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Starting at the Salem Museum

August 22, 2019 by jrcopenhaver

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.

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