Those "moderating details" are inane. The Heritage Society was willing to take the risk of storing and possibly digitizing the documents, some of which were moldy and some of which were not. Indeed, members of the Heritage Society were the ones providing the initial manpower (and masks and sanitizer) to clean out the building basement where they were found, including the broken furniture and muck. If they're willing to take documents in that condition, having already seen it first hand, why should the state be paternalistic about it?

Furthermore, some of the records were clearly NOT of limited value:

"The following is a description of the early investigation, accounted by Ms. Torrent of Franklin County Heritage Society; “Immediately we found Chattel Mortgages from the 1890′s, court dockets from post civil war to prohibition, delayed birth certificate applications with original supporting documents (letters from Grandma, bible records, birth certificates, etc), county receipts on original letterhead from businesses long extinct, poll record books, original school, road and bridge bonds denoting the building of the county, law books still in their original paper wrappings, etc., etc. etc. The list goes on and on. Our original feelings of shock that the records were there and in such bad condition led to feelings of joy that they were still there and that someone had thought to retain them for us to discover so many years later.

Each book or box opened produced a new treasure. A letter, stamped and in the original envelope, from a Franklin County soldier serving in France during the First World War asking the court to be sure his sister and his estate was looked after while he was away. A naturalization paper from the late 1890s for an immigrant from Russia escaping the tyranny of the Czar. A document from County Commissioners in the early years of road building requesting another county repair their road as it entered the county. Lists of county employees and what their wages were in 1900. A court document paying the court reporter who took the depositions in the “Sweat Ward” case, (Ward beheaded a man in the 1930s and later became the last man to be lynched in the county). Postcards, county bills, audits, cancelled checks, newspaper clippings, store ads from long gone businesses. Boxes and boxes of court cases covering the years of prohibition, a docket from an individual accused of running a “baudy house” within the city limits, a photo tucked now and then inside a book, one of the courthouse unseen since the 1920s. Again, nothing was in any order and many of the boxes were combinations of records from many decades."

What an amazing, amazing collection of documents! But sorry, it's all ashes now.