Tails from the Animal Cemetery

Although it may not be the most orthodox place for a public history internship, over the summer I had the opportunity to work with the Baltimore Humane Society in Reisterstown, Maryland. The organization is approaching its 100th anniversary, and it operates the Baltimore Humane Society Memorial Park–a historic animal cemetery. Today the Memorial Park sits on five acres of land, has approximately 10,000 graves, and continues to offer animal funeral and burial services. However, after almost a century of operation, the cemetery is nearing capacity. For that reason, my internship aimed to explore the cemetery's history to find materials, anecdotes, or narratives that could support fundraising efforts to expand it.

I was given what was essentially a dream assignment: to find something interesting. Unsurprisingly, after some research, I found that this historic animal cemetery is home to a wealth of fascinating, funny, and poignant stories. Among those were pets who had been left to the Humane Society in their owner’s will, dogs who had lived in the Star-Spangled Banner Flag House, a pet lion, an animal who “co-authored” a book on pedestrian safety for children, and many more.

Part of the process involved looking into some of the oldest graves in the cemetery. This was particularly intriguing because both the staff and visitors I met were eager to share the bits of information, memories, and rumors they had about various graves with me. Those conversations often gave me new leads to explore, and it made the research process much more engaging when I knew I had an enthusiastic audience for whatever I’d happened to find. By the time my project was complete, I had created a digital collection of more than 250 items spanning almost a century of the organization and cemetery’s history. I had also identified a handful of individual pets with interesting stories, researched the history of animal cemeteries in Maryland, and compiled all of my findings into a presentation for the organization’s leadership and visitors.

As a final and especially rewarding capstone to this experience, I was recently invited to speak about my project at an event held at the Memorial Park. After spending the summer collecting the history of this place, it was a wonderful opportunity to bring some of my research back to where it began. I was able to share stories and photos with people I had met at the very beginning of the project and heard new stories from people I was meeting for the first time. I’m excited to share more of that process here in future blog posts, as well.

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From Storage Unit to Special Collections: Saving the Baltimore Woman's Industrial Exchange Archives

    Four years ago, in September of 2022, my previous supervisor, who is a researcher for the Maryland Women’s Heritage Center, took me to the second floor of the Baltimore Woman’s Industrial Exchange. She opened one of the office doors and explained that the piles of papers and boxes were archival materials that she found spilling out of one of the closets. We had just received a grant to begin documenting the history of the Exchange, so this office felt like we had stumbled upon a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. Since that day, I have spent my free time buried in the archives of the Exchange, knowing they held precious glimpses into the history of Baltimore. In January of 2026, the Maryland Women’s Heritage Center lost key grant funding and was no longer able to afford the rent required for the Exchange building to be its headquarters. As the group engaged in the necessary steps to move their work to become fully virtual, the board had to decide what to do with the Exchange archives. The physical objects, such as baking pans and clothes, were donated to the Baltimore Museum of Industry, while the remaining materials were relocated by my supervisor to a storage unit.

    Understanding that the remaining collection could not stay in a storage unit, my supervisor transferred the materials into my possession in order for me to analyze them for my thesis research. After learning more about the materials held in Special Collections at the UMBC library, I discovered that UMBC held a vast amount of Baltimore history in its archives. I decided to reach out to Special Collections about the materials in my care as I became increasingly overwhelmed with the thought of attempting to use an unprocessed collection as my main primary source for my thesis. After multiple meetings with Dr. Beth Saunders, curator and head of Special Collections, and training by Laurainne Ojo-Ohikuare, the Processing and University Archivist for the Albin O. Kuhn Library and Gallery, I was offered the opportunity to process the Exchange materials through an internship under the guidance of Dr. Saunders and Laurainne. The ultimate goal of the internship was to prepare the Exchange materials to be donated to Special Collections. My supervisor and I agreed that Special Collections would be the best fit for the Exchange materials, as the library staff consistently show not only the utmost professional care for their collections, but also take the time to engage with what is housed in their collections in various ways in attempts to promote the archives as living documents. The Special Collections reading room is also free of charge to visit and open to the public, so anyone interested in the Exchange will have ample access to its records.

    The internship was divided into multiple steps toward processing the collection. First, I went through the entire collection to complete a preliminary survey of the materials. At this stage, the materials were in unorganized piles held in five banker-sized boxes. After my initial survey, I discovered that the Exchange collection contains over 200 materials. The second step of the internship was creating a processing plan. This document consists of an abstract description of the collection, an assessment of the materials held within the collection, the provenance of the collection, and a detailed plan of how the archivist will approach organizing the collection. The third and final step of the internship was creating a finding aid for the collection. The finding aid clearly lays out what is held within a certain collection in order for researchers to easily determine the relevance of the collection to their own research. Ultimately, this internship not only allowed me to prepare and organize the Exchange collection in a professional manner for the public, but it has also allowed me to better understand the importance of preserving and making local history accessible to the public. Finally, the internship gave me the opportunity to spend time giving the attention and care needed to each material, allowing me to gain a better understanding of the Exchange as it relates to not only my personal thesis research but also to the broader history of the United States.

Here is me on August 31st, 2026 after signing the official document to donate the Exchange archives to Special Collections.

The Vision for the Future

Photo: Part of the HCCAAC section in the HCC library

My internship came to an end on May 12. For the final stage of our work at the internship, we were introduced to the library space. The Howard County Center of African American Culture has a dedicated library room at Howard Community College, which is available as a research and study space to the students. Similar to our work in the museum, our job is to catalogue all of the books in our Google Sheet, and then transfer them all over to the PastPerfect museum software. 

For a lot of the semester, the work I was doing for the Center felt repetitive and a little bit tedious, even though I knew it was important. When my internship supervisor met with us to introduce us to the library space, we had a talk that reinforced how important our work was and made me even more happy to be part of it. When we arrived at the library, we explored and were shown this corner of the library where they had some of the handmade exhibits from the Center’s old programming, and a photo and dedication to the Center’s founder, Mrs. Wylene Sims Burch. This sparked a conversation and the Center and its goals for the future of outreach and education. 

The Center used to be deeply involved in their community and did outreach programs, fundraisers, and in-house and traveling exhibits. Due to lack of funding, they have been unable to continue their programming to the extent that they used to. After COVID and their flood in 2021, they lost track of a lot of their collections, which began the need for the work that the interns and I have been doing. Now, they are only able to offer tours and exhibits by request, and host a limited number of events throughout the year. What we’ve been doing, helping catalogue and locate their museum and library collections, is a small but important contribution to the end goal of the Center regaining its footing to continue their mission of  “engaging community, promoting progress, transforming lives through culture, history and awareness.”

Thrown into the 3D Deep End and Coming Out a Pro

    I have spent the last several months at arguably one of the best places in the country to learn about 3D capture, and I have gotten an incredible amount out of that experience so far. When I started in February the position that I was interning for was fairly nebulous, initially being kind of a general position where I helped people out in the background and months later ending up in a bit of a developer and exploratory R&D role. This shift was due to the absolutely awesome level of autonomy that I was given, which initially arose from a day or two period early in the internship where everyone who was in the office was more or less busy and occupied and I didn't have anyone to shadow or explicitly tell me what to do. I took this time to start messing with a 3D javascript library called three.js to see what I could do with it, after I had a conversation previously with management about the lack of presentational materials when they do a deliverable hand-off to clients (mentioned in my last blog post). They saw what I was able to put together relatively quickly and asked if certain things were possible and for many of the things I told them I had no real idea and wouldn’t know until I tried, so I tried. They gave me the space to do so, so I just kept trying things and the culmination of that is a comprehensive viewer platform for various types of 3D data, with the company now planning on using it internally over the summer (at least). 
    Direct Dimensions works on 3D captures of very tiny things, huge outdoor scenes, engineering related things, cultural heritage related things, things that require exact precise measurement and things that are purely for visualization. This wide array of subjects and purposes makes it difficult to really convey what they do to the general public, but the gist is that they’re good at all of it and are genuinely capable of capturing the world for any application that you can think of. During the development of this application, I made sure to import and play with every data type that they had on hand in order to get an idea of what it would take to display that data reasonably well on the web. The big three are 3D mesh models (with multiple distinct types), point clouds from lidar or laser scans, and gaussian splats. There are platforms that handle each of these, but none that handle all reasonably well in an open, non locked-down manner. I was able to compile notes from a ton of reading and hammer down a workflow for each type that used the best possible techniques and technology in terms of compression, chunked streaming and level of detail loading in order to get a smooth user experience for each that could display well on even modest computers or phones while not sacrificing detail. I looked at many other programs and basically took the best ideas from each while fixing the things I felt were not good or impeded the user experience. They like the application enough that they asked me if I could integrate it with one of their automated scanner products, and I have heard them make clients aware of its existence (which bodes very well for my potential future at the company).
    I ended up becoming knowledgeable about many file types and capture methods and now have an opinion on what $50,000 lidar scanner is best (it's wild to me that I got hands on one). I have played with a bunch of programs for processing 3D data and now have a comprehensive understanding of the current landscape. I can not truly state how valuable this internship has been, and I hope that I can give back in a meaningful way. Aside from the software that I have put together I have also been experimenting with scene reconstruction and gaussian splats in particular, which are a bit of a frontier in terms of the tech and is a space that is progressing and moving incredibly quickly. I have been paying attention to academic papers that have been coming out and try to be the one that makes the rest of the company aware of the latest and greatest, and I believe that in the coming years there will be a distinct shift away from creating 3D content with very rigidly defined manipulations of XYZ coordinates to more so growing and evolving 3D content from carefully prepared seed data. Basically this will make a lot of the vision-oriented (as opposed to metrology or archival) use cases for 3D scan data affordable and workable, and we will be able to use generative techniques to repair and augment scan data in new ways. One example would be taking a 3D laser scan of an old or damaged building to get accurate base geometry and then pairing it with photos of what the building looked like 100 years ago in order to create an accurate 3D model of the building as it once was. You would be combining the real with the inferred, but the data is all there so nothing would have to be speculatively created from assumptions. What someone would previously have to meticulously model by hand could be done reasonably quickly (under supervision) to create an asset that could be used in a museum or in a virtual experience. It’s something I find very exciting, and I am lucky to be this close to a technological frontier. All in all I am incredibly grateful for the experience I have had here over this semester and can not wait to continue the work that I have started. 

Below is another screenshot of the web application that I put together, this time of the editor/scene composition interface which shows a lidar scan of the Direct Dimensions building that I was present during the capture of. Usually point clouds like these are locked into difficult to use and heavy desktop applications.

Celebrating National Volunteer Week

Museums and historic sites all across the country recently celebrated National Volunteer Week from April 19th to 26th, and Riversdale House Historic Site and Museum was no exception. As many of my colleagues in the realm of public history are probably well aware, museums generally have very small staffs and even smaller budgets. Therefore, it is essential that places like Riversdale are armed to the teeth with a crew of volunteers of able body and mind, ready to take on any task that a given day may call for. Our volunteers truly come from all walks of life, ranging from young teenagers to elderly retirees. No matter who you are, we can find something for you to do!

Volunteers assist us with a wide variety of tasks here at the historic site and museum. Most importantly, volunteers lead two daily tours of the historic mansion that is the centerpiece of this historic site every weekend. Volunteers also assist with administrative tasks like staffing the front desk and sorting mail. They can even be found working in the community garden on site, or helping out with historical cooking demonstrations or other special events. See my previous post for more on historical cooking!

As someone who started his journey in the museum world as a volunteer here at Riversdale two years ago, I have experienced firsthand the personal enrichment and sense of purpose that volunteering provides. Now that I am employed at Riversdale as a part time staff member, seeing volunteers contribute to our mission of inclusive interpretation continues to be a source of joy.

When I found out from one of my colleagues that it was National Volunteer Week, I jumped at the chance to help her assemble gift bags as tokens of appreciation for the many volunteers who assist us day in and day out. Gift bags included notepads, pens, t-shirts, and my personal favorite, a mason jar-style water bottle complete with a straw and an inspirational message to boot!

Brunch is Served

At the Riversdale House Historic Site and Museum, we periodically host cooking demonstrations organized by our Kitchen Guild volunteers. On April 26, 2026, the Kitchen Guild held a “Spring Brunch” cooking demonstration. Was “spring brunch” a “thing” in the early nineteenth century? I am not sure, it’s above my pay grade. Regardless, it was a fun idea that had some great turnout from community members and helped generate interest in the museum. So, putting my grumbling aside about the historicity of spring brunch, I can say that all in all this was a successful program and I am glad that I could participate in it. Before proceeding any further, I would like to issue a disclaimer to anyone reading this that is interested in visiting a Kitchen Guild demonstration: you will not be allowed to eat the food. Food safety regulations prevent us from being allowed to serve the food we make for guests. You would think that the county would give us a historical exemption, but alas.

On this particular day, the Kitchen Guild menu included smoked herring, a root vegetable called salsify, and “hoe cakes.” I think the smoked herring is pretty self-explanatory, we picked that up from Giant the day before the demonstration and it was ready to cook straight out of the package. Salsify and hoe cakes, on the other hand, required me to dig a little deeper, or perhaps hoe a little deeper (forgive the pun) to understand what they actually were. 

Salsify grows abundantly in the wild and can be cooked easily with minimal preparation. It is similar in taste and texture to parsnips. Given that it grows in the wild it likely would have been an important source of food for enslaved people and other early American settlers who would have been struggling to scrape out a living. Hoe cakes are a bread dish made from cornmeal, water, and salt. Along with salsify, hoe cakes would have likely been a staple of diets for poor families in early America, particularly enslaved people and those living on the Appalachian frontier where agricultural opportunities were much more limited than on the coast.

Celebrating Black History Month at Riversdale

 On February 22, 2026, the Riversdale House Historic Site and Museum held an event called “Plummer’s Kitchen.” This event was named after an enslaved man  Adam Plummer who was enslaved at Riversdale from the age of 10 in 1829 all the way up to emancipation in 1864. Plummer resided at the site for six more years as a paid foreman before purchasing a nearby parcel of land called Mount Rose in 1870, in what is now the town of Edmonston. Plummer is notable among enslaved people in that he was able to read and write, and kept a diary for most of his life chronicling events in his own life and that of his family’s. In 1927 his daughter Nellie Arnold Plummer drew upon this diary as the main source material for a history of the family’s journey from slavery to freedom under the title Out of the Depths or the Triumph of the Cross. The diary itself is in the collections of the Anacostia Community Museum in Washington, D. C. 

Plummer’s Kitchen was an attempt to demonstrate the foods that enslaved people in Maryland might have eaten on a typical day. This event took place both in honor of both Black History Month and as part of the effort to give greater recognition to the enslaved men and women who lived and worked at Riversdale. Part of Riversdale’s initiative to be more inclusive in its interpretation has focused on highlighting the experiences of those who have historically been marginalized. One example of a largely forgotten figure in the Riversdale story is of a cook named Sam. Little is known about Sam other than that he was a skilled cook who particularly excelled at making stews. This information was gathered from the writings of Rosalie Calvert, who appeared to be pleased with his work, having stated that she was “glad [she] bought the cook.”

Unfortunately, most of Sam’s story is relegated to a footnote in Rosalie’s diary and the remainder lost to time, along with the stories of countless others who were enslaved. At the very least, programs like Plummer’s Kitchen and other efforts to uplift the stories of enslaved people can help us better reconcile a complicated past with the present.