Hide and seek

As funding dried up and the need for the WPA disappeared during World War II, the HRS ended with in-progress inventories unfinished and surveys unpublished. Not all the work survived: According to Loretta L. Hefner's The WPA Historical Records Survey: A Guide to the Unpublished Inventories, Indexes and Transcripts (Society of American Archivists), a pile of Maine's WPA records were (gasp!) “dumped from a wharf into Casco Bay.” Apparently, no repository would accept them.