lmgreider

I have had a great time interning at the VMT this semester!  Reflecting back, I remember how hard it was to make it fit into my schedule, and there was a brief moment when I thought it might not work out.  But boy am I glad it did!  I finally had the chance to try out museum work, and I feel that I have solidified this field as one that I want to go into.  It was not what I expected, but what it did end up being was something that I enjoyed.  Yes, plugging things into the computer can get a little bit boring, but I realize that a big part of why I did that all the time is because I was the intern who did not have the wherewithal to handle some of my boss’s other duties.

During one of my last few days at the VMT, the older volunteers were helping to move some of the cars that have been offsite back into the auto gallery.  What this day ended up looking like for me was a fun day when I got to sit in really cool old cars and steer them as everyone else pushed.  It was a fun activity to end the semester with a bang, plus it gave me a chance to say my goodbyes to the older gentlemen that I had met and learned so much from.  It’s been a good semester, but now I think it is time to steer away on to new opportunities.  Next stop: Saint-Lô, Normandy, for an internship at a museum there!  I’ve gotten a taste of transportation history, and now it is time to study up on WWII and D-Day history…

Today we had a few visitors come into the museum and our mission was to show them the various wagons that their deceased grandfather had been keeping in the VMT on loan.  This sounds simple enough, but the problem is that we did not have adequate records of these wagons nor did we know precisely where in the museum they were located.  And mind you, it’s a rather large museum… with what feels like an even larger storage space in the back that is not open to visitors.

It took a little bit of walking back and forth and comparing different wagons to finally determine which ones were her’s… she only had her vague memories of riding around in the wagon as a young girl when she was on her grandpa’s farm to go off of.  And of course, we did not have the needed paperwork either.  So this experience just reiterated to me just how important it is to maintain complete paperwork for anyone in any job; if you don’t keep track of things, then it will come back to haunt you later on.

Granted, none of this was the curator’s fault; in fact it was mainly a result of the person in her job before her, and she was forced to clean up the mess that was left.  This is another lesson, too: even when we are no longer in a job, our legacy lives on with how well we carried out our work and whether we furthered the mission of the organization/business/what have you.  So we all need to be good stewards of whatever is in our possession, including a job!

I will say that although finding these artifacts that belonged to the woman who came in did involve some rigamarole, it was still fun listening to her stories and memories with the wagons in question.  It reminded me that all of the artifacts and objects in the museum have touched many people’s lives in meaningful ways.  So even if I see an old rusty wooden wagon, it is so much more than that to other people, and thus it is worthy of being in our museum.

The second half of my internship this semester has gotten a lot more interesting.  The redundant and meticulous process of cataloguing items is still a fairly regular job of mine, but my internship coordinator has been trying to give me new experiences so that I leave the Virginia Museum of Transportation with more than one skill.

 

A few weeks back I was cataloguing a collection from a deceased Roanoke resident names Paul Stonesifer.  The majority of this collection consisted of rail tickets from the Pullman Company, which I learned was a very luxurious form of travel as every traveller taking a Pullman car got an overnight sleeping suite.  Some of the particularly interesting parts of this collection are several World Series baseball tickets from the year 1952.  As I went through this collection piece by piece, I was able to figure out Paul Stonesifer’s story.  That is, he was a wealthy man who could afford to take a train trip from Roanoke to New York to watch the World Series.  It was really neat seeing how there are genuine stories behind these items I am cataloguing.  They are not all just shriveled up pieces of paper of rusty old junk.

 

The exciting bit of this is that my internship coordinator thought it might be fun to make this collection into a tiny exhibit.  Our first step with this was figuring out where the exhibit would be.  In a museum as jam-packed as the VMT, this is an important step.  We decided that we would remove a transportation hats exhibit near the entrance of the museum and replace it with pieces from this Stonesifer collection.  We will construct the narrative around the concept of “Oh the Places You’ll Go,” sort of playing on Dr. Seuss’ famous quote in order to introduce patrons to the concept of transportation that is obviously integral to the VMT.

My first few weeks here at the Virginia Museum of Transportation have largely consisted of training and getting my feet under me.  To understand the inner-workings of a museum, one must be at a museum regularly, so my being present has shown me what happens behind the scenes, especially in the areas where collections are maintained and organized, AKA the back room.

 

It is here in the back room that I’ve gotten to do the majority of my work so far, which has included cataloguing such random artifacts as empty oil cans, books about circus transport, and lease agreements for an AMOCO station in Roanoke.  It’s always interesting seeing what will come across my desk, because through the process of cataloguing these items I get to learn all about these items.  Sounds like a historian’s dream to me!