Endless ephemera

Larry and Maria Hiatt have their work cut out for them this winter.
And next winter.
And the winter after that.
And maybe a couple of winters after that.
The Hiatts, active volunteers for Jay County Historical Society, have just begun the process of accessioning (formally accepting, documenting and cataloging) one of the most remarkable collections of Jay County ephemera ever assembled.
What’s ephemera? It’s the stuff of everyday life: Papers, receipts, pencils, matchbooks, photographs. But it’s the stuff that’s most likely to disappear, tossed in the burn barrel or sent to the landfill.
Cheryl Myers wasn’t going to let that happen.
Back in about 1982 or 1983, she came across an old Coca-Cola bottle with a Portland imprint on the bottom. A now-and-then antique dealer and a collector by nature, she held onto it.
And she started looking for more.
“I’ve just always been interested in the history of Jay County,” she said.
She found herself prowling through rummage sales and bidding on items at auction.
“Next thing I knew, it was a collection, a big collection,” she said.
And what a collection it is.
Yearbooks, souvenirs, posters, school newspapers, plates, pencils, pens, matchbooks, postcards, old photos, canning jars, exit signs from schools demolished years ago, menus, ash trays, glasses, deeds, mortgages, “all kinds of paperwork” and more.
You name it. If it had a connection to Jay County, Cheryl Myers collected it.
And now, she has donated the bulk of her collection to Jay County Historical Society to be incorporated in the museum.
How big a collection are we talking about? Twenty-four plastic bins worth.
“So many things I can’t remember,” said Myers. “It was all of Jay County, everything I could get.”
While Myers started with rummage sales and auctions in the 1980s, she quickly made the transition to eBay. “I got a lot of things over the Internet,” she said.
For the most part, none of the items were expensive. “I started so many years ago,” said Myers. “They weren’t as high back then.”
Most of the items cost her $20 or less.
“I never really spent a lot of money,” said Myers.
Among the more unusual items are an advertising piece from 1917 from The Crystal Theatre, an early moviehouse in Portland — “A guy was selling that out of his garage” — and a pair of over-sized leather dice used as a promotion for Bimel Wheel and Spoke Company, an early Portland manufacturer.
The most she paid for any item, Myers said, was $100 for a mint condition of a late 19th century two-volume history of Jay County. She has held onto that.
But the rest — items numbering in the thousands — will now be preserved for future generations at the historical society’s museum.
It may be awhile, however, before everything is on display.
The Hiatts estimate they can accession about 1,000 pieces a year, working together in afternoons as volunteers at the museum.
At that rate, they have years and years of work ahead of them.