In a battle to preserve history dating to 1770s, Westmoreland County running out of space

From British rule to the coronavirus, Westmoreland County government stores millions of paper records spanning more than two centuries of local history.

Rows of boxes stacked to the ceiling hold government and court records dating to the time of King George III. They occupy thousands of square feet of warehouse space in the basement of the courthouse annex in downtown Greensburg and another storage space a few miles away at the Forensics Center in Hempfield.

It’s nowhere near enough space to accommodate the additional boxes scattered throughout courthouse offices waiting to be put into storage and indefinitely preserved.

“We don’t have a place to put them,” said Jason Greenwald, director of the county’s records management office.

To help ease the crunch, Greenwald proposes leasing 6,000 square feet of space — which is larger than a basketball court — in a Hempfield warehouse near Roseytown Road. The Hempfield warehouse has an adjacent 2,000-square-foot office that could be converted for additional storage, Greenwald said. Details of an agreement are not finalized.

State law requires the county, as well as other government entities, to preserve history by retaining public documents, including criminal and civil court files and tax records. Westmoreland County also stores sheriff’s warrants dating to before the American Revolution and land registries from the early 1800s that list slaves as taxable property.

The county has about 13,000 bound docket books and ledgers and another 32,000 boxes of files and documents in storage, Greenwald said.

Most records, if not specifically sealed by the courts, are available for public viewing at the courthouse, where about 60% of the records are kept.

About a decade ago, the county added warehouse space for records at the Forensics Center, which was converted from the outer shell of a decommissioned waste-to-energy plant. Now, both the center and annex are full as an estimated 2,000 additional boxes of records pile up in courthouse offices.

“It’s a problem we’ve had for a number of years,” county Commissioner Sean Kertes said.

While the county converted some older records to digital media and placed others on microfilm and microfiche, the paper records must be retained.

Meanwhile, county officials are slowly attempting to review the records in storage to determine if any don’t meet the requirements for preservation and can be discarded — a project that could free up some much-needed space.

And, while finding additional storage is the primary concern, Greenwald said efforts are underway to ensure proper temperature and humidity levels are maintained to preserve centuries-old documents.

“The unfortunate thing is this has to take a backseat to what we need to retain, but mostly we’re trying to put the records into an acid-free environment as much as we can to preserve them so they don’t deteriorate,” Greenwald said. “We’re limited by what we are capable of but try to make sure they are not tainted.”