FEB 6, 2025 | NEWS | By Evan Arvizu
The vault door unlocks and swings open. The light flicks on, revealing a lengthy room, full of large beige bookshelves. On those shelves are rows and rows of neat gray boxes. Nothing special visually, just a storage room of sorts. It’s exactly 64 degrees.
With the press of a button, the shelves start to move, unveiling the treasures hidden inside. On one shelf, a thousand boxes of college history. Another section, 800 unpublished single copy manuscripts, some housed in just one box, others spanning nearly 200. Boxes full of fragile, heavy glass negatives, at risk of shattering with one touch, tiny artist-made books, medieval fragments, old archaeological photos, original architecture blueprints — the contents are seemingly endless.
Colorado College’s Special Collections are just that: special. They house a robust 25,000-item collection of books, journals, photographs, art, maps, physical items and more. It’s composed of donations, curated acquisitions, nearly every book that has been published about Colorado history, and every book written by CC students, alum, or faculty.
What makes CC really unique is the extensive collection of rare books and manuscripts. For a college so small, this is not the norm, said Jessy Randall, head archivist and curator of CC Special Collections.
Where did it all come from? Well, during the early days of the collection, CC got lucky.
“A lot of wealth in the 19th century and early 20th century was here in Colorado Springs, and Colorado College was a place that people thought of when they thought of where to donate their rare books,” Randall said. “We have really surprising terrific things in the collection.”
Randall has been at CC since 2001, creating development policies, managing operations and growing the collection.
“The funny thing about archives is that it all looks the same,” she said. “It’s nice, neat, tidy gray boxes, archival quality, expensive gray boxes with labels on them. It doesn’t really look like much of anything. But to an archivist, you look at these boxes and you’re like, oh, my beautiful collection.”
The collections have bolstered campus social movements, contributed to increasing education and accessibility efforts and assisted countless community research projects. Now, they are growing in a big way.
The Archive Project
A few years ago, while writing a book about the block plan, a faculty member ran into a wall: they struggled to find specific records they needed for their research. The records, which should have been publicly accessible in the archive, were sitting, locked in the cages of the Armstrong Basement. This brought to light an issue on campus; there are important historical records and objects scattered around CC that need to be documented, organized and better-taken care of. While the school has tried its best to keep and document its own history, it’s hard without a staff member dedicated to the task.
CC has archival spaces all around campus: the Palmer Attic, the Armstrong Basement, offices, classrooms, historic buildings, houses and more. There is archival material and history all around. Still, it’s often shoved in a box in the corner of a storage room, locked behind closed doors or in the worst-case scenario, accidentally tossed out during spring cleaning.
Enter the Archives Project. This undertaking, also known as the History of CC Project, was intended to be a three-year effort to organize and digitize CC’s unpublished archival records. The project, currently in its third year, will have enough funds to continue for a fourth. The end goal is a significant addition to the Special Collections’ physical and digital archives.
Randall and Special Collections brought in archivist Clare Trissel Davis, a Colorado Springs native and CC legacy, to head the project. Having grown up around campus, Trissel Davis deeply appreciates the college and its history.
Her father, James Trissel, founded the press at CC, an institution that acts as a unique pillar of CC education and has had a significant impact on Special Collections’ emphasis on letterpress-made books. Her mother, Carol Neel, is a history professor, and her step-father, John Horner, is a psychology professor.
While combining college records might not be as exciting as other archival jobs, Trissel Davis emphasized that the work is valuable and that her connection to the university only makes her care more about doing it daily.
“Personally, I think it matters a lot to me, the act of capturing what is of enduring value to our history,” she said.
Randall said this sentiment is shared by the anonymous donor funding the project.
For the past two years, Trissel Davis has been visiting CC archival spaces, going through boxes, organizing physical records, digitizing collections, and updating the organization systems and archival software to make accessibility and future work more manageable.
Not every file or record needs to be kept, so developing records retention policies, and helping campus administrators to understand what is of historical value and needs to be kept is another big part of the job.
This project has taken her to the corners of CC, from athletics to the Dean’s office and even student housing. They recently acquired a collection of old Black Student Union materials from the basement of Glass House, also known as Lennox House, after a student stumbled upon them.
“We’ve been looking for these organizational records for so long and he just happened to see it because he lived in that house,” Trissel Davis said.
She emphasized the desire to increase public awareness about the project, hoping it will lead to the discovery of more important hidden collections.
Linking Past and Present
Special Collections hold value in research and academic settings. However, the importance of record keeping and archives goes deeper than that.
“There’s a lot of stories that just disappear, you know, student activists and student organizations have accomplished and done lots of things that just get buried because the students graduate,” Trissel Davis said. “We’re able to capture those stories and that’s really exciting.”
One of her favorite finds: the discovery of a nuclear disarmament club at CC in the 1960s called Commitment.
Randall shared another example. In 2017, amid the Me Too movement, CC renamed South Hall. Former namesake President Slocum had been asked to resign in 1916 over financial impropriety. Rumors swirled that another contributing factor had been his history of sexual misconduct in the workplace.
Curious about the basis of these rumors, Randall took to the archives and found precisely what she was looking for, hidden inside 15 handwritten, scrapbook-style encyclopedias made by a passionate Colorado historian and former CC professor, James Hutchinson Kerr. Kerr had documented first-person accounts of women who had spoken out against Slocum, detailing years of sexual harassment. Randall called Slocum CC’s own Harvey Weinstein.
The resurfacing of these records prompted the changing of the name and an important public acknowledgment of the wrongdoing embedded in CC’s past. Discussing these issues, even retroactively, is crucial to the college upholding its current mission statements around seeking excellence through continued learning and accountability.
“We can’t improve if we don’t acknowledge our institutional history. Having an awareness about what worked and what didn’t work, that’s empowering. If you’re just saying what the college is, instead of doing these things or referring to times when we did them, what is the point,” Trissel Davis said. “If we’re not building a legacy, we’re essentially here for no reason.”
Building a New Legacy
“Philosophically, I think there is a shift happening in rare books, manuscripts, and Special Collections departments around the world, where we are thinking critically about the power sources that created these collections,” Randall said. “To speak academically and abstractly, we’re interrogating our very mission, our purpose. What are we really here for?”
“At CC, the answer is teaching and learning,” she explained.
In her time at CC, Randall has focused on curating pieces more representative of the CC community and its diverse backgrounds, and using them for educational purposes. While doing her best to acknowledge the biases that created the existing collection, new acquisitions aim to tell stories that are more inclusive and equitable.
This includes bringing in a first edition of Ntozake Shange’s “For Colored Girls” and relabeling a poorly described old map already in the collection, highlighting its depiction of the prominent black neighborhood in Colorado Springs. It also means including unique books and artwork in the collection, like Candace Hicks’ “Volume XXXIII” an embroidered fabric composition journal.
Randall explained that while they are actively working to decolonize new acquisitions, she won’t turn away valuable donations. However, the approach to these items has changed. In 2005, a CC alum offered to donate their “Noble Fragment,” a single leaf of an original Gutenberg Bible. The previous curator had turned it down, but Randall jumped at the offer.
Despite the relatively low research value of a Noble Fragment because of the countless digitized copies available online, Randall emphasized its worth outside of academic use.
“When that gift came in, I felt like I should retire right then. The emotional impact of that book, of showing that book to students, that single page, it’s priceless. I had one researcher who burst into tears upon me putting that leaf in front of him,” she said.
This type of shared access and appreciation contributes to what both Randall and Trissel Davis discussed as efforts to break down barriers of perceived elitism and exclusivity.
“Librarians themselves sometimes feel unapproachable to students, but Special Collections? That’s like another level,” Trissel Davis admits. “I don’t think I approached a librarian the entire time I was [in undergrad].”
However, she makes the point that librarians and Special Collections staff are here to help students access resources, and want to create that safe space.
Tucked away in a gray box inside the vault, a rare book could live for a long time, perfectly maintained at 64 degrees and 42 percent humidity. But if it never comes out of that box, what’s the point? Eventually, it’ll begin to molder away, lost to the recesses of the growing vault. Randall emphasized that the true value comes in learning from these historical treasures and sharing the stories that they hold, which means promoting both preservation and access.
Kerr’s Encyclopedia, Special Collections
Candace Hicks’ Composition Journal “Volume XXXIII,” Special Collections