A summer cloudburst coincided with a long-needed roof repair at the Southern Oregon Historical Society earlier this month, causing catastrophic water damage to the historic old JCPenney building in downtown Medford.

“We have an enormous amount of dehumidifiers running — humidity is not good for this stuff,” said Ron Kramer, executive director of the Historical Society, referring the SOHS archives and collections.

Kramer was standing in the library of the Historical Society’s beleaguered building on Central Avenue Thursday morning. Here a small piece of luck seems to have intervened — the library is the only undamaged area.

“It’s major — all of this stuff is irreplaceable,” he said.

A life-size painting of Abraham Lincoln and a historic organ loomed over his shoulder, while books and working tables surrounded him. He directed BELFOR Property Restoration to make the corridor leading from the front door to the library its top priority. Kramer was determined to keep the library open, he said, if at all possible. To that end, the wall along that corridor was already stripped down to reveal bare support beams.

“They’re doing ‘exploratory demolition,’ taking out some of the walls to determine how much water damage there is,” he said.

Some parts of the building have already been marked as “toast,” he said, including the first- and second-floor bathrooms, multiple walls, most of the roof and ceiling and a portion of the east wall in an expansive collections storage area behind the library. Dehumidifiers were running — with plastic taped from the soaring ceilings and leading down to the floor creating a containment area — to protect the collections, including multiple boxes of film. 

Late Thursday morning, he said, artifacts would be moved from the lobby to the society’s off-site collections storage area to protect them as repair teams prepare to begin work on the roof above the lobby. In the upstairs suite — which until a few weeks ago housed the Rogue Valley Times — the whirr of dehumidifiers made it almost impossible to hear voices. Workers on ladders dismantled metal struts previously holding ceiling tiles. More plastic cordoned off the bathrooms and a nearby balcony area. 

The second floor was the hardest hit, Kramer said.

“When I arrived on Monday after the weekend storm, the roofers were doing a great job trying to mitigate the damage. They had a tarp down covering just about the whole floor up there. When they picked up the corners, we pretty much had a swimming pool,” he said.

The damage came from a summer rainstorm over Father’s Day weekend, Kramer said. Two days and nights of rain coincided with a long-awaited roof repair project for the building — built in 1948 — which is a registered historic landmark.

“The building has needed a new roof for many years,” Kramer said.

During previous rainy days, the historical society positioned large plastic garbage cans under the most serious leaks. During the clean-up after the storm, Kramer said the trash cans were completely filled with water.

The damage occurred because a cover over the roof under repair was “not sufficiently airtight,” Kramer said, when the storm blew through. Aside from curatorial staff at the off-site collections space, staff are now forced to work from home indefinitely, not only because of the lack of bathrooms, but because of the dehumidifiers. 

They require so much power to run, some of the building’s lights have to be kept off to reserve power, Kramer said. They have also impacted the air conditioning. 

“The dehumidifiers are drying everything out, making it hotter, and the air conditioning was running so we had to turn it off, but the unit is from like 1988, so the service people told us, ‘If you turn it off, you may not be able to get it come back on,’” he said.

The society was forced to turn off the system and hope for the best, one of many ripple effects of the water damage, he said. The full scope of the damage is not known yet, but plans to open the second floor as a museum in October and revitalize the expansive downstairs area as an event space are on hold for the time being.