Love of country and the promise of a $150 payment from the town drew 87 Essex men to enlist in the Union Army at the height of the Civil War in 1862.

Now, 146 years later, Gloucester native and Manchester resident Anne Bevan is hoping love of history and a desire to preserve the records of those soldiers' service, along with details about numerous other aspects of town life, will persuade volunteers to join her effort to save Essex's archives.

For the past year and a half, Bevan, 33, has been working with Town Clerk Sally Soucy to rescue the hundreds of tax forms, health statistics, military records, election ballots and meeting minutes rotting away in liquor boxes and garbage bags in the metal vault in Town Hall's partially-finished basement.

Bevan, who recently earned her master's degree in museum studies from San Francisco State University in California, first heard about the archives from a resident who had been researching his family history and described the terrible conditions in the basement.

"I came down here and realized anything I could do would be an improvement," Bevan said recently during a visit to the vault. "It was musty and wet and the first thing we had to do is run the dehumidifier and stabilize the climate. There were papers in garbage bags that had completely disintegrated. We had to throw them out."

The town appropriated $5,000 toward preserving the archives to pay for the dehumidifier and acid-free storage boxes and Bevan, outfitted in coveralls and a breathing mask, has dedicated a few hours each Friday to sorting through the piles and taking the most vulnerable documents out of danger.

Now, Bevan said last week, the time has come to begin the second phase of the preservation project, a complete cataloguing and organization of the documents and transfer into a permanent storage system upstairs, out of the flood-prone basement.

"The next phase is the most time-consuming, because we have to go through everything," Bevan said. "It's a big undertaking. We have to create an inventory and then pull out certain things that we want to display and need professional conservation."