Internships Blog

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Started my third week at the Salem Museum. I spent most of my time this past week in the library / archive section of the museum, conducting research for a new exhibit. I am looking into 14 prominent citizens of Salem throughout the ages, that provide an insight into the town at the time. It begins at the founding of Salem, and continues up to the modern day. It is a large task, but I am chipping away at it. It has been interesting to go through the archives to find information on these people. Some eras are a lot easier to find information on than others. Everything is well organized, but there are clear gaps in the archives. It was a slow process at first, but I have found it easier as the week has gone on. Next week I will be taking a break from this to work on a smaller exhibit in the lobby.

The first picture is of me standing among the archive shelves. All of the pieces are shoved into the back, so it is significantly less empty than it appears in the pictures. The second picture is of my notes at an early stage.

Finishing up my first two weeks with the DMFAH has certainly been an exciting and memorable experience, as I am now able to immerse myself in the hands-on dispensing of history that has always been my fascination. With my time as intern, it is imperative for the museum to undergo vast reorganization of its collections so that the museum can achieve accreditation with the American Association of Museums. To contribute to this, I have learned how to use PastPerfect as an accessioning tool and have personally entered into the museum’s database numerous entries relating primarily to material that is part of a collection of the museum’s but found recently to have been stored away without proper knowledge or accessioning. These items, which included elegant silk dresses and authentic fox and beaver furs, all belonged to the collection acquired by the museum from the estate of Danville native Camilla Williams, a famed opera singer and the first African American to receive a regular contract with an American opera company. Showing the need for reorganization if such items were in limbo since the museum’s acquisition of the collection in 2012, it is essential that this work be done, and there is much of it at that.

So too did I assist in many facets of museum operation, such as being a greeter as well as scanning historical documents and summarizing them for digitization purposes. The museum is also preparing many new avenues of outreach to get the public more involved with our community’s historical and creative heritage by planning for new and novel events and for bringing art installations to the new gallery operated by the museum on Craghead Street in Danville. These are expressed in my attached pictures, wherein the first is of myself helping to rewrap a prototype for the museum’s Wanderlove exhibition of public yarnbombing on Danville’s scenic riverwalk coming in July. The second is of myself working as a greeter at the Craghead Gallery on the opening night of Tim Duffy’s Blue Muse exhibition of tintype photographs of blues musicians, most of whom are African Americans, whose contributions to music are invaluable but whose names have often been eclipsed, among others who continue to carry on these musical traditions. In just my first two weeks all of this has been put on my plate, but with the assistance of the director, staff, and other interns I have been welcomed and cannot wait to continue helping the museum regain its footing as a beloved cultural dispenser in the region. Many disparate stories can be told in just the building alone, from the days of the Sutherlin Mansion’s use as Jefferson Davis’ last capital during the Civil War to the Civil Rights battles waged within when the building was the public, segregated library.

Over these two weeks at the Vinton History Museum, I have done different jobs throughout the museum. I continued to work on the organization of the William Byrd High School clippings and finished the William Byrd Sports book. I began working on a new book dedicated to William Byrd High School clubs from the 1950’s to now. A family came into the museum and I gave them a tour while helping the little boy with a research report he was doing on the town of Vinton as a final project at Noah Christian Academy. I also took down the previous graduation display since May has come to an end, along with majority of the graduations in the area. I prepped the display area for a new display. We, myself and another intern, did a bridal display since June is popular for weddings. We put two weeding dresses from 1958 on mannequins ( the dresses were donated to the museum from two sister who has a joint wedding at Vinton Baptist Church) and dressed a cloth mannequin with a pink flower girl dress from earlier in the 1950’s. I also organized a bookshelf in the School and Church room and separated the annuals, newspaper clippings and picture between the school in the area. I also did a little cleaning around the museum to prepare for the Ice Cream Social (the museum handed out free ice cream to those in the community and it allowed the museum more publicity). At the Ice Cream Social, I handed out ice cream to guests and gave roughly 10 tours throughout the day.

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Happy to be back in the Salem Museum to finally start this internship in earnest. The past week I worked with the staff to get acquainted with the museum and its innerworkings. So far, I have learned about the curatorial and archival aspects of the museum, which is exactly what I wanted to do. I helped re-organize the civil war exhibit, set up artifacts for a school field trip, and done a lot of accessioning. I have enjoyed going through newly donated material and examining / filing them. I can understand how some might find that type of work soul-crushing, but I have no problem with it so far. Next week, we start work on a new exhibit about Salem through the ages, focusing on one person from each era. It will be more research-heavy than what I have been doing so far, so I am exited to learn about what goes into that.

First picture is of me holding an authentic musket in the archive. We were bringing stuff out to show the kids on a field trip the next day. Luckily, I was not working when the kids showed up. Second picture is of a “key” and “sounder” for a telegraph that was recently donated, along with a half filled-out accession form.

A Day at the Transportation Museum and the J-611

Trains, Planes, Automobiles you name it in the world of transportation past or current you will find it at the Virginia Transportation Museum downtown Roanoke Virginia. Home to the sole remaining of 14 built Class J model steam locomotives by the Norfolk & Western Railway here in Roanoke, Virginia. The J-611 is the crown jewel of the museum, this locomotive rolled out of Roanoke’s East End Shop in 1950. Its mission was to pull a 15 passenger train from Norfolk, Virginia to Cincinnati, Ohio. The locomotive recently underwent extensive repairs and upgrades at the North Carolina Museum of Transportation for the past two years.

When I arrived in early June excitement was all in the air as repairs to the J-611 neared completion. Adding to this excitement was the locomotive was going to steam under its own power from North Carolina to Pennsylvania to be located for the summer at the Strasburg Rail company. On May 22, 2021 with our museum director Christine Williams aboard one of the passenger cars the J-611 arrived safely in Strasburg under its own power where the locomotive for this summer will provide daily passenger excursions for the Pennsylvania Transportation Museum. I arrived just a few days shy to be included in what I call a lifetime experience, hopefully when the J-611 returns to Roanoke later this year it will run excursions from Roanoke to Lynchburg as it has done in the recent years.

During my time at the Vinton History Museum, I have worked on multiple tasks. I helped think arrange a new display using some of the items in the museum. It was a display to honor the past and present William Byrd High School aka WBHS (the local high school in the area) graduates. We used an old graduation gap and gown from the 1950s and put them on a mannequin with some graduation cords (the cords belonged to me because the museum did not have any). We added a secondary mannequin in on the other side of the graduate. Around the mannequins, we put some older pictures of past WBHS graduation classes and some old yearbooks on a desk. I have also reorganized some of the older newspaper archives. I separated and recategorized the WBHS sports section in the museums records by sorting through the sports snippets from other WBHS newspaper snippets from the 1950s. After sorting through the records, I combined all the WBHS sports newspapers snippets into a collective binder.

During the week of May 10th, I was able to work on many different tasks while at the National D-Day Memorial. I helped out with a lunchbox lecture behind the scenes that the education staff was holding, worked on some spreadsheet work in regards to donor information, and helped prepare for the Armed Forces Day 5K. Each year, the Memorial hosts and annual Armed Forces Day 5K, though this year was a bit different. With the global pandemic at hand, the 5K was virtual this year. The above image is the shirts I helped sort into different mailing bags, add a few extra goodies in, and mail off. Despite being a virtual 5K, many people participated across the country and the Memorial staff was still able to kick off the event via Zoom and Facebook Live.

After working for much of the semester with Alex, we were finally able to fully launch out World War II exhibit. It took a decent amount of research and organization but, it came out in a way that we think visitors will greatly enjoy. Alex and I spent much of Friday cleaning up the cases and the floor area around them. We spent time getting the information on the walls level so everything looked as professional as it could be. We also made arrows for the floor to help direct people through the exhibit efficiently.

Much of my time going up to our launch day was spent labeling items in the exhibits and also doing some last minute research for Alex. These labels help provide a clearer understanding of some of the items in the cases. Understandably, some of the items are old or never get looked at anymore, so it helps people understand what they are. As attached to this post, my final write ups went on the wall next to my case to finish up out exhibit.

This past week I was tasked with creating two scavenger hunts for the upcoming Memorial Day ceremony. Both scavenger hunts were centered around the 5 display cases in the Education Q-Hut on the site. The above image is a watch that was used in both scavenger hunts. The first one was solely a photo-based scavenger hunt where elementary-aged students are asked to match the picture with the artifact. The second version is meant for middle school-aged children who were given statements and needed to match the statement to the artifact (for example with the above watch: This would be great for a soldier to have on him so he can know what TIME it is.)

At this point in the culmination of all the research that Alex and I have done, it has finally come to putting the finishing touches on our exhibit. Alex let me take a whole cabinet (seen as attached) and put artifacts in it as a saw fit. I went for the souvenir theme that we had. I included items that were brought home from the war. I found things such as a Nazi dagger, Nazi helmet, and pamphlets that showed the way for soldiers around the town.

As Alex and I finished putting all the cases together, we began putting together our signs that we typed up. We have been going through and gluing the cardstock signs to foam core to mount them. I also have been finishing up the labels for the smaller items that visitors may not be able to identify. At the end of this week we should have everything put together and ready to open at the beginning of next week.