Sunday, August 10, 2003

By Mike Bucsko, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

For several years, the brick buildings of a former match factory sat vacant in Bellefonte as borough officials sought an appropriate mate for the historic Centre County property.

About three years ago, a perfect suitor came calling -- the American Philatelic Society from nearby State College.

Now the society and its resource arm, the American Philatelic Research Library, are poised to move to the anchor of Bellefonte's historic district as part of the new American Philatelic Center.

The move will kick off Saturday when the philatelic folks open their first building in the 104-year-old match factory complex. The center's opening was scheduled to coincide with Bellefonte's annual arts and crafts fair.

The building, the newest of the 18 buildings in the historic complex, will initially house a handful of retail and professional businesses until the philatelic society and the library are able to complete their move by early next year.

The match factory was built in 1899 and opened for business a year later by the Pennsylvania Match Co. The company was one of three that occupied the site until the match business shut down in 1947. A lumber supply and retail business, Claster's, occupied the site until 1996.

The site received a historic designation from the National Register of Historic Places two years ago, an outcome sought by borough officials partly as an incentive to developers who would be eligible for investment tax credits on the property. As it turned out, the tax credits weren't used because the philatelic organizations are nonprofits.

Another reason the borough sought the designation is because the factory site along Spring Creek is the last remaining link in Bellefonte to the area's once-burgeoning lumber industry, said Sue Hannegan, the borough's historic preservation officer.

A marriage of the site to the stamp society and its library was ideal because it continues the town's long-standing commitment to preservation and history, Hannegan said. Bellefonte is home to a wide array of Victorian and antebellum homes.

"That was very important to us because of the connection to tourism," she said. "An awful lot of people come to Bellefonte because of its architecture and its history, and that really ties in well."

The American Philatelic Society, founded in 1886, has been in State College since 1945. Before that, the organization did not have a central office, said Kim Kowalczyk, the society's education director.

The move after 58 years was motivated mainly by the needs of the library, which needs more space for its collection of philatelic reference material, Kowalczyk said. It is the library which bought the match factory property, which will house the new American Philatelic Center.

The 35-year-old library has 5,000 periodical titles and 19,000 book titles, including some that date to just after the Civil War, said Gini Horn, the library's director. Before such an entity existed, the American Philatelic Society used the Carnegie Library in Oakland as its reference depository for 30 years in its early days. The main library receives about a dozen inquiries annually about the collection, which contains material from 1899 to 1929, said Greg Priore, the library's archivist.

Horn, a graduate of the University of Pittsburgh's School of Library and Information Sciences, has overseen the library's electronic conversion, including the placement of the library's catalog on its Web site, www.stamps.org. To accomplish that task, the library put the catalog on an electronic database so it could be accessible to the American Philatelic Society's 50,000 members, Horn said.

The library receives about 2,000 requests for information each year, and, "That doesn't count the phone calls," Horn said. Stamp collectors, like other hobbyists, are protective of their property, which leads to some interesting inquiries, she said.

Like the time a caller inquired about the value of a rare stamp with a supposedly "secret" mark on it. The caller didn't want to share the secret mark with the librarians, so when he faxed a copy of the stamp to the library, he just included an arrow to the spot where the secret mark was supposed to be, Horn said.

Employees at the library and society are looking forward to the move to the new center, but not necessarily the physical move itself. The library has to move four miles of shelving, plus another mile of information that is in storage.

In addition to the stamp periodicals and other reference material, the library also has to move hundreds of atlases, maps, gazettes, histories of various countries and other material, Horn said.

The library's collection comprises about 50 percent of United States material and 50 percent of material from other parts of the world, mostly from Great Britain, Canada, France, Germany, New Zealand and Australia, Horn said.

The move in the first phase will occupy 22,000 square feet in the match factory complex. The second phase, which begins next month, will include an additional 5,500 square feet of space for the library and society.

The entire project is estimated to cost $7.5 million, part of which will be offset when the American Philatelic Society sells its current headquarters next month, Kowalczyk said.

As part of the deal with the library and society, Talleyrand Park in Bellefonte will double in size, from three acres to six acres. The park, named after the Frenchman who named the town, borders the match factory. Bellefonte, which means "beautiful fountain," was named after the borough's Big Spring, the third largest in the state.

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