As I said
before, I worked on two different internships this past summer. I’ve already talked about the National
Archives, now it’s time to talk about Sandy Spring. The Sandy Spring Museum is a local museum
established to chronicle and preserve the history of a small Quaker community,
Sandy Spring. I had never heard of it
until we visited on a field trip during my 300 class last year, but what I saw
there interested me for several reasons: it was not at all far from where I
lived, making any commute easy, it had a surprisingly excellent archive for
such a small institution, and it depended very heavily on volunteers. So when I was considering internships, Sandy
Spring was first on my list. I mean, an
intern is basically just a volunteer getting college credit, right? I figured that they would say yes, even with
my aforementioned scanty resume. I also
thought that because it was so small, I’d probably get the opportunity to do a
lot of things that an intern wouldn’t normally handle.
 |
| Looking down one of the aisles in the archive |
As I said
before, I figured that there was no way that the Archives would accept me, so I
said yes to Ms. MacDiarmid, the archivist at the museum, straight away. This ended up complicating things a week
later, when the Archives got back to me and offered me another internship. I’ll talk about why I was so determined to do
both of them later.
Anyway, I
was right about the opportunities. I
started out in the archives, where I expected to be, doing inventory. Essentially, I was pulling down boxes of
records and cross-checking their contents with the online archive database,
making sure that everything matched up. That
in and of itself was interesting; their collection has all kinds of documents
and objects from the Civil War and earlier.
Once I was familiar with the database though, I did all sorts of
things. One day, I was sent to buy
spackle and then spent the morning spackling wall holes in the exhibit gallery
while artists set up the new exhibit around me.
I helped document new exhibits, I held lights and reflectors for a
fundraising video, I created finding aids, I did the preliminary work for a
forthcoming large-scale object inventory.
That last was a lot of work, there are several thousand objects in the
archive and on display, and very few of them are where the database says that
they should be. One day, Ms. MacDiarmid
came in and told me to drop what I was doing because we had a group of kids
from a local day camp incoming in the next 20 minutes and we had to set things
up for them. That was fun, pulling out
everything that we could think of that would interest a group of kids and
showing them a bit of what we did.
Then there
were the guns. You see, among the
museum’s collection were three rifles, one musket, one revolver, and four
cannonballs, one of them technically a piece of grapeshot, all Civil War era,
and while I was there, we realized that no one knew whether or not any of them
were loaded. After Ms. MacDiarmid took a
weekend trip to another local museum and discovered that their two rifles had
gone missing at some point in the last two decades, she got a bit worried, and
mentioned the antique ordnance to her boss, Ms. Weiss, the executive director
of the Sandy Spring Museum. Ms. Weiss
shared a story about one of her former places of employment, which had found a
Civil War era cannonball in their collection and donated it to the local fire
department, where it was later detonated.
This made Ms. MacDiarmid very
worried, and we spent some time trying to figure out how to safely tell whether
or not any of these things were dangerous.
After consulting with a neighborhood gun expert and the local bomb
squad, the end verdict was that they were all harmless, which was a big relief
to everyone.
