Maryland State Archivist Elaine Rice Bachmann went to Preakness once, in 1991, and she didn’t venture beyond the inside of the racing oval.

“Well, you know, it was the infield, so enough said, but it was exciting for a Midwesterner who had grown up around the [Kentucky] Derby and all of that excitement to sort of see how it’s done in Maryland. And I think infields have a certain universality in the terms of the joyful celebration of the horse racing that occurs there,” the Indiana native said with a laugh.

Now her office is tasked with preserving the art, documents, photos, paintings and memorabilia contained within the cavernous complex which is now owned by the state, items that have accrued over many decades and been displayed or kept in storage.

The 150th Preakness Stakes on Saturday will mark the final race day at the crumbling, historic Pimlico. After that, the Maryland Stadium Authority will oversee a plan to raze the racetrack and build a modern replacement, as well as a new training center at Shamrock Farm in Carroll County.

The Baltimore Banner thanks its sponsors. Become one.

In the window between the final day and Pimlico’s demolition, preservationists will remove and pack up many of the historic items inside, with the goal of giving them a home in the modern racetrack set to open in time for the 2027 edition of Preakness.

Plenty of other collectibles, such as stadium seats, will be auctioned off online by the Department of General Services starting May 17 , the day of Preakness.

Bachmann, who previously served as the archives’ curator of artistic property , said the undertaking is similar in scale to when the state in 1996 acquired the Peabody Art Collection from the Peabody Institute , in part to help ease the financial burden placed on Johns Hopkins by its takeover of the conservatory in the 1980s.

“I think, in the same way, this is the state stepping in and ensuring that Maryland’s racing history and the artifacts associated with it remain in Maryland, in the form of the Pimlico racetrack itself,” she said.

Since last May, Bachmann and other archivists and curators from her office have made multiple trips from Annapolis to assess the historic items that have been kept here for decades, drawing on an inventory put together by the Maryland Jockey Club and the Maryland Racetrack Operating Authority, the body created by the state government in 2023 to develop the new direction for the thoroughbred industry.

The Baltimore Banner thanks its sponsors. Become one.

“While horse racing may not be something everyone has been involved with, once you start looking at the history, once you start looking at the pieces that are maintained, you start to get drawn into that world,” she said.

On their tours, members of the archives suggested adding architectural elements, such as metal black-eyed Susans affixed to a building exterior, to the inventory of items to be saved — the kind of details that Bachmann said can get overlooked in the lead-up to a demolition.

“It’s like cleaning out your your parents’ house or your grandparents’ house; you might not always recognize something of value,” she said. “And so having more eyes on that is helpful in determining [what to keep]. It really is our job to consider what is worthy, in the interest of the Maryland public, of saving for posterity and what may not be.”

An untold number of historic objects and records were lost in a 1966 fire that destroyed Pimlico’s Victorian clubhouse . Some fire-damaged vestiges, including the charred weathervane that once sat atop the building’s cupola, are on display at the track’s Hall of Fame Racing Museum and will be kept for the newest iteration of the track.

The Baltimore Banner thanks its sponsors. Become one.

The overall collection includes other survivors of the fire and, of course, items that were added since: small trophies, race programs, photos, 24 portraits of jockeys, scrapbooks from the press room with newspaper clippings, seven large-scale murals of race day scenes painted by the late local artist Raoul Middleman.

The oldest pieces date to around the period of the track’s opening in 1870, said Chris Kintzel, director at the Maryland Commission on Artistic Property, which is housed within the archives.

Gandhi said one of her favorites is a framed facsimile of a George Washington journal entry in which he writes about betting on a race in Annapolis.

Robin Gower, curator at the Maryland Commission on Artistic Property, is looking forward to digging further into the backstories of the jockey portraits.

The track kept detailed records of the paintings, she said, with photos, biographies of each rider and, in some cases, pictures of the jockeys attending the unveiling ceremony of their likeness.

The Baltimore Banner thanks its sponsors. Become one.

“That really helps us tell a full story about the paintings and really helps us understand more than what’s on the surface,” she said. “To me, that was a great surprise, was to find not just any sort of documentation but great documentation related to each of these pieces.”

Using these materials and old newspaper articles, Gower said, archivists helped turn up a story that was “perhaps forgotten to time” about the artist who painted the portraits, Henry Cooper.

Twenty-two works by Cooper, who was first hired in 1955, were destroyed in the devastating clubhouse fire. He spent the next year and a half repainting them, using photographs of the originals.

But this presented a mini mystery. Eddie Arcaro — the only jockey to complete the Triple Crown twice — was initially portrayed with a helmet on. In the picture that hangs in the Hall of Fame Dining Room today, he is not.

“I would love to, again, dive into the files and see if there was a reason that he removed it in the second time around,” Gower said.

The Baltimore Banner thanks its sponsors. Become one.

Middleman’s murals from the 1970s — bright, colorful scenes overflowing with horses, jockeys, trainers, grooms, railbirds and other characters, all seemingly on top of each other in places — are likely the rarest pieces of art on-site.

They also present one of the biggest challenges, since they’re placed high in the second floor of the grandstand. During previous trips, staffers have gone up on ladders to photograph the murals, get a sense of their condition and see how they’re mounted to determine the safest way to uninstall them. Professional art handlers will be brought in once the track closes to remove them — each one includes five separate Masonite panels — and bring them to a climate-controlled storage facility.

“We’ll get a further assessment from there, but it’ll be a delicate and meticulous process,” Gower said.

Parts of the collection, such as photos, the newspaper scrapbooks and records, will be brought in to be digitized and made available online.

Although the items are all now owned by the state, the ultimate aim is to loan them back to an exhibit space in the new Pimlico building, creating a throughline between the old and the new. Renderings of a new clubhouse have been revealed , but the final details of the building’s layout are still to come.

The Baltimore Banner thanks its sponsors. Become one.

Seeing lesser-known photographs that had been tucked away inside the current hall of fame, Bachmann believes there’s a greater story to tell and there’s a natural inspiration with the Kentucky Derby Museum at Churchill Downs .

“I would love to see Maryland get to tell its own story in that way, because it’s something that visitors can engage with all year round, not just on the day of Preakness,” she said.

Baltimore Banner reporter Hayes Gardner contributed to this report .