Internship at the Archives of the Holy Trinity Ukrainian Catholic Church #1

    Hello! My name is Danylo Leshchyshyn. This summer, I interned as an assistant archivist at the Holy Trinity Particular Ukrainian Catholic Church at 16631 New Hampshire Avenue in Montgomery County, MD. This church constitutes a parish of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, an Eastern Catholic denomination in communion with the Pope of Rome. The parish of the Holy Trinity P.U.C. Church was one of many churches established by Ukrainian refugees who settled in North America after the Second World War. I grew up in this parish, so I was grateful for the opportunity to serve by helping manage the archives.  

Holy Trinity P.U.C. Church. Photo by Danylo Leshchyshyn.

    The chief goal of my internship was to organize and preserve the mountains of historical data in the parish archives. Organizing meant individually examining each document or item, and determining its origin. This process was made easier by simultaneously compiling an archival catalog, recording where each document was located. Each day I would encounter documents or other historical material which required immediate preservation work. To preserve the items, I learned how to properly de-crease dangerous folds, clean mold, and delicately remove staples and other sources of rust. The pandemic actually did not hinder my job too much, for my role allowed me to work independently in the archive room.

    The main joy of my internship was discovering all the hidden treasures waiting in the archives. During my time in the office, I had a wonderful opportunity to view hundreds of papers documenting the history of the parish, including many missives with beautiful letterhead and hallmarks from the Patriarch of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church. There were also architectural plans related to the construction of the Holy Trinity P.U.C. Church in an authentic Carpathian Ukrainian style. In addition, I stumbled upon a rare collection of Ukrainian songs donated by a parishioner some time ago, consisting of over a hundred unique vinyl records.

Ground-level plans of the Holy Trinity PUC Church, by architect Larysa Kurylas.

    While this might not be an ideal place for most UMBC History students to intern, since it requires a strong grasp of the Ukrainian language, it proved a perfect opportunity for me to conduct quiet research and give back to my parish community.

Collections Internship with Save Our Seminary - Part 3: Material Culture

Possibly my favorite part of my collections internship with historic preservation nonprofit Save Our Seminary (SOS) was taking inventory of new acquisitions to the organization’s archives. One of SOS’s board members monitors sites like eBay for paraphernalia related to the school. I was surprised that there would be things sold online related to the school, but that speaks to the wide spread of the girls that attended the school. One yearbook I looked at listed girls from a huge variety of states, some even from overseas. It was rare for a student to actually be from the DC area. And like any college, the attendees had a lot of pride in their alma mater; National Park Seminary had an active alumni network even after the school closed in the 1940s.

A 1920s school yearbook. The girls all sport stylish 1920s bobs and each girl
has a fun, congenial description of her personality written by the yearbook staff. 
Another interesting note: The Yearbook was called "The Acorn" and you may be
able to see the squirrels drawn in on the blocks behind the women’s pictures.

Unfortunately, many of these alumna are passing away and their estates are being sold. The majority of the acquisitions I went through were from the collection of one particular woman who attended NPS in the early 1920s. Interestingly enough, my supervisor and I discovered through some archival detective work that this woman and her sister both went to National Park Seminary…and must have married two men who were brothers!

A note from one student to another asking to meet at one of the sorority buildings.

It was amazing how much stuff these women kept: playbills, ticket stubs, notes from friends and faculty, postcards, letters. One thing I found particularly amusing were these short notes that I dubbed “early twentieth-century text messages.” Sometimes these were warning notes from school faculty regarding money owed or dorm rooms that needed to be cleaned. Other times they were notes from sorority sisters asking the girl to meet them at a certain place later that day. It was interesting to see how people communicated before email and text.

A scrapbook featuring playbills and other paper ephemera.

A whimsical name plate pasted into a scrapbook. These name plates with characters
were common and some of the paper decorations in the scrapbooks are quite elaborate.

I also had a chance to look at yearbooks, school catalogs sent out to advertise the college to potential students, and scrapbooks made by students of their time at the school. It was fascinating to see fashions and hairstyles change over the years but also to get a sense of what it was like to be a student at NPS. Since I scrapbooked my own college experience, it was interesting to see the change and continuity between scrapbooks (and college life) in the early twentieth century and today. In fact, I decided to use the scrapbook collection as the source base for my senior thesis. All in all, after spending so much of my internship focusing on the buildings of the school, it was enlightening to get a glimpse on the lives that were lived within those buildings. 

Giving life to buildings: The field hockey team sat in front of the stone arches below

 for this picture. I found this photo interesting because school sports teams still take photos like this one.

 

• Read the first and second posts on this internship.
• For more information on National Park Seminary historic district, visit www.saveourseminary.org.
• Find public history internship opportunities.

Collections Internship with Save Our Seminary: Post 2

The newly renovated Greek Revival gymnasium, which now houses 

condominium units, greets visitors when they enter the National 

Park Seminary historic district. Not too long ago, the 

magnificent building was decaying from neglect. (Rebecca Gale)

As I relayed in my last post, I have been completing an internship with the historic preservation nonprofit Save Our Seminary (SOS), based in Forest Glen, which is responsible for the rescue and restoration of the historic National Park Seminary campus. SOS maintains an archive of objects important to the seminary’s history, and I’ve had the chance to aid with organizing parts of the collection to make it more accessible. 

While my first task was filing slides in archivally safe sleeves, my second project was sorting and filing an extensive set of photos depicting the gradual decay and long-awaited restoration of the historic buildings over the course of two decades. The bulk of the photos were taken by my internship supervisor, a historic preservationist and the executive director of SOS, who has been documenting the state of the campus since before most of us undergraduates were even in existence.

The end result of my project: Two and a half feet of binders
filled with hundreds of photos! Each binder houses photos of
a specific building or sculpture, placed in chronological
order to show change over time.

This collection has amounted to hundreds of photos and dates back to 1990. My job has been to sort photos into categories based on what building or object is pictured and place them into archival sleeves in chronological order so that it will be easy to trace the development of each building over time. Going through the photos has been fascinating, and their existence is a testament to the dedication of people who care about the stories that historic spaces tell, even when they no longer showcase their beauty as originally intended. I remember driving past the seminary campus when it was a tangle of weeds; it’s easy to forget the horrific state of the place looking at its pristine, glowing stucco today.

Some of the photos from the collection, depicting one building (a dorm during
the school era) before and during restoration. You can see the historic fireplace
that was preserved throughout the process. (Photos by Bonnie Rosenthal,
courtesy of Save Our Seminary)

This photo collection is a reminder of the victory that has been won in saving one American treasure and restoring it to life. Whenever I set foot on the seminary campus now, I think back to the mind-boggling images of decay – floors falling down, entire walls sagging, stones buckling, roofs caving in, fires being put out – and my heart warms to see a dream realized in front of me, the dream of a group of people committed to a place that spoke to them. The seminary is a reminder to keep fighting for the preservation of historic places because their story deserves to be told and they are meant to be a site of life once again.

• Read my first post on interning with Save Our Seminary.
• Visit Save Our Seminary's website to learn more about the site's history as well as upcoming events, tours, and lectures.

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/.