Internships Blog

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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.

The last few weeks I have spent working on an exhibit based on souvenirs that were brought back from World War II. I have done multiple days of research in local newspapers between 1945 and 1950. I have organized events that were going on in Salem and Roanoke into a timeline that I have submitted into Alex Burke, who is the assistant director of the museum, to look over. While he was checking my timeline out, I was combing through the museum software, past perfect, for photos that we can use for the exhibit. Also, I began to go through physical photo catalogues that were left over from some local history books.

After Alex was able to approve my work with the local timeline, I got to work finalizing the timeline and labeling what he thought were the most important facts I had found into a final timeline. While I was working on that, I was also typing up the original articles that the major information came from. We are shooting to finish this up and have it ready in a few weeks.

This past week at the National D-Day Memorial our biggest task was to help prepare and carry out a large book sale. The sale included hundreds of books that were donated to the Memorial by a long time donor and due to a need for more storage, the book sale was created. My part in helping prepare for the book sale was ensuring that each book was in its correct location (ex. D-Day, Axis Nations, Allied Nations, miscellaneous etc.) During the coming days of the book sale, I met many donors and board members, as well as interact with a handful of patrons who were seemingly just visiting to tour the Memorial but ended up purchasing a book or tow as well. All books were marked down and all funds went directly to the Memorial.

During these last two weeks, Alex Burke and I have collaborated on going through newspapers to give an idea on what was going on back home in Salem and Roanoke during World War II. At this point today, we have finished the research from the newspapers and are beginning to look how to frame this information in a concise but informative manner. Since there is a lot of information we gathered from these newspapers, the biggest challenge we face is keeping the write ups for the exhibit short. We also want to avoid cutting out important events too, so this has been a tough task for us so far.

With the write ups being planned and put together, I have been working on using the museum’s software to look in the archives for artifacts that I feel would make sense to be used in the exhibit. I have mainly focused on local items that tie Salem in with World War II. These consist of pamphlets of high school football games that have a mention of it, or just slice of life items that shows where people of the time’s heads were at. Next, the plan is to start accessioning these items, which I will be learning here shortly.