet

When Father Jemonde Taylor at Raleigh’s St. Ambrose Episcopal Church cleaned out his office closet, he found an important piece of Raleigh’s past. And now it’s housed at the Libraries’ Special Collections Research Center.

Opening a battered cardboard box, Taylor discovered the church's only surviving copy of blueprints from its construction in 1965. "It was a treasure trove," Taylor told Andrea Blanford, a WTVD-ABC11 reporter. "Not only these blueprints, but also the pictures that go along with the construction."

Taylor called the NC State University Libraries about the blueprints, and Gwynn Thayer, Special Collections Research Center (SCRC) Associate Head and Curator, went straight to the church. Architecture is a key collecting area for the SCRC, and the church had been designed by Leif Valand, a significant local Modernist architect known for his work in Cameron Village in the late 1940s.

"He was a very prolific architect," Thayer told WTVD. "We were very excited to hear about this because a lot of Leif Valand drawings are gone.”

WTVD’s short feature with Taylor and Thayer is viewable here.

Senior Vice Provost and Director of Libraries Greg Raschke sees this moment as an inspiring expression of the value of the Libraries to our local community: “The responsiveness to get these materials right away, the proper storage to house them, the preservation knowledge to clean and stabilize them, the knowledge to quickly describe and make them available to researchers and faculty, perhaps even digitize them… These are concrete, fundamental capabilities at the Libraries, and those capabilities serve the community.”