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.