Oakmont Library Home to Historical Treasures

Oakmont Carnegie Library has a secret.

Beneath the shelves of books, down the stairs and in the basement, there is a treasure trove.

You won't find gold or jewels, but a rich collection of history dating to the 1700s.

The collection includes hundreds of historic Oakmont photographs, Victorian papers ranging from diaries to power bills, blueprints for Edgewater Steel and even a newspaper from the day that George Washington died.

"It's the unofficial Oakmont museum," says librarian Stephanie Zimble, the library's archives specialist.

Members of the Oakmont Historical Society rescued many of the Edgewater Steel blueprints from the mud during construction, and they now are stored safely in the library along with bricks from the original gatehouse.

"Edgewater is so important to the history of the community, so I couldn't in good conscience get rid of them," Zimble says.

Zimble, a Verona resident, was able to procure the oldest image yet of the library after she gave a lecture on how preserve personal historical items.

One of the women who attended, Caroline Carroll, approached Zimble after the talk and offered to share a collection of glass plate negatives from the early 1900s.

The photographs, shot by Dr. William Cooper, portrayed a different image of Victorian life — the type rarely seen among the posed and proper portraits of the time.

Cooper's photos provide a grittier, more realistic picture of the era, Zimble says.

"You don't get a lot of photos of Victorian children playing, and you definitely don't get to see a little Victorian girl playing baseball in her backyard," she says.

The library's oldest piece of history is a newspaper from Ulster County in New York announcing the 1799 death of George Washington.

The worn pages feature poems and articles about the late former president, including a reaction from John Adams.

The piece was a gift from a professor in Ohio, James Flaherty, whose daughter Ann brought it to Oakmont Library.

One of Zimble's favorite artifacts is the diary of Clara Bailey from the turn of the last century. Inside, the author carefully sewed pressed leaves and flowers to document her most important memories.

The pages are pressed with leaves from the grave of Alexander Hamilton, a flower from the room where Washinton Irving wrote "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" and a shamrock from Ireland.

The diary also contains a penny with an unknown date. Bailey wrote that she found the penny immediately after stepping from a train in Salt Lake City and decided to preserve it.

"I have never seen anything like this," Zimble says. "A lot of human life and human experience gets stuck in places like this."

Zimble's favorite artifacts are always the personal ones, she says.

"I like stuff that people held and used," she says.

Zimble is a specialist in handling and preserving old things of all sorts and takes private appointments to teach community-members how to do so themselves.

She also is willing to scan and return residents' local historic photos using the library's high-tech equipment to archive them electronically.

Anyone can make an appointment to see the historical objects in the library, too. Zimble's big dream is to someday open a real museum where anyone can easily browse Oakmont's treasures of the past.

Until then, she says, it will remain as it is,  "a hideaway for forgotten things."

Browse the library's thousands of archived images online at the University of Pittsburgh's Historic Pittsburgh.