A treasure trove of historical documents has been sitting dormant beneath Bellport Village Community Center and Village Hall over the last century, but the village historian and mayor are spearheading an effort to inventory the haphazardly placed records.

Since becoming Bellport mayor last year, Maureen Veitch has prioritized organizing the haphazard collection of physical documents like permit requests and original blueprints inside the village buildings and hopes to eventually digitize historical records.

To get the job done, Veitch appointed Bellport resident, and former chief of library and museum archives at the Museum of Modern Art, Milan Hughston, as volunteer village historian.

“He has been incredible in the basement of this building going through documents and doing what’s called an ‘appraisal of documents’ so that we can begin to understand what we have here,” Veitch said.

Hughston has been working inside Village Hall and Community Center unraveling decades-old business blueprints, scrapbooks, permit requests, and more for over six weeks, and plans on giving the mayor a roadmap for where each document can go.

“A part of the outcome will be to help her [Mayor Veitch] determine what records might be worthy of being scanned so they could be made more available,” Hughston said.

For Hughston, the archival initiative will hopefully lead to digitizing important village documents like original housing blueprints and permit requests from throughout the post-war housing boom.

The numerous file cabinets and aging cardboard boxes once unseen for decades also include village ledgers, scrapbooks for bygone village anniversaries and parties, and notebooks neatly outlining board meeting minutes from over a hundred years ago.

Bellport’s archival project comes months after the Town of Islip completed a $325,000 renovation for its records department, which improved lighting and fire safety fixtures, and allowed for easier access to their archives.

Veitch also submitted a $500,000 grant application in April for digitizing records and cybersecurity enhancements to senators Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand, but the money hasn’t come yet.

After categorizing the dozens of blueprint scrolls, floppy discs, books, and more, Hughston will present Mayor Veitch with his final document appraisal in September, hoping that the months-long inventory project will help secure funding to update the village’s archives to the digital age.

“The long-term goal is… helping the mayor at least conceive of how she might get grant funding to move it to the next step,” Hughston said.