CHARLESTON — As West Virginians prepared to vote last week in the primary triggered by his death, the staff of the late U.S. Sen. Robert C. Byrd finished a final task for history’s longest-serving member of Congress.

Helped by officials at the center that bears Byrd’s name at Shepherd University, the aides closed down the office that Byrd had occupied for more than a half-century.

The 92-year-old’s stature had actually brought him several offices: prime ground-floor space in the U.S. Capitol, a suite of offices in the nearby Hart Senate Office Building, and field offices in Charleston and Martinsburg.

Packing up the offices yielded an estimated 3,000 cubic feet of documents, photographs, art objects, mementos and other items. A semitrailer and a second truck delivered the thousands of crates and file boxes to the Robert C. Byrd Center for Legislative Studies at Shepherd.

There, Director Ray Smock and his staff will perform a detailed inventory of the items. Plans for the trove include an extensive online archive as well as traveling exhibits.

“Our goal is to get as much of this out and usable as quickly as possible,” said Smock, a former historian for the U.S. House.

Senate rules set a 60-day timetable from Byrd’s June 28 death for the emptying of all those offices. The team assigned the task wrapped up just before Saturday’s special election, aided by the Senate’s sergeant-at-arms, its curator and other Capitol Hill officials.

Byrd occupied a corner office in the Capitol’s ornate northeast section, renowned for its tiled floors and ceiling frescos by 19th-century painter Constantino Brumidi. The space adjoined the rooms of the Appropriations Committee, which he chaired throughout most of his later years in the Senate.

“He occupied some very high priority territory right on the main floor,” Smock said. “It’s a very beautiful, very historic part of the Capitol.”

West Virginians who visited Byrd while in Washington may be more familiar with his corner office on the third floor of the Hart building. Smock helped take down more than 1,300 items from those walls: photographs, signed letters from presidents, awards, newspaper clippings, items from the Congressional Record.

“The entire thing was covered with framed objects,” Smock said. “It was like a museum when you walked in there. You could sort of trace and read about his career.”

The photos show Byrd with constituents, movie stars, presidents, foreign heads-of-state and other dignitaries. Some had been up so long, prolonged exposure to light has faded them. Byrd also framed tally sheets from several key Senate votes, including those cast against the balanced budget amendment, the line-item veto and the invasion of Iraq.

“These were things he felt strongly about,” Smock said. “He kept records of every vote he ever made, close to 18,000.”

There was also a photo of Byrd with fellow Senate freshmen, circa 1959, and others of him wielding the fiddle. Other items were deeply personal: family photos, framed report cards from his grade school days, and a series of drawings of birds, squirrels and other animals that he had done as a child for his grandmother.

“They were really pretty good,” Smock said. “He had an artistic eye.”

The biggest object was a 7-foot-tall portrait of Byrd painted in the 1970s. The heaviest, weighing perhaps 100 pounds, was a huge chunk of West Virginia coal carved to depict a steam locomotive emerging from it.

As students of Byrd might expect, the inventory contains numerous Bibles and copies of the U.S. Constitution. One closet held a cache of the pocket-sized edition of the Constitution that he routinely carried and handed out to visitors.

“We’ll continue to give those out until our supply is exhausted,” Smock said.

Byrd’s massive files include drafts and source materials from his countless speeches as well as the books he’d written. Volumes ranging from King James Bibles — “For an orator like himself, nothing read better,” Smock said — to works of ancient Roman authors were found peppered with underlined passages and Byrd’s writing in the margins.

Byrd’s estate, which owns all these items, also purchased his chair in the Senate chamber. But most of his other furnishings belonged to the Senate and will return to its collections. Perhaps the most notable of those was Byrd’s desk in the Hart building, which had been former Vice President Hubert Humphrey’s during his Senate days.

“You see all sides of Byrd in these photographs, in these records,” Smock said. “Going through all that, it was quite a lesson in 60 years of American history.”