A trove of Civil War-era manuscripts handwritten and illustrated by Newark students and now headed for the Library of Congress might have been lost and forgotten forever had the principal of Barringer High School not noticed something unusual one day in 1969.
“There was a huge safe being walked down the corridor, and it was locked, and he was told they were throwing it away because they couldn’t open it, nobody wanted it, and they didn’t think there was anything inside,” RoseAnn Gasparinetti, president of the school’s alumni association, said of the late principal, Pat Restaino. “But he said, ‘Don’t do it,’ got a locksmith in, opened it up, and that is where all of the journals were.”
