BURLINGTON, Vt. -
Pieces of presidential history with ties to the Green Mountains fill the special collections space at the University of Vermont, including one letter from President Franklin Roosevelt:
"Dear Mr. Spargo, I am very glad to have had the opportunity of reading your address in Bennington after President Wilson's death."
The correspondence was one of dozens of items that con artist Barry Landau, 63, swiped from UVM while posing as a presidential historian. He was recently sentenced to seven years in jail.
"They uncovered thousands of items from many, many libraries in the Northeast U.S.," said Jeffrey Marshall, who's responsible for UVM Special Collections.
UVM's items included letters from FDR, President Taft and Karl Marx. They disappeared last year and resurfaced following an investigation by the team at the National Archives.
"There are people out there who are very good at concealing the items. We try our best to observe him, but in this case we fell short," Marshall said.
Library officials admit they may be luckier than most when it comes to getting a lot of the missing items back. That's because if you flip them over you can see that they've been marked with a library stamp.
"Well it's always nice to welcome materials that belong here and welcome them home," said Mara Saule, UVM's Library Dean.
UVM staff recently made the trip to the National Archives to reclaim the documents. They're still not certain when they went missing from the collection of roughly 1 million items that mark Vermont history, but are glad they're back for the upcoming 50th anniversary of the university's special collections.
"They're not available anywhere else, or they're not available many other places, so they're materials that we are stewards of for the general public-- for the scholarly community across the world," Saule said.
UVM no longer allows bags and backpacks in it's special collections and is working on new security cameras for the space as well, but library staff say keeping items under lock and key around the clock is not the right move.
"It would just be counterproductive to lock the door," Marshall said.
It is still not clear exactly how many items were stolen from UVM and if more will resurface.
Historical societies in New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland and Connecticut were also hit in the multi-year heist.
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