Preserving African American Church Collections

This summer, I interned with Heritage Montgomery, a non-profit organization that serves to promote tourism and heritage culture in Montgomery County, Maryland. This past spring, Heritage Montgomery undertook a project designed to preserve and archive the records, documents, and photographs of African American communities located in Montgomery County. Two communities were chosen for this grant, Pleasant View Historic Site and St. Paul Community Church. These communities were identified and chosen based on their immediate need to stabilize their records, documents, and photographs that were damaged or close to being lost from age and deterioration. Heritage Montgomery collaborated with these two communities and the Maryland State Archives (MSA) to complete this project.

My internship played out in two different stages. The first stage consisted of working with Heritage Montgomery in Germantown, MD to develop a collections intake form and conduct a collections intake session for Pleasant View Historic Site. At this intake session, my duties involved maintaining the organization and documentation of the extensive collection so that it would be well prepared for its transportation to MSA in Annapolis, MD. Once MSA staff assessed Pleasant View’s collection, it was transported to Annapolis ready to be archived and digitized into the MSA database.

The second stage of my internship included the responsibility to archive and digitize Pleasant View’s collection with the help of MSA staff. Because of Pleasant View’s large and extensive collection, it took June, July and August at the Maryland State Archives under the supervision of the Special Collections, Imaging, and Legacy of Slavery Departments to successfully complete this project. My duties included cataloging each individual item into the Archives internal database using basic HTML and then scanning each individual item into the imaging database. This allows for public access to view each cataloged entry alongside each digitized item.

Once Pleasant View’s collection was completely archived and digitized, the materials were transported back to Fairhaven Methodist Church that is serving as an intermittent storage facility. Ongoing measures are being taken to begin St. Paul Community Church’s collection this fall.

Pleasant View’s collection is accessible on the Maryland State Archives website in their Special Collections database under collection number 6158. Please check out my archival work from this summer!

First Blog Post about the Priddy Library

Hello, my name is Saul Espinal-Acosta and I am interning at the Universities at Shady Grove Priddy Library. I have been interning there since late August. My supervisors/bosses are Nickolas Faulk and Irene Munster. My duties and responsibilities there are to work on and help design exhibits. At first it felt overwhelming due to the exhibits being made online and having to condense it and being unbiased when writing information.  But since being there for over a month I've grown accustom to that fairly quickly. So far I've worked on editing past exhibits, and I've only really worked on one brand new exhibit so far and that was the Civil Rights timeline exhibit that went up on Wednesday. One of the most challenging things that I had to do for this particular exhibit was to look for photos online that were in the public domain. That may sound easy and all but in reality it's more challenging than it sounds and very time consuming. The other duty that I have which perhaps may be the most important in terms of skills for the future is that of learning how a library functions, the ins and outs. In this very competitive world, a skill in the functions of a library could be very influential when submitting a resume because that show the employer that the employee has a diverse set of skills under their belt.  Next week I will probably know what my next assignment will be. So far, interning at the library has been very helpful and advantageous for me. I have class everyday and doing the internship allows me to be in school for a longer period of time as oppose to just coming to class and leaving an hour and half later. I also get a lot of my work done in the library now, something that before this internship I did not do.

Preserving History: Collections Internship with Save Our Seminary

The seminary built each campus sorority a meeting house 

designed to look like the architecture of different countries. 

The Japanese Pagoda was the Chi Psi Epsilon sorority clubhouse 

at NPS. The exterior was restored by SOS volunteers in 2000. 

(Photo by Rebecca Gale)

This summer, I volunteered with Save Our Seminary, which is a nonprofit organization in Forest Glen, MD that was formed to fight for the preservation and restoration of the historic National Park Seminary campus. National Park Seminary was a women's secondary school that was known for its whimsical architecture. The school was a popular choice for the daughters of prominent Americans until the U.S. Army took over the campus to serve as a medical rehabilitation center for returning soldiers in World War II. By the 1990s, the buildings had fallen into disuse and disrepair.

Shocked by incidents of theft, water damage, dilapidation, and even arson, preservationists and local community members formed Save Our Seminary (SOS) to pressure the army to take better care of the property. After a long, hard-fought battle, they were able to arrange for a developer to restore the historic campus buildings and convert them into condominiums, apartments, and single-family homes. Today, SOS continues their preservation work by archiving the site’s history, providing educational programming, and preserving the site and its sculpture.

Athletics, including horseback riding, were an important part
of academics and student life at the National Park Seminary.
Here students are on horseback in front of the Dutch Windmill,
another sorority clubhouse that is today a restored single-
family home. (Photo Courtesy of the Historic American
Building Survey and Save Our Seminary)

My internship has involved working in the SOS archive to help organize its collections so that they are easily accessible to researchers. My first project was sorting through an extensive collection of slides featuring pictures from the seminary’s extensive history. Some of the photos dated back to the 1890s and it was fascinating to see images of the campus in its glory days, with smiling young women in Gibson Girl shirtwaists with bouffants piled high posing for the camera with friends.

While the work of archiving – housing, dating, categorizing, and sorting into chronological order – can get tedious at times, I always treasure the intriguing glimpses into the past that often serve as a reminder that history was lived by people not so different from us. And even though the tasks we perform as interns can seem insignificant, each small task contributes to a larger cause: preserving the stories of the past to inspire the people of the future. 

For more information on Save Our Seminary and the National Park Seminary, visit the organization's website at http://www.saveourseminary.org/.