Mount Olive Area Historical Society receives $1,250 Do-Good Grant• Most will go to Kraft Collection

The Mount Olive Area Historical Society has received a $1,250 Do-Good Grant from CampusWorks, a technology consulting company that focuses solely on higher education.

The bulk of the money is expected to go toward the Society’s efforts to catalog and preserve the massive Kraft’s Studio print and negative collection — a project that Joy Hatch, who submitted the project for the grant, has a passion for.

It has been some time since Hatch, higher education/technology senior executive for CampusWorks, has lived in Mount Olive where she once worked at Kraft’s Studio.

However, Mount Olive is still home and when CampusWorks decided to offer the Do-Good Grants for community projects, Hatch’s thoughts quickly turned to her hometown and Kraft’s Studio.

Hatch, who lives in the greater Myrtle Beach, S.C. area, is the daughter of Rex and Faye Hatch of Mount Olive.

On Saturday, July 22, Hatch was at the David John Aaron Teaching and History Museum on East Main Street to present the grant to Ken Dilda, museum director.

The presentation was during CampusWorks’ first Impact Weekend, Giving Works of July 21-22.

Giving Works embodies the company’s collective commitment to making a positive impact in the communities it serves,CampusWorks Chief of Staff Jacqueline Faulkner said in a letter to the Historical Society announcing the grant.

“Through the award of this grant, CampusWorks hopes to support your efforts and, in turn, provide resources to expand and build upon the ways in which you currently benefit your local community,” she wrote.

The company is a family-run business and very much into employees and community, Hatch said.

“Traditionally they have supported foundations of some of the colleges that we do work for,” she said. “This year they decided to do this local Do-Good Grant.

“They wanted to go out into the local communities of the employees and basically give a chance to give back. That also is what CampusWorks is all about — giving back and making everything better. I applied for the grant and here we are.”

Hatch was joined at the museum by her mother, Faye Hatch, sisters, Joni Hatch Darden and Nicole Hatch Reynolds, and her nephew, Andrew Reynolds, for the check presentation and a work day.

Lewis Carroll, Mount Olive Area Historical Society vice president, explained the process for documenting and sorting negatives and placing the negatives in protective sleeves.

Also on hand was Karen Moore, Mount Olive Area Historical Society president.

As for working on the negatives, Hatch said her family had simply decided it would be fun to do.

“But also when we did this grant we did it to support the Kraft Collection, and so this is perfect,” Hatch added. “We wanted to do something — not only hand the check over, but also do some work that would do some good.

“Then my family said, ‘yeah, we’ll go,’ and here we are. My family will do anything. That is kind of cool you know.”

Overall 27 grants were submitted.

“We are giving out $33,000 in grants in local communities for a variety of different organizations,” Hatch said. “It is exciting. This is really neat. I don’t live in Mount Olive, but this is home. I know this is where I will eventually end up living.

“When this happened, I’m like I am going back to Mount Olive and see if I can find something there. Mom and I started talking, and we talked about several things.”

Her mother mentioned the Historical Society, of which she is a member, and the Kraft Collection.

Master Photographer Charles Kraft, who died in December 2009, operated Kraft’s Studio in Mount Olive and surrounding area from 1942 to 2007 taking studio portraits, weddings, community events and community groups.

The number of people who came through the studio is amazing, Hatch said.

Negatives and prints were kept in library card cabinets stored on the second floor of the Kraft building on West James Street.

“I knew they were doing the Kraft Collection so we started talking more about that,” Hatch said. “It was kind of neat to know that they (negatives) were still living somewhere and still providing a history.

“That is when Ken and I talked. He gave me some briefings, and we talked about the Kraft Collection. It was really neat to be able to do that.”

Kraft’s Studio was one of Hatch’s first jobs when she graduated from college.

She was responsible for all of the darkroom work, printing and framing photos. Hatch also assisted with weddings and photographing community groups.

“I remember my first trip upstairs to look for an old negative when I ran across a portrait of my mom and my sisters in 1968,” Hatch added. “That single adventure opened my eyes to the information those card catalog cabinets held about the community in which I lived.

“I moved on from Kraft’s Studio into higher education, but that experience was foundational in my life.”

In 2005, Kraft’s son, Rick, approached the Historical Society about purchasing the collection.

However, the Historical Society was just finishing up the museum restoration project and did not have the funds to purchase the collection.

“He came back to us in 2009 with the same proposition,” Dilda said. “We had finished the museum and had a little money left. So we were able to buy the collection from Rick Kraft in 2009. Since then we have used a series of volunteers, and now a part-time paid employee, to process and preserve the collection.”

The initial estimation was that the collection was about 50,000 negatives and some prints.

“Little did we know, and today we estimate from 800,000 plus negatives and prints,” Dilda said. “We have processed over 600,000 and about 200,000 to 250,000 remain.

“It is an absolutely invaluable resource for this community — one that was well worth the cost and effort to preserve. It will continue for several years. Hopefully one day we will be able to go online with a part of it.”

Scanning is a slow and costly process, he added. It is doubtful the entire collection can be scanned, Dilda said, but hopefully a portion of it can be.

But that is years down the road, he continued.

Most of the Historical Society’s funds are directed toward the Kraft Collection, Dilda said.

As such, it is safe to say that most of the grant will go toward the Kraft Collection, he added.