Final Take-aways from the Irish Railroad Workers Museum

 

For the last semester I have been working as an intern for the Irish Railroad Workers Museum located on 918 Lemmon St, in Baltimore.  I have worked primarily on demographics research, and secondarily as a docent and, as the museum is quite the small facility, lacking the manpower of an institution with more resources, I have tertiarily taken on multiple miscellaneous duties within the museum.  While the majority of my time is spent searching through census records in order to discover the demographics data necessary for our upcoming exhibit, when the need arises, I am willing and able to provide tours to interested guests.  Though I am not as knowledgeable as my direct superior, I have come to enjoy sharing my knowledge with enthusiastic guests. When you successfully convey the information of your institution and exhibit an emotional response from visitors, you know you’ve done your job well. When your visitors engage with the content, and ask questions, become emotionally invested and expand their world view, there is no better feeling. This is why we engage in public history, to educate and incite.   Apart from my responsibilities as a docent and demographics researcher, I also am needed to perform various miscellaneous tasks, specifically during events at the museum.  Besides volunteers and interns, there is only one salaried employee at the museum so during our special events, conducted for holidays and the like, even the shareholders who are available will contribute.  This consists of moving equipment and setting up displays, troubleshooting electronics, and manning booths.  During my time with the Irish Railroad Workers Museum I’ve become quite familiar with the behind-the-scenes operation of the facility, and have grown quite attached to both the museum and my coworkers.  As a result when my term of internship is up, I intend to stay on as a volunteer worker.  

 atherine Till Sansone

Internship Blog

Spring 2024

History 790

When You Wish Upon a Starr

Entry Three “It’s a Wrap” 

How do you sum up a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity in five hundred words? I can give you two, exhausting and exhilarating, many times fully experienced together! For anyone who wants to work in a gallery, or curate an exhibit, I highly suggest you intern in one first because it is not what you think it will be, at least in smaller galleries. Major museums and galleries have many different departments working in tandem with each other to execute the installation of an exhibit. In ones, like where I was privileged to exhibit, not so much, you, the gallery manager, and an installer are the team. It was very physical work, more than what I could ever imagined it would be. I seriously stopped counting the hours it took to launch this exhibit after 120! As an intern, or if employed in a gallery or museum, it becomes your responsibility to execute the vision of the exhibit’s curator. Every exhibit is unique, like snowflakes, no two are alike. In smaller galleries, the exhibits can rotate every two to three months, with only weeks for the breakdown of the previous exhibit and the installation of the incoming exhibition. Hectic, organized insanity is the best way to describe the experience. The following are my takeaways from this amazing event. 

I am thankful I took the time to catalog, organize, and create a spreadsheet for the items I retrieved from West Virginia and Buffalo. The process took me over a month but honestly, take the time, you will thank yourself down the road. In the planning stage, you first walk the gallery with the manager to figure out the layout and how you want to communicate your vision to your audience. What are the colors, textures, and placement of articles or pictures? What is the tone or feeling of the show? Each wall is labeled according to its theme, colors, or texture. I wanted my exhibition to be a visual explosion for the eye to tell the story of this incredible woman who chose burlesque as her vehicle for success. Fortunately, I had the opportunity to visit the 2 O’clock Club in Baltimore where Starr once performed and owned, and it was here that I drew my inspiration. Almost all the original fixtures, wallpaper, and wall colors were intact, be it a little worn for wear. I wanted to mimic that energy throughout the gallery. Next, is one of the most important steps, how you want to tell the story. What pictures or artifacts will be used to capture the story? This step is where you will be glad you took the time to organize your items because you are pulling pictures, posters, and other items out of bins and boxes with little regard to container origin. I first arranged the items on the floor, and after I was satisfied with my selection, I used binder clips and push pins to arrange them on the wall before final placement. I was fortunate also to have other items, including clothing, jewelry, and memorabilia to display, which I knew would give weight to the pictures. One of the lessons I learned from my museum studies class was regardless of how you attempt to tell a story; you cannot dictate where your audience will be drawn. Keeping that in mind, I placed larger items in more prominent locations throughout the exhibit, which also, I believe, made it visually more appealing.

Aside from the physical aspect of an installation, I found writing the labels the most challenging aspect of an exhibition. As historians, we are tasked with taking a germ of an idea and expanding that idea through countless hours of tedious research into papers, theses, or dissertations. When you write labels, it is the opposite process. You now edit this information to a few coherent sentences that fit on a four-by-four label. It is madding. After the reception and listening to some of the questions and comments from several of the audience, I am still tweaking my labels and have added a few more for additional clarity. I find writing papers much more enjoyable!

So, in closing, despite the tremendous physical, emotional, and mental effort it took to launch this exhibit, it was an amazing experience. Curating an exhibit is like theater, the devil is in the details, details, and flaws, only you will notice, but important. While I have just skimmed the surface of this experience, I am beyond pleased to see what I have lived with in my head for over two years come to fruition. Would I attempt this in the future? The jury is still in deliberations!

My final thoughts as a Historic Preservation intern

         As the semester is wrapping up, my internship at the Frederick County Division of Planning and Permitting is coming to an end. The last month has been spent working on a project called Recovering Identities, a historic preservation initiative that has been paired with local schools to conduct oral histories interviews with senior-citizen African-American residents from Frederick County. Most of these oral histories were conducted over this winter, so I’ve been tasked with transcribing them. Despite the fact that the interview questions are largely casual and anecdotal, some of the themes that end up highlighting the responses can be quite significant and pertinent to historic preservation. The residents reflect quite a bit on how things ‘used to be’ along with the inevitable comparison of how it is today. Themes of gentrification, development, and inequities in buildings, neighborhoods, and rural areas are almost always present by the end of the interviews. One woman discussed how the street she grew up on, All Saints Street, was the historically Black epicenter of Frederick Town throughout the 20th-century, with outlying community members driving in every Friday night to partake in block parties. Now, her house is one of the only four Black households on the street. Another woman who grew up in the countryside reflects on the important role her small church played in growing up, but laments the fact that even though the area is filling in with development, many rural churches seem to be struggling more than ever. All in all, each narrator seems to have had a really positive experience growing up in Frederick County; these interviews – and this project in general – is a great way for historic preservationists and developers to ensure the next generation is given the same chance. 

My experience at Liveable Frederick has been very informative and eye-opening. While the majority of the work I did there was academic history – research and writing – I still learned quite a bit. I learned how to conduct and transcribe oral histories, a skill I think is useful even if one only plans on doing their own genealogical work. I was able to get more architectural experience through a site check and doing two physical descriptions, although I would say it would still take a lot more practice before it felt easy. Perhaps the most interesting thing – occupation-wise – that I learned was just how much non-historical work goes into preservation. For the most part, I was isolated in my own little world during my internship, however, each Tuesday morning I’d sit in on a team-wide meeting. It became apparent at these meetings just how much of historic preservation work – at least above the intern level – is working alongside developers, urban planners, government councils, lawyers, and a million other acronym-ed agencies in order to get most things rolling. It really does take a community. While I came in expecting this, it was still eye-opening to see it in person. But overall – it was a very enjoyable experience! 

Reflecting on My Time at the Space Telescope Science Institute

      During my internship with the Space Telescope Science Institute, I had the opportunity to learn many skills, both involving archives and how professional archives operate.  I primarily worked on two types of projects: processing physical collections, and digital archiving.  At the beginning of the internship, I was most excited to work with a digital collection as I had never had the opportunity prior.  Through the digital archiving projects, I was able to gain many new skills in archiving, including working with metadata, ingesting material from the Space Telescope Science Institute website to the digital archive, and learning archival methods for processing digital material.  I also enjoyed working with the analog collections that I was able to process.  Although I had some previous experience with this, it was very interesting to see the detailed process that the Space Telescope Science Institute employed with their collections.  I found myself enjoying the change of pace that the analog collections provided, giving me a break from looking only at the computer, and the various types of materials held in each collection.  Having both the digital and analog material allowed me to switch between projects, giving me a change of pace when I began feeling burnt out from one project. 

        The Space Telescope Science Institute also allowed me to work on smaller projects.  One such project was aiding in arranging a small exhibit about the Hubble Space Telescope servicing missions.  The project was interesting, imploring me and the archives team to be creative with the limited space within the display case and use some technical know-how to arrange the display.  Finally, I most appreciated the Space Telescope Science Institute allowing me to experience many professional aspects of working in an archive, such as attending different team meetings and being a part of some archive website demonstrations as they sought to change software.  The meetings allowed me to understand how a corporate archive runs and fits into a larger mission.  The archive at the Space Telescope Science Institute stands to serve the employees in their work connecting to astronomy and it was interesting to see how that impacted the archive focus.  For example, much more meticulous care was given in processing at the item level than I had seen in previous archives.  The reason such care was taken was to serve the employees as they did research into past astronomical achievements and studies with the Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes.  The exposure to working in a corporate archive and the opportunity to experience other professional aspects of the job made my internship with the Space Telescope Science Institute truly stand out.        

(The image is a Hubble Press Release titled, “Hubble Space Telescope Resolves Gaseous Ring Around Supernova,” from HubbleSite; https://hubblesite.org/contents/news-releases/1990/news-1990-07.html?Year=1990&itemsPerPage=100.)   

Ending of my Internship: the National Museum of Dentistry

 

The sign marking the location of Edgar Allen Poe’s death. He was found seriously ill in the streets of Baltimore before being taken to the Washington Medical College (later known as the Washington University of Baltimore) Hospital. He died there, but not before mysteriously calling the name “Reynolds!”, who has to this day never been identified.

As the semester draws to a close, so too does my internship at the Samuel D. Harris National Museum of Dentistry. This past month I have been working on drafting and editing profiles for the various dental and medical schools that I had been researching over the course of this internship.

                It’s actually been a bit of fun going through and seeing, and then converting to modern currency, the tuition and fees for a lot of these different schools in these profiles. Even back in 1830, you’d pay around 100$-200$ for an entire medical education, with fees included, which is usually around 2,000$-7,000$ for an entire college education at the most in today’s money. A lot of these schools also, just like modern colleges, accepted transfer students, but interestingly enough, accepted a range of different equivalencies. If you had worked as an apprentice for 5 years, that was usually enough to be equivalent to one year of formal medical education!

The profiles are mainly focusing on each school’s life, not necessarily the founders and their backgrounds, or notable students, which is the only area that I find a bit frustrating. A lot of the backgrounds of the men who founded these schools is pretty interesting, such as one man who left his position at UMD to join the Confederate Army, found his job no longer available once he returned, and then opened his own medical college tailored to ex-Confederates specifically! The school’s catalog from 1868 even mentions that all white men should be entitled to their own political views and freedoms, which is sort of beautifully ironic.

Overall, I have enjoyed this internship and the experiences and opportunities it brought me. Doing research through 150 year old books and getting to search through Maryland legislature from the 1790s has been very interesting, and I hope once this exhibition goes up, that you’ll give it a visit, dear reader.