Some outstanding examples of penmanship are to be found in hundreds of hefty books stored in the Webster County Courthouse.

Those books contain the land ownership records of Webster County dating back 150 years. And during most of those years, all of the information was entered by hand – no typewriters, and definitely no computers. Instead employees of the County Recorder’s Office wrote in all the land transactions with fountain pens. Those workers apparently had to pass a handwriting test to get their jobs.

Those records, all that valuable history, could be vulnerable to loss. Ink can fade, pages can yellow. In a worst case scenario, a broken pipe could spew hundreds of gallons of water on them.

Thanks to a recently completed effort, there is now a digital backup for some 442,000 of those documents.

Fulfilling a goal County Recorder Lindsay Laufersweiler has had since taking office in 2015, the records have been scanned and stored in digital form. Additional records from the County Auditor’s Office and County Engineer’s Office were also scanned.

The work was done by U.S. Imaging, of Saginaw, Michigan. It cost about $300,000.

That money came from the federal COVID-19 relief law called the American Rescue Plan Act. Laufersweiler lobbied the Board of Supervisors to spend some of the county’s allocation from that federal measure on the documents project, and the supervisors agreed.

Funding from the American Rescue Plan Act is one-time money that should not be plugged into the county’s general operating budget. Using it to pay for a project that would not otherwise get done is the smart thing to do.

Spending the federal money on this project will actually save Webster County taxpayers some money in the future. The county had been budgeting about $10,000 a year for maintaining the records. That outlay won’t be needed anymore.

We thank Laufersweiler for coming up with this plan and the supervisors for approving it.