Hanging from a clothing line stretched across two sets of ladders, dozens, if not hundreds, of film negatives from The Newport Daily News archives dry out in the lobby of the Newport Historical Society’s headquarters on Touro Street, just a portion of the photo archive that was impacted when the organization’s basement unexpectedly flooded on Tuesday.

“It’s really Newport’s stories,” Executive Director Rebecca Bertrand said. “It’s the stories of locals – and it’s the stories of your newspaper that’s being preserved and the wonderful thing is that though it’s damaged, it’s not lost.”

The rest of the 150,000 photo negatives that had to be rescued from the flooded basement are being stored in a freezer to stave off mold growth, Bertrand said. This collection of photos, dating from around the 1950s to the 2000s, was donated to the Historical Society by the Sherman family, the publication’s previous owners, and relocated prior to the paper moving from the former Newport Daily News building on Malbone Road in 2019.

You can read more at: http://tinyurl.com/yjsxf9n5.

Comment by Dick Eastman: Have you ever read any of my articles about the need to store MULTIPLE copies of your important data and store them in MULTIPLE locations? If not, maybe it is time for me to blow the dust off some of those articles and republish them.