Table Mountains

Antique dealer relieved as stolen archives case dismissed.

Charges were dismissed in a St. John's courtroom Thursday against a man who had been accused of owning stolen historical documents.

Antiques dealer Gary Murrin had paid $500 for documents that had been stored in 284 boxes that he said would otherwise have been shredded by a security company.

The documents had formerly belonged to the Provincial Archives of Newfoundland and Labrador, now a division of the Rooms cultural complex in St. John's. More here on the News Story......

A guy like Gary Murrin recognized that he had something of value but yet the Provincial Archives Department couldn't see value in it? I was happy to hear the charges against Mr. Murrin were dismissed. Hopefully this is a wake up call for those who we put in place of preserving our history and maybe an investigation in to the whole matter should be looked at. We have small museums across NL that would probably of liked to have gotten their hands on some of that history to display locally. I know that we had to beg a few years back in Cape Ray to have a few Dorset Eskimo Artifacts displayed in the small museum we have here. Yet thousands of the artifacts taken from digs at the site here lay in boxes somewhere in St. Johns. (maybe they have been disposed of or even looted.)