The Paper Chase

On New Year’s Day 1776, Lord Dunmore, the last royal governor of Virginia, and thousands of his Loyalist allies were huddled aboard ships bobbing in the harbor of Norfolk, the strategic port at the southern end of the Chesapeake Bay. A ragtag army of patriots occupied the town and, from the safety of the warehouses lining the shore, took potshots at anyone who appeared on deck.

At around three in the afternoon, four British naval ships riding at anchor opened fire on the waterfront as several boatloads of redcoats and emancipated Black Americans came ashore to torch the snipers’ posts. Terrified patriots scattered amid the barrage. After several buildings were left in smoldering heaps, the British and Loyalist troops returned to the ships.

The fleet’s passengers, many of whom owned homes and businesses on shore, were relieved at first to see that their town was still largely intact. Relief turned to horror, however, as pinpricks of flame sprang up through the darkened streets that evening. Soon the clouds “appeared as red and bright as they do in an evening at sun setting,” wrote one observer watching from more than a dozen miles away.

Fires raged for three days. When the blaze finally subsided, Norfolk, the largest city in the largest of the 13 American colonies, lay in ruin. Not one of its 1,333 buildings remained intact, and all of its nearly 6,500 residents were displaced. Never has an American city suffered such complete devastation.

The patriot commanders put the blame squarely on Dunmore and the fires lit by his troops. Newspapers repeated that assertion. Even the governor’s colleagues in the House of Lords expressed outrage. From Massachusetts, George Washington predicted that the burning of the port would persuade reluctant Americans to back independence—still a radical notion at the start of 1776.

The unprecedented disaster indeed encouraged Virginia’s patriot leaders to vote unanimously for separation on May 15. This stunning decision broke what had been a deadlock in Philadelphia and led the wavering colonies to adopt the Declaration of Independence on July 4.

The owners of Norfolk’s burned homes and businesses, meanwhile, demanded compensation. In 1777, Virginia’s new patriot assembly created a commission to determine who was culpable. The results, which appeared that year, were unequivocal. The commission found that the patriots themselves had taken advantage of the British attack to loot and torch the town and were directly responsible for a shocking 96 percent of the destruction.

Central to this stunning revelation were sworn depositions from dozens of eyewitnesses, each of whom—to avoid conflicts of interest—was a confirmed patriot who did not own property in Norfolk. James Nicholson, for example, watched as patriot soldiers “went from house to house plundering and firing them,” and according to another local man, the soldiers explained they “had general orders for destroying all the houses.” The report made it clear that patriot commanders had lied about Dunmore’s culpability—and even the direction of the wind on that fateful night—to hide their guilt.

“The intent of these records was to set the record straight about what really happened in Norfolk,” said Greg Crawford, state archivist at the Library of Virginia. The meticulously researched report, written in the neat hand of a clerk, also provides some of the most dramatic and reliable first-person accounts of the American Revolution. Yet it was not publicly released at the time, and the story of Dunmore as perpetrator of a terrible crime remained unchallenged.

Sixty years later, the commission’s papers were discovered in the attic of the state capitol in Richmond. The decaying document had been relegated to the shelves of the state library and largely neglected. By this time, the myth that the British burned Norfolk was accepted fact; many history books today still repeat this false piece of patriot propaganda, and I even saw it displayed in an exhibit at Philadelphia’s Museum of the American Revolution. Who hid the report, and why, remains a mystery.

The only proof that the British were not to blame, aside from Dunmore’s protestations, were the recovered documents. But as the 250th anniversary of the nation’s founding approached, the report was again in danger of vanishing—part of a quiet but alarming crisis threatening millions of paper records scattered across dozens of archives.

In the early 1900s, German chemists synthesized a soluble form of cellulose acetate, a film made of wood pulp (and later, synthetics) that proved useful for protecting playing cards, plane fuselages, and eventually, old paper. In the 1930s, a conservator named William Barrow at the Virginia State Library—today’s Library of Virginia—pioneered the practice of placing an archival document between two sheets of thin, see-through cellulose acetate. The resulting “sandwich” was then fed through a heavy press to heat and seal the page within, much like a laminated driver’s license.

Archivists in Richmond quickly embraced the technological advance, which seemed an ideal way to permanently protect aging letters, reports, and volumes. The library subjected two-thirds of the 97-page Norfolk commission collection to the lamination process, along with thousands of other documents. The procedure’s popularity also spread to archives in other parts of the Southeast as well as to Washington, D.C. “Institutions laminated documents with gusto,” wrote Library of Virginia archivist Eddie Woodward, the author of a 2017 study of the process. The National Archives in Washington, for example, bought a steam-heated flatbed hydraulic press to apply the technique to its documents, and Verner Clapp, deputy librarian of Congress, asserted in 1942 that Barrow’s approach had “withstood the test of time” and was “the standard method.”

Yet applying intense heat and pressure to fragile documents could activate the natural acids in paper and ink—particularly the iron-gall ink that was favored by writers from medieval times until the early 20th century. This in turn could speed up decomposition. When Barrow became aware of this issue, he developed methods to de-acidify paper and ink before running pages through a press; he later added a plasticizer to the cellulose acetate film to increase its strength and flexibility. Yet acidity remained a problem, and over time, the plastic dried out, shrinking and warping documents.

What seemed a permanent solution to the problem of decay proved to be maddeningly temporary. Librarians found themselves shelling out money to re-laminate their holdings. Many documents grew discolored, and by 1973, the National Archives acknowledged that the process was “not without some harmful effects” and began phasing it out, though other institutions continued to use it well into the 1980s.

A 2015 study that surveyed 52 institutions found that three-fourths of them held laminated material. Moreover, at least 2.9 million laminated documents were stored in the nation’s private and public collections. These figures are almost certainly understated by some margin; the State Archives of North Carolina alone estimates that it has some two million laminated documents. Since the Barrow process varied over time and from institution to institution, the extent of damage in American collections is hard to quantify.

“There are millions and millions” of documents in disrepair, Woodward said. “We are put in the unenviable position of deciding if we should spend our money on the more costly, heavily deteriorated documents that are possibly of more historical value, but might not be salvageable, or to opt for the more easily treated documents.”

In 2025, the Trump administration moved to eliminate the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the only federal agency dedicated to funding libraries. A federal judge struck down this move, and in April, the administration withdrew its appeal of this ruling. The White House, however, has proposed withdrawing all funding for the institute in 2027, so its fate now rests with Congress.

By early this year, the Norfolk commission collection, particularly those pages that underwent the lamination process, were “in dire need of conservation,” said Crawford. About half of the 97 laminated leaves were heavily damaged, and some were barely legible.

In early February, Crawford put the archival box containing the pages into a shipping carton and loaded it into a library van. He drove to South Boston, a small town near the North Carolina line, and met Matt Johnson, director of Conservation-NC, a private lab in Greensboro specializing in document conservation. Johnson then ferried the box to the lab, a one-story, nondescript building on the edge of town, securing the papers in a concrete vault.

On a recent visit in June, conservator Amber Pegram stood in front of aluminum pans, the sort used in cafeterias to keep food warm, soaking one of the laminated leaves in acetic acid, the liquid that forms the basis of table vinegar. Then, she said, “you can peel a layer off, clean, and repeat.” She pulled a paper out of the solution and placed it in a lightbox as a fan blew the fumes away.

Once the laminate-free paper was dry, Pegram’s colleague Emily Bell took over, soaking it in fresh water for as much as a full day and changing out the liquid periodically to remove dirt and residue. “The first time I saw someone wash paper, I thought they were insane,” she said, placing a page on a mesh drying rack. “But the paper is actually quite sturdy.”

Conservators must neutralize the natural acid in the iron-gall ink, a highly water-resistant substance made from tannic acid and iron sulfate. They do this by drenching the paper in calcium phytate, a mineral salt that stabilizes the ink.

Bell then took the dried material to her workbench to mend the pages tattered by age and the lamination process. She placed the pieces on a sheet of Japanese kozo paper, a material derived from the paper mulberry shrub that is tough, durable, and very light, and then used wheat glue to hold them in place. Bell lightly heated the pages using a miniature iron and placed them in an acid-free folder for their return trip to Richmond.

“As awful as lamination can be, if they had not done it, then it is possible some of these documents would have been lost forever,” Bell said. “Of course, people in the future may roll their eyes at the process we use, but our goal is to conserve in a way that is at least 98 percent reversible.”

The process has been time consuming as well as expensive; the cost of conserving fewer than 100 pages totaled $24,269—a hefty sum for any archive. The money comes from a $200,000 fund, paid in part by donations, set aside to stabilize Revolutionary War documents held in the Library of Virginia. Crawford has given priority to documents not widely known to the public that shed light on the lives of all Virginians during the Revolution, including Loyalists, women, enslaved and free people, and frontline soldiers.

Researchers soon will have access to digitized versions of all the documents. That the stories they contain are now being preserved is a fine birthday present for the nation.