Oakland Museum works to preserve memories of destruction, aftermath

Special Report

- Read more stories about Hurricane Camille

- Audio slideshow: Hear excerpts from Trooper Ed Tinsley's audio diary and see 1969 photos of the hurricane's aftermath

- Check out an interactive map of Camille's path and more

The Oakland Museum, located along U.S. 29 near Colleen, is developing a Camille Resource Center to make hundreds of documents, photos and videos related to Nelson’s greatest natural disaster easily accessible to the public.

With grant funding from several local sources, the museum has spent the last two years putting information surrounding the calamity into digital format to categorize and store it.

“When we first opened up as a museum, we had the Camille room, with all of the information that we had gathered together,” said Beth Goodwin, the museum’s president.

“Then we decided, we really have so much information that it doesn’t do us as a museum any good because it’s too much to show. It’s too overwhelming.”

Two interns from the University of Virginia, funded by a grant from the Charlottesville Area Community Foundation, spent two months last summer sorting and putting all the gathered information into digital format.

Goodwin said the museum staff thought that would be a good start to becoming a core research center for information on Hurricane Camille.

“There was such a wide interest in the event that we felt like it would serve the county and the people and whoever else was interested in it — it would give them a nice place to start,” she said.

Organizers envision computer kiosks at the heart of the center, where visitors could view digital versions of hundreds of photographs, videos, documents, oral histories and newspaper and magazine articles. Touch-screen technology would ease navigation and access.

The memory house
-Where: The Camille Resource Center at the Oakland Museum on U.S. 29, four miles south of Lovingston, one mile north of Colleen
-E-mail: oaklandmuseum@gmail.com
-Mail: P.O. Box 39 Lovingston, VA 22929
-Call: (434) 263-8400
-Hours: Saturdays, 10 to 4 p.m., Sundays, 1 to 4 p.m., and by appointment for groups.
-Admission: $5 for adults, children 12 and under are free.
NOTE: Oakland is closed during the winter, from Jan. 1 to March 21.

“The idea would be to organize this material, get it all digitized and then get a design for a computer that makes all of this information totally accessible,” said Woody Greenberg, the museum’s vice-president.

Other plans for the center include having a large topographical map of Nelson that shows how Camille caused landslides and flooding far in excess of any other natural event. It also would display an animation of the weather phenomenon that led to more than two feet of rain falling on areas of the county in less than nine hours, Greenberg said.

The museum also plans to place other materials on its Web site.

Oakland has received $9,000 in grant monies to fund the resource center from the Charlottesville Area Community Foundation and the Smyth Foundation.

Greenberg said another grant is in the works and that the museum is always taking private donations to help with the resource center.

Since opening in August 2007, the museum has continued to receive even more materials on Hurricane Camille, Greenberg said.

“We have hundreds of pictures. We have several dozen oral histories,” he said. “We have maybe thousands of documents ranging from newspaper articles to government reports.”

Goodwin said the museum is also always looking for “the things we don’t have.”

“What we’re really interested in is oral histories and personal photographs,” she said.

In the short-term, Greenberg said the museum would like to continue to work on the rooms housing the Camille information and set up more computer kiosks for public use.

For the long-term, the museum has discussed building a separate building for the Camille Resource Center, but that is “highly speculative,” he said.