Hold public office for 38 years and you will accumulate a fair amount of papers worth keeping.
Papers stacked to a length of about seven football fields.
That's the size of Nick Rahall's congressional archive: 2,000 boxes of speeches, testimony, documents, records, letters and reports, that the former congressman has donated to West Virginia University's new Beckley campus.
"The longevity of his career is one of the reasons that this collection is so important," said John Cuthbert, director of WVU's West Virginia and Regional History Center. "It has particular value in being able to plot issues and changes nationally, within parties, within people's personal evolution."
The future home of both WVU-Beckley and WVU Tech will host a celebration of the new campus and the papers on Saturday at 3 p.m.
"Other than my close to 40 years - actually over 40 years in public service, when you count my staff time with Senator Byrd - this is probably the most exciting moment of my life," said Rahall, who worked for Sen. Robert C. Byrd before running for office.
He said he decided to give the collection to WVU, after consulting with a number of other universities and institutions, because of the new campus in Beckley, his hometown.
Cuthbert said the collection, which arrived in Morgantown a few months ago, could take up to 15 years to sort, organize and catalog. He said entire archive will be open to the public by 2030, and they hope to have documents that are already in the public domain open to the public within a year.
The collection has records of every vote the Democratic lawmaker ever took in Congress, as well as the research reports prepared by staff to prepare him for those votes.
"It's a chance for scholars to see what the congressman had access to in making his decisions," Cuthbert said. "Who knows what light something like this could shed on almost any issue?"
Cuthbert said the archive could be used by scholars to track not just the congressional history, but also the modern history of southern West Virginia.
Among the chief responsibilities of members of Congress - one that rarely gets media attention - is constituent services, solving problems and responding to the concerns of everyday people.
All the letters Rahall received during his time in office - asking for help with a federal agency, complaining about a government policy, recommending he vote a certain way - are part of the archive.
By tracking the topics of constituent letters through the years, Cuthbert said, historians can note what issues were important.
"They get letters every day from people asking for this, that and the other and if you've been doing that for 38 years, you've got a critical mass," Cuthbert said. "What were the issues during his years? How did they evolve?"
Rahall, the country's longest serving Arab-American congressman, said there would also be a lot on his ancestral background.
"My grandfathers immigrated to this country in the early 1900s from the hills of southern Lebanon to the hills of southern West Virginia," Rahall said. "It's the American dream come true."
For WVU, the Rahall archive is the second major score in the last year, after the university secured Jay Rockefeller's papers from his 30-year Senate career last year.
"One of the beauties of this is that they complement each other," Cuthbert said of the two collections. "A leading member of the Senate, who was in his office for an extended of time, to have a comparable view from the House side is fantastic."
Rahall has mostly been out of the public eye since he was defeated last year by Republican Rep. Evan Jenkins, then a state senator.
He said he's filling much of his time with "golf and grandkids" and "actually enjoying life, stopping to smell the roses, so to speak."
But he was cagey about what else he's been up to.
He spends most of his time in Beckley, but still has a residence in Washington.
"I'm still back and forth more than I ever thought I'd be," he said. "I'm doing some little special projects in D.C."
What sort of projects?
"For individuals or for groups that I'm really not at freedom to reveal at this time," he said. "I've got another chapter to write and I'm putting together thoughts in outline form for that chapter, but not ready to say what's in it yet."
Might he run for office again?
"That's not on the horizon."
The donation of papers will take place at 3 p.m. Saturday at the WVU-Beckley bookstore, 410 Neville St. in downtown Beckley. Afterward, a campus tour for community members and alumni will begin from the same site.
Reach David Gutman at david.gutman@wvgazette.com, 304-348-5119 or follow @davidlgutman on Twitter.