jrcopenhaver

At this point in the internship the focus was set on getting all the finishing touches laid out and completed for the fire exhibit. Most of the pictures and signs were already up so what was left was mostly cleaning and last minute touches. All of the display cases were wiped down, the floor was swept (though I wasn’t the one who did that, not trying to take un-due credit), and my boss jokingly threatened to make me wear a smokey bear costume for the entire opening day. While all of this was taking place, I also got what was probably the most fun assignment I received while I was working. I was told to create a scavenger hunt for museum. I was given free reign to use whatever I wanted for it, so I enjoyed myself. It only took me around an hour to make, but as I said it was a good time. There were a few gimme questions, but there were a couple that were particularly difficult. In one case we have a picture of a man named Abraham Hupp on every single floor of the museum and part of the hunt was to find all of them. Without too much of a history lesson, Hupp was a tinsmith, inventor, and he organized the Salem Flying Artillery, who fired the last shot of the civil war, though Hupp died before then. One of Hupp’s more notable creations was the first “fire truck” Salem ever had, even though it was a push cart with a hand operated pump. Anyway, the scavenger hunt had all sorts of questions on it and when I looked through the ones people filled out I was quite pleased. Not a single person completed completely correctly. The closes were a couple kids who missed on question about how many paintings by Grace Smyth there were on the first floor.

It was around this point in the internship that we really got a lot of progress achieved on the Feature Exhibit. The Forestry Department showed up in a major way, donating all sorts of things for the exhibit. We got so much Smokey the Bear memorabilia ranging from comic books, to board games, to action figures, even a life size Smokey sitting on a log. At this point I did the bulk of my sign cutting and fortunately for me, it was revolutionized by the T square. Such a simple tool made cutting signs far quicker and easier with only minor amounts of judgement from my boss. In addition to cutting signs, this is when I learned the most about how to turn an empty room into a full blown tour of the Salem Fire and Forestry departments. The way the exhibit ended up getting set was to separate the room in half at the entrance and guide people through two lanes each devoted to one of the two departments. We got to work focusing on hanging sings and laying out where everything needed to be before cleaning up and  putting on the finishing touches. This is where I learned another interesting thing about the signs in museums and how they need to be placed. When we were hanging up signs I put up a row on a wall to go with some pictures that I put up earlier. Unfortunately for me I had to rehang all of the signs due to one fatal error. I hung my signs too high up on the wall. The height at which a sign gets placed on a wall is just one of the small details that go into making a museum exhibit as good as it possibly can be so taking every single detail into account is a valuable skill in the museum.

As mentioned in the last post, I have more on Past Perfect, the archives, and research for the feature exhibit I worked on in the Salem Museum. Work began in earnest for me on the feature exhibit in which I learned a great deal about what goes into making an exhibit because you can’t just throw something in a case and call it good. The first step of the process for me was to properly learn how to use the archives in the museum. I got on a computer and used past perfect to look for anything and everything we had relating to the forestry department and the fire department. I eventually produced a few really interesting things such as a bunch of sculptures of woodland critters made by Grace Smyth. Grace Smyth was a member of the forestry department and an artist who set up a museum in her house in Salem designed to teach children about anything from Native American life to the forestry department. I also found out that her sculptures were donated by my grandparents who knew her personally. The next step in the process was making pictures and signs. I had no idea what went into just sign making at museums, but once you get it down its actually pretty quick and painless. The fire department gave us all sorts of old pictures and photo albums for the exhibit. I was in charge of taking the pictures and scanning them into the computer so we could have them printed in high resolution and the correct size. While scanning is pretty dull, what came next was a lot more entertaining. Once the pictures were printed and scanned, they were glued onto a poster board and cut out using exacto knives and a whole lot of patience. What I later found out is that there is a list of all the people who interned at the Salem museum that is ranked in order of worst to best that ranks us in our ability to cut pictures out of poster board. I can only hope I am ahead of the curve in this.

When I first got to the Salem Museum my first thoughts were that the museum has really changed a lot since the last time I visited. I had lived in Salem for a few years prior to starting college, but the director of the museum has since changed. When I arrived, my first assignment was to take some time and walk around and see what the museum was all about. In addition I had to take a legal pad and jot down my thoughts on the museum as a whole and the exhibits. The museum was packed with all sorts of things from an exhibit on Salem’s contributions in the Civil War, to a small exhibit on a moonshining still, to an exhibit that consisted of numerous children’s dolls that are absolutely terrifying. With all this done, I was tasked with researching the Bedford Boys, a group of young men from Bedford, Virginia fighting in D-day. Very soon after I was given my first lesson in using the archives at the museum and past perfect, the system for organizing the archives. I will have more on both of those later, but for now I used past perfect to find all sorts of WWII items. Eventually after finding all of these I made my own exhibit centered around WWII and the Bedford Boys. I really enjoyed getting to design and set up my own exhibit and it was in the first week no less. This exhibit did take a back seat in the internship as a whole though, because we were about to start work on the next feature exhibit for the Museum which would be centered around the forestry service and the firefighters. For scale, my exhibit filled a corner of the foyer, while this next exhibit would fill one of the largest rooms in the building to the brim.