The federal government initiated the Historical Records Survey (H.R.S.) in 1935 to relieve high levels of white-collar unemployment. Established as one of five programs under the Works Progress Administration (W.P.A., renamed Work Projects Administration in 1939), the H.R.S. employed clerical workers and professionals to inventory public and private archives across the nation. The H.R.S. was federally funded and directed until August 1939, when federal law required states to assume complete administrative control and greater financial responsibility for the project. With the beginning of World War II, however, W.P.A. projects unrelated to the war effort were discontinued, and by mid 1942 the H.R.S. project was at a standstill. All W.P.A. projects ended in February 1943, and most H.R.S. records were deposited in public repositories.
The H.R.S.' primary goal was to survey and inventory public state, county, city, and town archives across the United States, as well as private collections and archives. HRS projects were conducted on both the national and state level. The first national project inventoried county records, but surveys of church records, imprints, and manuscripts soon followed. State projects included such diverse topics as Transcriptions of Cemetery Inscriptions (New Hampshire), an Inventory to the Eugenics Records Survey (Vermont), an Index to Indian Depredations (Georgia), the Erie Canal Records Survey (Pennsylvania), and Letters of Famous Oregon Pioneers (Oregon).
The H.R.S.' secondary goal was to publish record inventories to make historical records and documents more accessible to amateur and professional researchers. Attainment of this goal fluctuated greatly between states and individual surveys, and H.R.S. officials estimated that only twenty percent of completed inventories were published. A third goal was archival reorganization and record preservation. In the process of surveying collections, workers often found records neglected, unorganized, stored under bad conditions, or, in the case of one Iowa county courthouse, used for kindling. Workers' efforts saved many collections from disposal or irreversible damage.
State projects deposited their records in various institutions when the H.R.S. officially ended in 1943 in hope that the survey would continue after the war. The Oregon H.R.S. deposited its records with the University of Oregon and the Oregon State Library at Salem. Other collections received less favorable treatment, however. Archivist Leonard Rapport found the Massachusetts H.R.S. records "in 132 bundles, wrapped like laundry but feeling like short-weight sacks of Portland cement" in the "surrealist circus-tent setting" of a Forbes Library attic. He also reported that some records were misplaced or discarded for lack of space. The Maine H.R.S. records, for example, were dumped into Casco Bay soon after the project ended as no repository was willing to accept them. In the 1970s Rapport and the Society of American Archivists brought attention to H.R.S. work by locating the surviving unpublished records and publishing The Historical Records Survey: A Guide to the Unpublished Inventories, Indexes, and Transcripts (Chicago, 1980).
From the guide to the W.P.A. Oregon Historical Records Survey records, not yet dated, (Special Collections and University Archives, University of Oregon Libraries)
