In what is the first local example of a wave of federal budget cuts, the Trump administration has revoked a $200,000 grant to Pilgrim Hall Museum that would have supported modernization and preservation of four centuries of documents in its archives that are now housed in deteriorating boxes.
In an email, Keith Sonderling, acting director of the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services, told museum director Donna Curtin and president Peter Brown that the grant “no longer serves the interest of the United States.”
“IMLS is repurposing its funding allocations in a new direction in furtherance of the President’s agenda,” Sonderling said. He did not explain what that agenda is or how the grant fails to serve the interests of the United States.
Sonderling did not respond to a request for comment.
He said in his email that a March 14 presidential executive order “mandates that the IMLS eliminate all non-statutorily required activities and functions.”
Curtin said institutions such as Pilgrim Hall rely on such grants to supplement their budgets.
“They fund so many projects in local communities,” she said of the little-known federal institute. “So now, we see the impact of taking steps against an agency and how that impacts people at the local level.”
Pilgrim Hall, on Court Street in downtown Plymouth, was awarded the grant in 2023 to care for 35,000 documents in the museum’s collection, said Curtin, who described them as “amazing documents and papers that we know need some greater attention.”
“It is really disheartening to lose that funding because it doesn’t appear to have anything to do with the merits of the work being done,” she said. “Maybe we should not be sad but mad.”
Curtin said that the museum has been unable to fulfill an increasing number of requests for its documents from the Revolutionary War, partly because of recent construction to replace an aging roof and to make other improvements, and because the archives need better cataloguing and digitization, which the grant would have funded. This year marks the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution.
Curtin pointed out that the reconstruction of the hall and the restoration of the museum’s paintings and other artworks are unaffected by the cut.
The shuttering of the IMLS, Curtin said, “is damaging to our communities in so many ways, and here in one of America’s oldest museums, we’re seeing that impact.”
The $200,000 grant would have paid for a project archivist and student interns to create a digital database for the collection and begin the work of storing them in new cabinets. The total cost of the project was $585,000. Pilgrim Hall was responsible for raising the balance of $385,000 from other sources.
Curtain said the project was to have begun last year, but because the roof had to be replaced first – it had been leaking since 2021 – the archive work was postponed.
“Unfortunately, when your roof starts leaking in your facility and you’re trying to do a full roof replacement, you can’t have people going in and out looking at sensitive materials,” Curtin said. “We had to completely seal off the archives.”
In the face of the unexplained federal grant cut, Curtin said, she hopes Pilgrim Hall will be able to find alternative support for the archives project.
Fred Thys can be reached at fred@plymouthindependent.org.