kagjohnson

Now that my summer internship at the Vinton History Museum has come to an end, it feels bittersweet. I originally hopped on the chance of doing the internship so I would have one less class to take this upcoming school year. But the opportunity that started out as a way to elude another class turned into something much more valuable to me, both personally and professionally. The workers and volunteers I had the chance to work with were amazing at sharing their love for history and the experience they had with working at the Vinton History Museum. I was surprised at how much I could learn in such a short amount of time. At my time at the Vinton History Museum, I learned how important effective communication is, how to work with a different generation other than my own, did research, changed displays, learned how to give tours (gave a lot of them too), set up an online auction and helped brainstorm new ideas to vamp up the museum. My largest challenge throughout my internship was trying to teach Judy ( who is in charge of my internship, works for the Vinton History Museum and is old enough to be my grandmother ) how to use Instagram ( vintonhistorymuseum ) and Twitter to try to target a different, slightly younger group of people and advertise the museum. Although my internship has ended, I will never forget the skills it taught me and the new friendships I had the chance to make.

These past few weeks at the Vinton History Museum have been very busy. The weeks have consisted of doing research on the Vinton War Memorial charter that was found, setting up the summer action and cleaning the basement to be worked on. The charter of the Vinton War Memorial (a very well known building and landmark in Vinton) was found in a spare room in the museum; we decided it would make a great addition to the military hallway. After finding it in the spare room, I decided to do some research about the building and its significance to the town before putting it on display. The charter was signed by the charter members who were mothers of those who served during the second world war. The charter members signed in order to meet the goals needed to build the Vinton War Memorial. My research indicated that construction on the building began in 1946 and was completed in 1948 and the property included a pool and baseball field that were open to the public. An article I found from 1998 (to celebrate 50 years of the building) interviewed Otto Goode, a committee member, that discussed the bonds that helped fund the War Memorial, the research of other monuments in Washington D.C, and Richmond before the War Memorial was built and how the town of Vinton wanted to do something for the veterans of the second world war before the city of Salem did. Today, the pool is closed and the baseball field is now gone, but the building still stands after many renovations and additions and now is used for events and weddings.

The summer auction is finally set up and will begin next week as a fundraiser for the Vinton History Museum. Ben, the other intern, took pictures of all 20 items, while I did some research and wrote the descriptions of them on the website. The items include Depression glass, a sweetgrass basket, crystal glasses, silver plated spoons with engravings, etc. All items were donated to the museum from those in the community. We also began cleaning out the basement of the museum because the town of Vinton will be waterproofing it soon. In the basement we found old newspapers from 1941 and 1945 from different city. One from Hawaii, Baltimore and Washington D.C. Unfortunately, the Hawaii newspaper was not in the greatest quality, but the Baltimore and Washington D.C papers were in excellent condition after being in the basement for who knows how long and exposed to the elements in the basement.

Since my last post on June 7th, I have been in the newspaper The Vinton Messenger, helped organize and research auction items, taken down the June wedding display, and put up a new display for the month of July. The newspaper interviewed myself and another intern, Ben, at the Ice cream social and printed it the following week. Although the paper version printed my last name incorrectly, the online version was correct. The article can be found at: https://vintonmessenger.com/vinton-history-museum-welcomes-two-summer-interns?fbclid=IwAR3xvPdD3QaB_p3S19A9Aa46qdh97CuiH-urlCsXr3lP7qi31Hld8Z81vIU and it included some personal information to introduce us to the community while it included some of the projects we have taken on at the museum. I have also helped organize items for an auction that the Vinton History Museum is planning to have soon. The items have been donated by the community for their yearly yard sale (one of the fundraisers the museum holds every year, except last year due to COVID-19), and if some of them seem to have more value the item gets held back. Some of the items that have been held back for the auction include some crystal glassware of vases, silver plated presidential spoons, imperial China, many collectable dolls, and various other items. I have research many of the items for the auction to find the items dollar values. Lastly, we had taken down the June bridal display that was in my last post and replaced it with a military uniform display in observance for Independence Day. The display shows three different uniforms ranging from World War II to more present wars in the United States. All three uniforms have never been on display before at the Vinton History Museum.

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.

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.