Dalton State College celebrates renovated Bandy Heritage Center and library

Published 2:00 pm Friday, August 27, 2021

Jack Bandy “was so proud” of the Bandy Heritage Center for Northwest Georgia, and he would’ve been “really proud” of the renovated and improved version that was unveiled to the public last week, said his widow, Marg.

“It was his dream to have” a place where all of the history of this “wonderful” community could be stored and enjoyed, she said. “He loved Dalton, he was born here, and his three children still live here.”

Jack Bandy, a carper industry pioneer and noted philanthropist who died in March 2020, was the benefactor and namesake for the Bandy Heritage Center at Dalton State College. In 2008, he endowed the center with $2 million for staff and materials.

“I wasn’t part of this history, but Jack was, and I love to see the history here, (because) Dalton is a really impressive place to me,” Marg Bandy said. “This meant so much to Jack, and it made him so happy to see this.”

There’s “so much interest in history here, and there’s so much history to be interested in, but (the Bandy Heritage Center) is the first real effort to preserve that history so people can answer questions in the future,” said Adam Ware, the center’s director. “You don’t have to be a history buff to love this stuff.”

The Bandy Heritage Center collects and preserves everything from photographs and clothing to diaries and letters, and those are made accessible to the public via research opportunities, curated museum exhibits and educational programs.

Though headquartered at Dalton State, the Bandy Heritage Center covers seven Northwest Georgia counties, including Whitfield and Murray. Renovations for the center began in July 2018 and finished in December 2020, but the campus wasn’t fully open at that time due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Bandy Heritage Center’s collection has grown to more than 10 times the size it was just three years ago and includes 27,000 new acquisitions from individuals, businesses and organizations, according to Ware.

“It’s a different animal.”

The renovation includes a climate-secure archival storage space (courtesy of a grant from Georgia Humanities), a lab for preservation work, a reading room for research and a small exhibit gallery, he said.

“We’re set for about a decade” in terms of archival space.

State Sen. Chuck Payne, R-Dalton, was among those checking out the artifacts at the Bandy Heritage Center and proclaimed the space “awesome.”

“I’ve always loved history — my parents taught me to love it — and I love to look back over history, because you see the bigger picture,” Payne said. “Looking at history can paint a picture beyond your lifetime.”

On the same day Dalton State welcomed the public to the new-and-improved Bandy Heritage Center, it also featured an open house for the Derrell C. Roberts Library. Renovations began at the library in 2018 and were being completed in phases, but a burst pipe and flooding last November sped up the process.

“I just wanted to cry when I came in that morning” and saw the flooding, said Margaret Venable, Dalton State’s president. “The good news is it didn’t ruin many books, just things on the floor, like carpet, and now it’s better than ever.”

The library has added digital signs on the first and second floors to increase communication, as well as another classroom on the first floor that can be utilized as a meeting space. The front desk, offices and workrooms were all renovated, second-floor shelving has been reconfigured and there’s more seating.

“Our librarians are so creative, (so) they made the best of a very bad situation” while the library was being renovated, and “it’s a natural fit” for the Bandy Heritage Center to be adjacent to the library, Venable said. “They both do lots of archiving, and there’s a lot of collaboration.”

Both the library and the Bandy Heritage Center are now open to the public again, but due to the pandemic, masks and social distancing are both strongly encouraged.

Anyone interested in donating photographs, documents, yearbooks, objects, etc., to the Bandy Heritage Center is invited to email bandyheritagecenter@daltonstate.edu.

The Bandy Heritage Center has been collecting numerous items to document the impact locally of the COVID-19 pandemic, and that will continue, because “it is changing history,” Ware said.

“There are so many things I wish we had from the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918,” but he hopes the Bandy Heritage Center will have items from the current pandemic for future generations to study.