Moving the Collection, Part II

Anyone who has moved in or out of a house with lots of stairs knows what a difficult and exhausting project it can be. If you add to the equation that what you are moving is a one of a kind collection of Civil War artifacts, the stakes go up in a hurry. In a move such as ours, size does matter, and we had our fair share of things both big and heavy.

As curator, it is far too easy to myopically focus on the primary object when considering the difficulties of a move. In my case, I was very concerned about getting some large bronze busts, one of Abraham Lincoln and one of Admiral George Melville, down the stairs and out of the building. It did not at first occur to me that the busts are hollow and not exceptionally heavy, or that the marble pedestals on which some of them perched might be a bigger problem. But this turned out to be the case.

An experienced mover might tell you that the problem isn’t getting a heavy object down the stairs; it’s getting it to stop at the bottom. For this problem, particularly in the tight spaces we were forced to operate in, muscle power was a better option than any gizmo or gadgetry we could come up with. So in much the same way the Egyptians moved blocks up as they built the pyramids, we built a ramp to bring things down.

The key component is what they call the L-pallet. An L-pallet is basically one third of a box; the bottom and one side. With a brace on each side, the L-pallet gives you a rigid frame on which a heavy object can be moved. As you can see in the picture at the top, the object, whether it is a bust, a pedestal or a battle log, is strongly secured to the L-pallet with minimal contact from the packing materials. The L-pallet thus becomes a movable vehicle for the artifact. Using a dolly, we were able to move the pallet to the edge of the stairs, tip it over on its back, and slide it onto the two by six boards we screwed to the stairs to make the ramp. The original idea was to rig a pulley system to ease the pallet down the ramp. In practice, this proved to be a too complicated for the space that we had. In the end, we attached straps to the L-pallet so that half the crew could lower from above while the rest, myself included, manhandled it to the bottom. This process was slowed by the narrow stairs, which made lowering the items perfectly straight an important priority. To keep the pace from getting away from us, we screwed a board across the ramp about a third of the way up the stairs to provide us with a brake.

I have to confess that just prior to moving the heaviest of the pallets down the stairs (this one was the marble pedestal for the Melville bust) I took the opportunity to have some fun at the expense of an intern named Laura we had working in the basement archives. The basement archives were located directly under the stairs, so I stuck me head in there and made a little show of measuring the room. When she asked what I was doing I told her what we were about to slide a heavy object down the stairs and that I just wanted to make sure that if we lost control of it and it crashed through the floor that it wouldn’t land on her. I assured her that, having looked at the situation, I was “pretty sure” she was safe. She was a trooper, and took it as a joke, but I noticed that when the pedestal was coming down the stairs, she had abandon the archives and watched from the safety of the hallway.

All kidding aside, it was a great relief when we had them down the stairs and out of the building. But we weren’t done moving big things just yet, and more challenges remained. I’ll have more on that next time.