Locust Siding, Still Focused on the Gable End

     With all the compromised material taken out, we began to reframe and sheath the framed portion of the gable end. The gable end has an inward slant, out of plumb about a half an inch over 8’. We believe this is likely due to the reduction of brick course thickness as the building gains height. My boss has noted that much older masonry structures were built with an intentional inward tilt, leading to both gable ends slightly leaning towards each other, from foundation to top of the gable ends, to put compression on the building as most masonry buildings struggle with bowing outwards against lateral force. From the base of the structure we estimate the building is 3 brick courses thick, potentially four including the chimney and fireplace portion, to match the thickness of the log walls. Upon reaching the second floor, the brick course is reduced to 2, where the floor joist sits upon a shelf. 

    The original reveal of the siding was flush with the existing rake board. In order to match this reveal, we needed to use 1”, 5/4” or true 1”, pressure treated material. My boss decided to invest in using locust as the wood material for the german siding as the wood is extremely durable in both hardness and rot resistance. Because this material will mate with the roof surface, it is best to use such a durable material. The siding is 1” thick, with the bevel reducing to approximately ½” where the siding laps over another. 

Once the sheeting was replaced, we put Tyvek up as a moisture barrier for the structure. In order for moisture to continue to wick down the tyvek, we put spacer strips made out of tar paper so the back of the wooden siding would have an air gap to dry out. The roof sheeting of the kitchen addition was laid to make accommodation for the siding size, as well as appropriate flashing, so the first courses of siding were barely visible as they had to travel inside the attic of the kitchen. The siding was laid with stainless steel nails with a larger shank size to accommodate the hefty weight of the locust. In order for the nail heads to be flush to the surface size, we pre-drilled the boards and countersank the surface creating a divot for the nail head to fit into. 

As the courses progressed, we reached the location of where a new louver window would be installed. The previous window was badly deteriorated and allowed no airflow through the attic. To allow complete air circulation from the front log structure down the ell addition, we decided to install a permanent louver window. Once again, because of the compromised location of this louver window, we used Sapele wood, a mahogany derivative, which we had leftover material in 1” from our previous work. We were careful to ensure that the louvre openings overlapped one another to prevent driving rain from entering the attic through the window. Once completed, we had to install the heavy window, precariously supported by me on a roof while my boss secured it inside the attic framing. Several attempts were made to ensure the window was plumb and square as it marked the end courses of siding around it which needed to be flush and tight.

Finding Meaning in the Absence of Information

Courtesy of the B&O Railroad Museum

This fall, I am interning at the Baltimore & Ohio (B&O) Railroad Museum in their Curatorial Department. My internship mainly revolves around research tasks for objects in the collection, information to be used for exhibitions, and writing labels for objects and people to be used on the museum’s online collection and future displays. It was only until late September, early October that I became involved with a major curatorial project at the Museum.

The project that I have been working on with the Assistant Curator focuses on the B&O no. 3316 “The Washington” observation-lounge car that was a part of the B&O’s Columbian on their Capitol Limited line that operated from the 1923 till 1971 when it became a part of Amtrak. The Columbian premiered in 1930s and in 1949 new Pullman-Standard (Company) cars were made for the Columbian with the no. 3316 “The Washington” making up these new train cars. The no. 3316 has been undergoing restoration after years of neglect in the B&O Railroad Museum’s train yard and will be restored by early 2026 to be showcased as a part of the Museum’s “Unlocked Series” which gives visitors an opportunity to go into the train cars and learn more about their history in the context of their services, the B&O, and railroads broadly.

One of the main focuses of the Unlocked Series for the no. 3316 is to educate visitors on the Pullman Porters, African American service workers for the Pullman Company on their trains (and broadly became a catch-all term for any African American service worker on trains), who worked on the trains in the Columbian and the Capitol Limited. I was tasked with researching porters that would be showcased in the train car. Issues became apparent as very little information was available about many individuals the curatorial department wanted to include. If there was information, it was mostly through tertiary sources rather than primary sources or reliable secondary sources, and only available through on-site archives in institutions outside of Maryland and the B&O Museum. 

The few weeks I had on this task were frustrating and made me aware of the limitations of history around Black and POC labor. It’s frustration in that fact that very little was put into documenting these individuals as people than employees and frustration in the idea that research can unfortunately be a fruitless endeavor due to archival silences, absence of publicly available information, and lack of collective memory for this part of history. Eventually, frustration becomes acceptance, and this acceptance makes you realize that with certain things nothing can be truly known, it doesn’t want to be known, or it wants to be known by what little or lot of information it has. Often the lack of something is just as important as the depth of something—especially with histories within histories.

Plantation Preservation & Inclusive Interpretation: Behind the Scenes at Riversdale House Museum

 My name is Stephen Toth and I am an undergraduate history major in my senior year here at UMBC. This semester, I am interning at Riversdale House Museum in Riverdale Park, Maryland, a historic house museum owned and operated by the Maryland National Capital Park and Planning Commission (M-NCPPC.) I have been part of the volunteer team since September 2024,working in the roles of Tour Guide and Visitor Support Assistant. In these roles I either give tours of the house or work the front desk of the visitor center, greeting visitors as they arrive and giving a brief introduction to the history of the site. 

Riversdale House was constructed between 1801 and 1807 at the behest of Henri Stier, a wealthy Belgian aristocrat who had fled to the United States due to threats to the security of the wealthy during the French Revolution. Stier returned to Belgium following the conclusion of the Revolution in 1805 and entrusted his daughter Rosalie Stier Calvert with overseeing the construction of the remainder of the house. Much of what is known about life at Riversdale in this period is drawn from the extensive writings of Rosalie Stier Calvert, which were compiled by Margaret Law Callcott in 1991 under the title Mistress of Riversdale: The Plantation Letters of Rosalie Stier Calvert, 1795-1821. After Rosalie’s death in 1821, the plantation remained in the Calvert family until 1887 when it was sold to developers who created the town of Riverdale Park which surrounds the grounds of the house today. The house itself went through a series of owners until it was acquired by M-NCPPC in 1949, though it did not open in its present format as a museum until 1993.

When discussing the story of Riversdale, it is also critical to mention that enslaved labor was used in the construction of the home along with the daily tasks of agricultural and domestic labor. Before the 2020s, much of the interpretive content was centered around the Stier and Calvert families. With the increased public focus on the role of slavery in shaping our nation in recent years, the interpretation at Riversdale has evolved to become more inclusive of the stories of the approximately 55 enslaved people who lived and worked on the grounds. This process is ongoing, and it is very exciting to see and be a part of these changes. I look forward to sharing more stories about my time here at Riversdale with you all. 

A mariachi band performs on the front steps of the Riversdale House as part of a Hispanic Heritage Month Community Day event on September 14, 2025.

Gnashing my Teeth: Lots and Lots of Archive Work!

 

When it came to tackling this massive collection, it was really a case of just diving in headfirst! We had already gone through all the boxes and made a preliminary overview of everything, so now I had to go binder by binder, folder by folder, box by box with everything. I began going page by page with every single document, scanning them and adding accession numbers for everything. A ton of this stuff was old faxes, printed out emails, and letters organizing conferences, seminars, and events. And I had to go page by page, scanning even the documents that were flight confirmation faxes, dinner menus, or hotel booking information. As tedious as it was, it was interesting to see hotel brochures from the 1990s for fancy European resorts, or cancelations of flights due to ‘events happening in New York last week’, written in September of 2001. As I scanned, I also kept folder and subfolders on a shared hard drive on the computer, where all the digitized files were sorted by binder and by box.

Once I’d gone through a few of these boxes just containing binders of correspondence and travel plans, I moved on to boxes of published medical journals. This was a bit harder of a task, since Branemark kept multiple copies of every article, book chapter, or even interview he’d ever given. While about half were in English, he’d published a lot of work in Swedish, German, Dutch, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, even Japanese. His very first published article from the 1950s, on conducting experiments on the vascular system of rabbits had around 50 copies of it in the collection! I created a chart with the title of each journal, the article title, the year published, the language of the article, how many copies we had, and if the article was accessible online already in a database or not. This took a long time, especially since I had to go one by one and look up article titles with complicated (at least for me) medical terminology as the titles to find them online. About half of the articles were available online in some capacity, and about a fifth or so of the total articles I could find no trace of at all. Sometimes, the case was it was an incredibly low-quality photocopy of book pages where I couldn’t find any title and looking up chapter titles got me nothing, sometimes it was entirely in a foreign language or alphabet I had difficulty using to search, and sometimes, 1960s Swedish academic journals just weren’t preserved widely online.

Once this treacherous task was finished, I took over the conference room with all my journals. I laid them all out, a total of about 3 boxes worth of academic work, which ultimately took up every single flat surface in the room. My supervisor and I decided that the museum really only needed to keep 2 copies of each article at most, since some had anywhere from 15-50 copies. We would see if the ACP would like all these extra copies back, and if not, they would probably end up recycled. Then, I went through, keeping two copies of each article and putting any remaining copies back into their respective boxes. While doing this I did some crude math calculations, so that the ACP could know exactly how many articles we had to potentially return to them.

All this work took a while, and after the scavenger hunt of trying to find each article online, it got a bit less fun, and a bit more tedious. But I had finally finished, and we had 3 piles of ‘to keep’ articles, and 3 boxes of ‘to return/get rid of articles’ nicely sorted.

Author of an article I found whose last name made me LOL

National Museum of Dentistry Internship: Sinking my Teeth In!

 

For my internship, I continued working with the National Museum of Dentistry we have here in Baltimore! During my undergrad, I worked with them for HIST 391 , and I’ve become good buddies with the Collections Assistant, so I was excited to work with them again over this past summer!

The project I was working on was a donation from the American College of Prosthodontics of a collection relating to the pioneering dentist Per-Ingvar Branemark (1929-2014). Branemark was a Swedish doctor turned dentist who discovered that titanium and bone fuse together extremely well for what he would go on to call ‘osseointegrated implants’ that could be used all over the body for prosthetic teeth, limbs, fingers, even ears, noses, eyes, chins, lips, literally anything you can imagine. The entire collection was donated upon his death to the ACP by his assistant turned wife, Barbro Svensson.

A lot of his work the museum wanted to keep and work with was focusing on dental implants specifically, but you really could do so much with osseointegration in the field of restorative surgery. This collection was essentially everything Branemark ever wrote or published, scheduling information, handouts, and communication related to every professional event he ever attended, patents for every medical tool he ever invented in every country it was patented in, and tools and photographs from just about all the surgeries he ever performed.

The first steps in what we were doing with the collection was to go through all the boxes and just get a general idea of everything that had been donated, how we’d need to go through it, and where to house the items that we were going to keep. Since the collection spanned a wide variety of archival objects, we separated them into archival materials (faxes, letters, pamphlets, booklets, surgery plans, etc.) and physical objects (medical tools, photographs, slides, photo negatives, DVDs and VHS tapes, etc.). I essentially made a colored coded chart with each of the boxes and recorded the contents, archival or object, to start off the process. The curator of the museum, who actually is a licensed dentist himself, handled the processing and digitization of about half of the ‘object’ boxes: the DVDs, CDs, VHS tapes, as well as adding records for the medical instruments to the collection. My main task was going through everything else!

I first began to get a general overview of all the boxes I would be going through since there were 20+ binders filled with 50 or so years of information. I created preliminary little finding aids with information about binder and folder contents, with basic info like “correspondence and slides regarding professional seminars and conferences attended from 1980-2001”, or “medical journals published from 1960-1980”. Just a little more specific than my color-coded spreadsheet to help myself work! After all boxes were gone through, I was able to sort things into groups essentially, of all the boxes just filled with academic journal articles, boxes with just cases filled with slides and photo negatives, boxes just filled with books and patent paperwork, and boxes just filled with binders. It was a bit daunting to see all the boxes filled with so much stuff at first, but once we’d tackled this first step, it felt much more doable!

From there, we were faced with going through each box, one by one!

A little doodle I came across in the files!