The Enterprise Farmer's Club

Alicia Cooper

October 27, 2015

History Internship

Blog Post #2

 I have truly enjoyed interning here at the Sandy Spring Museum. The Museum is small but has a vast collection that has been donated by the Sandy Spring, Olney, and Brookeville community. The staff on hand are very helpful and full of knowledge. I have been working closely with the archives director Lydia. We have worked together to find me a project will benefit the museum and the community. They have decided to increase the accessibility and findability of the Enterprise Farmers Club minutes which started in 1865. I will be creating something akin to an archival finding aid. With the increased the accessibility of the collection will facilitate its exposure to a broader audience as a valuable resource for both social and agricultural history.

 Many attribute the strength of Sandy Spring’s sense of community to its abundant and enduring social organizations. One of the oldest organizations that continue to meet today is the Enterprise Farmer’s Club; the club is celebrating its 150^th anniversary this year. The Enterprise Club was originally formed to bring the community together to share knowledge and collectively solve the problems of soil depletion and agricultural yield inherited from previous tobacco-based farming. Many of Sandy Spring’s social organizations maintain meeting minutes in a consistent, formulaic format that stretches back to their origins. In 2005, The Enterprise Farmers Club donated to the Sandy Spring Museum their meeting minutes dating from the Club’s inception. As the Museum holds several such collections of meeting minutes from local social organizations, this assignment will also serve as a beta-project to help establish a format that can be applied across collections.

The final product will have both collection-level descriptions as well as item-level indexes. The collection-level description will include a collection summary, biographical/ organizational note, and scope and contents statement. To do this I will need to leverage contextual resources available in the Museum’s library and archives. In this project, the item-level refers to the individual meetings recorded in the minutes. I will also create an index to record biographic information related to attendance and membership as well as topics discussed during each meeting. In doing these things I hope to explore ways to capture the social aspects of the meetings including host site information as well as meal descriptions. This work will allow not only for increased access to meeting minutes’ content but also afford a longitudinal view of agricultural and social trends in the Sandy Spring community. So far I have only transcribed volume one of the meeting minutes.