There's a new archive in Dayton dedicated to the history of one of the city's most influential companies: National Cash Register.
NCR was a pioneer in modern sales and factory techniques, and reshaped Dayton's economy over 125 years before it eventually left the region in 2009.
A vast historical collection that tells the company's story is now housed in the former Neil’s Heritage House building on West Schantz Avenue. Inside the building, there’s new life, and a new mission — a much different mission than the restaurant and banquet center that first opened its doors in 1946.
It will now serve as the Mark and Paula Hurd NCR Archive Center. It will be operated by its new owners, Dayton History, which is the nonprofit operating Carillon Historical Park and several other historic sites across the region.
On a recent tour of the facility, Dayton History President and CEO Brady Kress talked about why they chose the building and the new mission being served here.
This transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity:
Brady Kress: We saw this property, it's of course adjacent to Carillon Park, which is our headquarters and largest part of Dayton History and it was right across the street from our property. It came up for sale at one point and we were interested in it and looked at it and then part of the family came back and kind of reopened the restaurant for just a couple years and then it was on the market again. So we were hearing different ideas for the property and we were concerned, 1) about the mid-century modern building from an architectural preservation perspective. And then, 2) it was one way of getting off of Carillon's property being adjacent to it. So we have the river on one side and UD on the other and Calvary Cemetery on the third side. Carillon is kind of a triangle, and so this was one that was somewhat connected across the road to Carillon Park.
We found a donor who was willing to help us acquire the property, and we did so. And it took us a little longer to find the different donors to restore the property, abate the property, clean it all up and then adaptively reuse it for the archive center. And the idea with that was that we house our two dimensional collections here, and we're still in the process of moving in. But what that means is all of our papers, our photos, the engineering notebooks, flat files, artwork, advertising work. All of those materials will be here. When you talk about a collection with 100,000 glass plate negatives, those are items that we can't really have the public come in and thumb through, right? They're very fragile. In addition, our archivists and our curatorial offices are here now cleaning those items, they're digitizing them, and then we're housing them here in different controlled environments for those particular items.
So it's a true archive center.
Jerry Kenney: We're standing here in the lobby and I can see you've got at least one cash register that has been brought across the street. I noticed there are obviously still signs of the Heritage House. How are you trying to balance what this building previously served as and what it will continue to serve as? Great observation.
Kress: So the whole idea with the building was to preserve the envelope and then preserve probably what most people remember and love about the building, which is this entryway and lobby and the flying staircase and the Tenderloin Room. And so those pieces, the crystal chandelier as you walk into the Tenderloin room and again how many thousands of prom photos were taken in front of the staircase. So those items we preserved. And then we've outfitted the building in a mid-century modern fashion. So we kind of picked a date and went with it. And so the ads and so forth that are used on the walls throughout the building are NCR sales ads that we've kind of used as decor, and they relate to the different time periods.
So as you pointed out, there is a cash register here. This is just one of a few machines that'll be in the archive. The focus here is the two-dimensional items.
Now, folks that are familiar with the NCR collection know that we have a thousand business machines that are also part of the collection. That is actually going to be part of a Phase Two that's gonna be over at Carillon Park. So if you think about this project, we're thinking about it almost like a presidential museum, presidential library, where you oftentimes have the the library itself with the presidential papers and small tokens, smaller artifacts, the photographs and so forth, and recordings and everything. That's this part of the project, the Hurd Center. For the second phase — oftentimes those presidential museums, if you think of going to Mount Vernon or think about going to the Lincoln Presidential Library in Illinois — the second part of that is a museum complex.
And that's where they're using some of those artifacts — some of the three-dimensional artifacts — to tell stories. And so those three-dimensional pieces are gonna be deployed over to Carillon Park and placed on exhibit for everybody to see every time they come through Carillon Park. So it really is the difference between the research library and the museum interpretive center.
