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.

Artifacts and Accession Numbers

Photo: "Back Closet 2"

    In January of 2026, the interns and I returned to the Howard County Center for African

American Culture after winter break and got into the bulk of the collections. There is work to be

done both in the museum and in the library, but we started work in the museum’s “Back Closet

2” which had three bookshelves full of materials. All of the interns were given access to a

museum spreadsheet, which was divided into three tabs. The first tab was titled “Data Drafting”

and this was where we would record all of the information about objects that had attached

accession numbers. The second tab was for objects with conflicting accession numbers, and the

third was for objects with no accession numbers.

    The majority of what we catalogued over the first month had no accession numbers, and

were taken out of the closet for us by our internship supervisor. These included mostly paper

materials, including newspaper clippings, photographs, posters, calendars, community flyers,

family reunion records, and more. With these, we recorded all information available such as

dates, names, dimensions, materials, and condition, and left them organized in the center’s

office.

    After we finished with that portion of materials, we began on the rest of “Bookshelf 2” in

the back closet. Most of these objects now had accession numbers with them, and the vast

majority so far have been vinyl records that were bought, donated, or gifted to the center.

Recording objects with accession numbers is similar to the ones without, but we also had to

include the number, the source and collection, as well as the location (e.g. Back Closet 2,

Bookshelf 2, Shelf 3). After accessioned objects were recorded in the Data Drafting spreadsheet

tab, we then had to enter them into Past Perfect, the museum collection management software

that the center uses. Most of this was copy and pasting information from the spreadsheet to the

software, but there was quite a learning curve in getting accustomed to using PastPerfect. So far,

the internship has been mostly data collection and entry, and I’m gaining valuable experience in

handling and managing museum collections.

Bridging Documentation, Restoration and Presentation

     As an intern with no task specifically assigned, I have been able to float around Direct Dimensions a bit and see a few of the distinct departments that the company has and get a good idea of what each one does. I started out in the cultural heritage/art preservation area and spent a good amount of time with the project management head there. He was able to walk me through a few of their client interactions from inception to completion, and the breadth of what they do here is genuinely impressive. One of the projects I was lucky enough to get a peek into involved working with the Central Park Conservatory to document, preserve and rehabilitate historic stonework and art installations including the Bethesda Terrace and the hippos in the Safari Playground. The Bethesda Terrace work mostly consisted of extensive scanning for documentation, but the hippo project consisted of scanning the sculptures for the explicit purpose of restoration and extended into the fabrication of exact replicas of hippo sculptures that were found to be in especially poor condition. The amount of work that this entailed was extensive but the end result is absolutely worth it, and now the hippo sculptures can continue to add to the makeup and personality of the park.

    A project in the architectural division involved documenting a historical building in Anne Arundel County that was due to be demolished for reasons related to safety, as the building was vacant for a number of years and contained high amounts of asbestos and other harmful materials. The deliverable here was a bit nebulous, as the client wanted the building documented but did not have a specific use in mind for the 3D data that was obtained. Management was brainstorming things to do with the data that could add value to the final product and brought me into the conversation, where I was able to think about it a bit and see that the package that they give to clients at the end of a project contained all of the raw data gathered, as well as specific formats of 3D models based on what purpose they would be used for. I realized the presentational aspect was entirely absent, aside from a SketchFab link that would display the 3D model so you can interact with it. This isn’t nothing, but I felt that it stripped the context entirely and thought I might play around and see what I could come up with to bridge that gap. Over the last month and a half, I was able to put together a basic platform for the company to host and display their 3D data in a way that better suites their needs, while keeping that data entirely under their control. I concentrated on the context aspect, adding the ability to display extensive archival-grade metadata, annotations, and data overlays (like drone flight paths) as well as many other features that cover their wide array of work. It has been an incredibly fun experience and I have learned an absolute ton about displaying 3D data on the web, as well as what they have taught me about the data capture process. My hope is that this project can evolve into something more comprehensive and be a genuine addition to their offerings long-term.

    Below is a screenshot of a scan they did of the National Katyń Memorial in Baltimore City presented in the web viewer I assembled. I did research and included the history of the memorial, the history of the massacre that the memorial is dedicated to the victims of, as well as the history of the scan that was performed. Direct Dimensions was contracted by the National Katyń Memorial Foundation to scan the memorial and do area calculations of the bronze and gold leaf materials for cost estimation purposes for repair and preservation. For this project the 3D model was more of a side effect than anything else, but we were able to create interactive documentation that the foundation can use to raise awareness for the memorial and preserve the memorial as it is right now for future generations, with full historical context present.

 

Stories in Storage

Photo: The exterior of the Howard County Center for African American Culture building

    Last semester, fall of 2025, I was hired along with two other students for an intern position with the Howard County Center for African American Culture. The hiring process was long, but not complicated. I was initially denied the internship, but they reached out to me about a month and a half later and asked if they could interview me to see if I could join the team. It ended up being less of an interview and more of a meeting to ask me when I could start. 

There wasn't much information about what the internship would have me do except for the position description in the initial email. All it said was that there had been a flood in 2021 that meant they needed to rapidly remove the museum's collections out of the building, and that now they were looking to recatalogue everything. I would be taught how to handle, record, and catalogue museum collections, which was the exact area of museum studies that I was interested in learning more about. After the interview, I joined the other two interns for an onboarding meeting and found out that the work hadn't started yet. We met once in November to become acquainted with the museum space and learn more about the center, and then once in December to start learning the hands-on skills before the holidays. I learned quickly that since the center was largely run by volunteers, everything took a little longer than usual to get started. 

The Howard County Center for African American Culture has an abundance of fascinating artifacts, books, documents, music, and more, a large portion of which sat unorganized in their upstairs storage closets. My internship supervisor, Dr. Kyla Cools, introduced us to the space, the artifacts, accession numbers, and Past Perfect, the museum collection software that we would be using to record all of the items. In January, after winter break, we all returned to the center to begin working consistently. 

 

History in Three Dimensions

Jake Marino

 

 Photo: Direct Dimensions employee using LiDAR to capture the Three Soldiers Vietnam war memorial statue in Washington, D.C.

    This semester I am lucky enough to be interning at a company called Direct Dimensions located in Owings Mills, MD. The company was started by the owner Michael Raphael in the mid-1990s as a metrology company that specialized in digitizing measurements of real-world objects for use in applications like CAD software, and over the years they became one of the premiere companies in the field of 3D scanning. The level of capture they can process is measured in microns at the most advanced level, and they use this skillset for everything from capturing for visual reference to capturing for exact replication and restoration. They have departments focused on specific types of capture, but my position is in the cultural heritage section of the company that works with artwork and historical artifacts and places. They are known very well in this domain due to their high level of technical expertise, doing scanning work for the National Parks Service, the Smithsonian and many other museums all over the country to preserve significant artifacts and aid in restoration as well as digitize items for public display on the internet and information kiosks in the museums themselves.

    My position initially was working on messaging in the cultural heritage space. This came about in a conversation I had during my interview where I talked about how important I thought the work they do is, and over the course of the meeting I laid out some ideas I had regarding working with museums and online institutions like Wikipedia to make scans of important cultural items more accessible. I am still doing that work but the company is inherently technical, so they have allowed me to do some exploratory work on that side as well. I have been able to see what they do for their process, from scanning and taking pictures, to processing of the raw data, to creating and cleaning up models, to presentation and even fabrication. It is incredibly interesting and overall, just super cool from every direction. I’m excited to see what I get to work on and to just be in this space as a preservationist, it’s a great opportunity in a field that most people probably don’t really think about but has very wide applications and huge future potential. 

Supporting Community History & Heritage

 

            My ultimate takeaway from my experiences interning for Todd’s Inheritance Historic Site is twofold. Firstly, learning how to conduct research, cataloging artifacts, and handle delicate items with very little support, knowledge, resources, or guidance is a tremendous endeavor. While the team of volunteers at Todd’s provided as much support as possible to my work, most of the project was carried out with very little oversight. This kind of experiences forces a researcher to pick up skills ad hoc and improvise when necessary; having the responsibility of handling and identifying family heirlooms so they can more accurately be presented for the public’s enjoyment is a serious task that must be treated with a solemn respect. Secondly, I have come to truly understand and appreciate the struggle involved in community-supported museums, archives, and historic sites like Todd’s Inheritance. The stewards of sites like Todd’s do not have access to vocational training on archival administration and material handling from accredited universities, expensive climate controlled environments, extensive archival records detailing the history of the property, or large financial investments from state resources or intellectual organizations. However, they make do with what they have access to and they do a tremendous job of respecting the property and materials’ histories while also creating an extremely accessible and welcoming environment for the general public to visit and learn about their community history and cultural heritage. Small, volunteer-run sites are invaluable to the preservation of community history as they ultimately will always have the best interest in their preservation since they have virtually no ulterior motives. I look forward to continuing my work collecting, itemizing, cataloging the historic items housed at Todd’s as a volunteer and supporting this small slice of preserved history.

Todd’s Inheritance also provides demonstrations, re-enactments, and lectures that provide opportunities for community interaction with the history, as well as improvement of accessibility to the general public. This photo shows the volunteers presenting a demonstration on Defenders’ Day to commemorate the Battle of North Point and the siege of Baltimore in 1814.

Bare Bones and Unknowns

 

            Given the extreme lack of support provided to the volunteers working to preserve and maintain the property and all the artifacts contained within, the work I was conducting proved to be quite challenging. The state government provides little financial support or vocational training in historic preservation, so they rely heavily on community volunteer work and visitor donations. Due to these restrictions, there has been virtually no organized collection or catalog to itemize and record all the artifacts that they are in possession of. This was the primary challenge in my work as they could only provide limited records or understanding of the objects I was cataloging, which is no fault of their own since they are all undertaking this herculean effort purely out of their generosity and their passion for cultural heritage. Many objects either had production line stamps detailing the maker and year of creation or that information was already known by the volunteers through the aid of the surviving Todd family members. However, some items required background research to ascertain the approximate era/year of origin and who the maker was. This involved examining every possible surface, texture, or material of an object for tiny details, and some of these objects were very large and heavy pieces of furniture. For example, one item that required this approach was a Sentinel Analog Wall Clock with no observable significant details and relatively little knowledge provided by the volunteers; I was able to identify it as a Sentinel series produced by Sessions Clock Co. in 1911 through following the details I was able to observe. Additionally, some of these objects were in very poor condition, due to wear over years of use or mishandling, which hampered efforts in identifying them from deterioration of details and weakened their structural integrity.

Three Hundred Years On The Patapsco Neck

            During the summer of 2025 I was given the wonderful opportunity to intern at a very small historic site in an isolated corner of Baltimore County, Maryland. I worked as a paid intern at Todd’s Inheritance Historic Site which is a colonial-era farmstead located at the very end of North Point Peninsula near Fort Howard. This area has a rich history rooted in the War of 1812 and specifically the siege of Baltimore and Fort McHenry. The three-story farmhouse was originally rebuilt in the 1820s after being burned down by the British invasion in 1814, but the area was first settled by the Todd family in 1664. The property was held in an unbroken line of succession for over three hundred years until in 1975 it was sold off and fell into serious disrepair. In 1997, the house was saved from sale and possible destruction by a coalition of community members dedicated to preserving the historic significance and cultural heritage of the property, and in 2001 the house was awarded a Historic Site designation by the Maryland Department of Natural Resources and kept under the stewardship of a group of dedicated community volunteers. Over my three months of work, I collaborated closely with these volunteers to identify, organize, catalog, and digitize over 200 various items on display in the house spread across four different rooms. This detailed work involved categorizing the items, determining their provenance, their year/era of origin, the materials they consist of, as well as the size dimensions of each item and photographic documentation. Many items originated from the Todd family heirlooms and thus had to handled with utmost care and respect as a member of the Todd family still resides locally and is heavily involved in the project of historic preservation and documentation.

Reflection on Internship

     I came into this semester after being out of college for nearly 4 years. In the time spent out of college, I I focused on developing vocational skills to bridge my scholarly interests and my desire to do field work in preservation. Taking the time to reflect on my work while completing the requirements for the internship has allowed me to be more connected with the work I do. Despite the exciting nature of my work, it's still a 9-5 job. The general rigors of construction, early mornings, working in terrible weather, wear on a person. However, being able to record and share information about the work has been an exciting and engaging prospect. I hope to be able to share more challenges and triumphs of projects I engage in going forward with more likeminded colleagues. 

    The hardest part about this internship has been time management between the other courses. As I said before, this is my returning semester to college, as well as my last, so I am out of practice when it comes to college work. Due to poor planning on my part, I never completed my lab course requirement and was only able to get into a GES lab course. Working on the internship simultaneously with three other courses proved to be more work than I expected. Despite this, I'm thankful for the Public History department to allow my current job at Hestia Restoration to be included in the internship. Mathew Benning, the owner and my boss at Hestia, wants to establish a link between the history department at UMBC as a potential option for more interns. I believe it would be an exciting learning experience for both us at Hestia and the students willing to get their hands dirty doing some real restoration!

Reflecting On My First Internship Experience

Last week, my internship at the B&O Railroad Museum concluded and it has been a long journey of many different types of experiences, good, bad, ugly, and insightful. It showed me what it is that curators do on a day-to-day basis as well as the difficulties of being an intern in the public history field today. My internship at the B&O Railroad Museum has helped me build up my existing skills and learn practical skills that will help me for future internships and professional opportunities.

In my freshman year for a first-year seminar course, I wrote a final paper that focused on a career path I want to pursue after college, its job market and salary, educational requirements, and what does it mean to do that job. From that paper, I had an inkling of curatorial work being 90% office work, a percentage of exhibition development, and a percentage of networking for the department, museum, and object acquisition. And through my internship it has turned out to be pretty accurate and more intensive for the intern as much of the office work gets given to you and the more hands on, developmental tasks to the museum’s curatorial team. The human labor aspect of both groups ultimately comes together for a final project but it’s underestimated how much of being a curator is behind the scenes, and rather boring. I am hopeful I can have a career as a curator that I can make it my own or feel like it’s my own within its constraints.

Coming into my internship I had experience writing labels and doing research for labels. This internship put these skills to the test and put into perspective the sometimes specific or niche information that certain museums require for their label information. I had more experience with artwork labels which allow for a more flexible description of the artwork as it can take on many different forms depending on what you want to focus on (formal qualities, the artist, art movement, theme, relationships, etc.). At the B&O Railroad Museum where it focuses on B&O railroad history and railroad history in general that luxury is limited as history and object context are more important. It was a task to get used to as researching information and understanding it to put it into label form was challenging for me as someone with little prior knowledge of railroads, art specific material culture experience, and where to look for information I am lacking with to help clarify the label’s information. The Assistant Curator was able to guide me through the process that was more aligned with history and material culture research, label writing, and questioning to uncover and better understand a method of working with (non-art) objects that can succeed in various contexts.

Overall, my internship at the B&O Railroad Museum has been a challenge and a fruitful experience that has strengthened my skills in writing, research, and exhibition development through my projects with the upcoming B&O no. 3316 “Washington,” the American Freedom Train (AFT) exhibit, and other smaller side projects with object descriptions, accessing archival materials, and cleaning up existing exhibits in the museum. This is an experience that I would not have had if not for blindly applying to a museum outside of my field of study and emphasizing my prior skills I built up through course work at UMBC and in my study abroad program. And I have walked away with a valuable memory, experience, and opportunity to add to my resume.

The Elusive Mural of the B&O no.3316 "Washington"

Courtesy of B&O Railroad Museum

 As a continuation from the previous post and after that specific research task for the B&O no.3316 “Washington” observation-lounge car, I was given my next assignment that was by many staff members at the B&O Railroad Museum called a “wild goose chase.” This post will outline my experience with this assignment and the interesting outcomes of it.

The B&O no. 3316 “Washington” has an Art Deco inspired lounge that fits into the modern art period the car was made within (built in 1949) and has a main wall feature, a photomural. In the front end of the no. 3316’s lounge is a photomural—a large scale print of a photograph on a wall, usually colored—of cherry blossoms at Tidal Basin in Washington DC. The photo is a perfect shot of the basin, the Washington Monument, the cherry blossoms across the water and their branches over the frame. Railroad fans know of the cherry blossom mural in the “Washington” but it is a relatively unknown fact online as information to find anything about it is non-existent. The B&O Railroad Museum’s archives have photographs and information around the context of the piece but do not know who made it.

So, my assignment from the Assistant Curator was to find out additional information about the photomural but especially who made it. Before me there were two-three attempts from staff members and an intern which made this task daunting if not impossible hence my start to a wild goose chase. I chose to instead look at it as a treasure hunt to be more optimistic, and this optimism paid off as I found a singular article from 1949 by the Railway Age Magazine that described the specific details of the new B&O “Columbian” trains at the time and a partial list of companies and businesses that helped different aspects of the train cars. Each car of the “Colombian” has a mural for a major sightseeing location in the cities they stop at. These murals were done by the Kaufmann & Fabry Co. a Chicago based photography studio who are best known for their photographs of the Chicago’s “Century of Progress” World Fair in 1933. It’s an intriguing connection between innovation and railroads that could only be made by the existence of these murals.

In light of the discovery, I had the opportunity to write drafts of the label to be used for the no. 3316’s “Unlocked Series” which felt like a reward and an honor to be given the chance to do. I wrote around four labels for different points of emphasis: some art history, some historical context, for the middle schooler, for the railfan, and by the request of the Assistant Curator one for myself which felt like it was against my training around labels (a motto “It’s for others not you!”). I focused on the process of making a photomural from photograph to wall decoration which further connected me to the time period the “Washington” was made in. I am looking forward to seeing the final label with the cherry blossom mural.

The Good, The Bad, and The Brittle: My Battle with 19th-Century Diaries and Boxes of Bureaucracy

    For my internship at Loyola Notre Dame Library, I processed over forty different collections varying in size, subject matter, and dates. The oldest and smallest collection both happened to be the Adelia M. Hall diaries collection. This collection consisted of two small personal diaries from a female evangelical who traveled the world in the mid-nineteenth century. The diaries had small news clippings and letters held within the pages from her travels. This collection required a lot of preservation precautions as well as some translation and transcription work. The preservation precautions were to prevent further damage to the almost two century old leather binding of the diaries. I used gloves when handling the diaries and was extremely careful with each individual page in order to keep from ripping or bending the pages. Unfortunately, over the course of the travels and the years in storage, the diaries had seen much better days. The leather was beginning to crumble and the pages were extremely brittle. Much of the news clippings and some of the entries were in Spanish. Since I know an extremely small amount of Spanish, I had to work hard to transcribe the Spanish and then translate it to English in order to understand the subject matter of some of the entries and the news clippings. 

The largest collection was the Notre Dame University Curriculum Committee records. This collection was the most frustrating and obnoxious collection I processed. Not only was it extremely large (roughly fourteen boxes if I remember correctly), but there was an immense number of duplicate materials scattered throughout the collection. I had to go through everything and separate the documents based on date and type (meeting minutes, proposals, finalized curriculum, etc.) and then go through each pile to weed out the duplicates and recycle any copies. The LNDL Archives policy was that items only needed a maximum of two copies in the collections (unless otherwise decided by the Head of the Archives, Jenny). The only reason we would keep more than two copies would be if there were valuable and varying notes taken on different copies and the notes were worth saving. Many of the items (specifically the meeting minutes) had dozens of unnecessary copies. We recycled A LOT of paper while I processed this collection. We also had a slight delay in the processing of this collection because of two reasons. The first being that the air conditioning in the building went out so we brought out the fans to cool us down and they immediately blew a few of my piles around and I had to redo a small section of the collection. The second (and most annoying) was that seemingly almost every other collection had a couple of items that needed to be moved to this collection. Even after I finished the collection, either myself or one of the other interns would find meeting minutes or proposals or something else that should have been a part of the Curriculum Committee records and I would have to dig out the boxes again and find where the items went (many of which we discovered were copies and just needed to be recycled). While my supervisor, Jenny, complimented me on my speediness and effectiveness of the processing of this collection, it felt like it would never end. 

Lastly, the most interesting collection I processed was the Scrapbook Collection. It was composed of about a dozen different personal scrapbooks made by either students or faculty of the different universities. The scrapbooks were adorable and incredibly interesting to look at. The old photos and ephemera put in the books were so fun to go through. I really enjoyed this collection. 

Polishing off my Internship!

 

Towards the latter half and ending of my internship, I was left to manage the remaining boxes which consisted of patents, books, and many, many carousel slides. Technically, slides, photographs, film strips, and x-rays were considered objects, but I was given the task of going through these still since most were mixed in with documents.

This part was one of the most interesting parts of the entire internship, since these slides and images covered such a wide range of content. Most were images of surgeries that Branemark participated in, and I’m not usually a squeamish person but some of these images were unlike anything I’ve ever seen before. Since osseointegration could be used not just in dentistry, but in restorative and plastic surgery in general, he helped people all over the world who had facial deformities, missing facial features, and missing limbs. I did end up seeing someone have their entire nose removed and replaced with a prosthetic, I can only assume due to the tissue being unsalvageable for a rhinoplasty, but an entire intact human nose just sitting on an operating tray is a crazy sight to see. Some people were missing nearly half their facial features, and had custom made prosthetics that could be removed and looked like a complete and normal face. I had never seen anything like it before!

I also loved seeing the random assortment of slides and photographs thrown in there of Branemark meeting with colleagues, the interiors of office buildings and conference halls from 20 or so years ago, nature pictures, and even just casual photos of Branemark with family and friends. There were even a couple of photos from a visit to Australia of Branemark and company hanging out with kangaroos! I found it really interesting that he kept so many tiny pieces that made up over half his entire life and his career in these binders, slides, and boxes, and that I was able to look through them and see a small part of who he was.

Along with these slides, photos, x-rays, and film strips were both handwritten and formal surgery plans and notes for each patient, which I also would go through one by one and digitize. The process for scanning film, slides, x-rays, and the like is different than documents, and I was simply told not to worry about digitizing those.

Once I finished with the boxes of slides and whatnot, I had the easy task of going through patents. Branemark had patented some of his osseointegrative bone anchored screws and other tools in around twenty-five different countries, and renewed them over the years, so I had a wide array of patents to go through. My supervisor and I ultimately decided that the best course of action would be again to create a chart with information on all these patents, with country of issue, year, etc. on it, and to rehouse the patents into protective slips within a binder.

My final tasks for this internship were to find places for this massive collection to go within the museum’s storage, and to create finding aids for everything. My finding aids went binder by binder essentially, with the binder title, year of creation, content overview, content language, some background on the collection, who had donated the collection, what legal restrictions may apply to the content, and where it was kept. Working on these while finding homes for everything turned out to be the best plan of attack and really helped me keep track of where everything ended up going.

I really enjoyed my time working with this collection! I worked with such a large scale collection full of interesting things, and I got to spend pretty much every day just hanging out with a friend of mine while we both worked together in our office. Also, the museum hosted multiple events with free food through the University of Baltimore Maryland, so I ate a lot of free cake and cookies throughout. Overall, I am so grateful I was able to continue to work within a collections setting, and be able to get more firsthand professional museum experience!

An awesome picture of Branemark wearing a cowboy hat with a sword!