So you might have noticed, if you follow the museum on Facebook, that we moved the Printing Press almost two weeks ago. This is a project that David has been planning since I came to the museum. We had a very good reason for lifting this enormous press, it was starting to make the floor cave in. So heavy! We slowly lifted it using some boards and the pallet jack that David purchased a month or two ago. In order to stop it from tipping forward and killing us, we ended up putting boards and a railroad jack from the collection on the edge of the jack to stabilize it. I couldn't believe it, but it worked. And we slowly pulled it across the museum floor to the back. We put it right in-between two posts, because the floor is much stronger there. Set it all down and left it.
And then Tuesday, after talking with my boyfriend about it - my boyfriend who is a print maker- I found out that we had to move it back an inch or two. The bed wouldn't open up because the edge was just under the lip of the press. (Now mind you we are missing a part or two to this.) So we got out the boards, got out the jack and started to pull the press back. Only one problem. We forgot to a. push in the bed, and b. hitch up the railroad jack so it wouldn't start tipping forward! The pole meant to press slid out from it's hole and the press started to tip.
Thank God my mother and I were at the front and were barely able to stop it from slamming into (and through) the floor, and potentially killing us all. With a bit of maneuvering and some very sore arms, we managed to put the middle pole back and set the press about 3 to 4 inches from its previous position. And there I hope it will stay until it falls through the floor. (This is seriously how I foresee this press going in the very far future.) If I can get the pieces to run the press, my boyfriend has connections that are willing to do a little event for us. The only problem is, I don't remember what box we put those in. But they are somewhere in the museum. Somewhere.
Now the awesome thing about the Press is it is a beautiful Washington Press, which I'm told is very good, made in the mid to late 1800s. The patent date on it is 1875, but of course it could have been made a little later. The press was used to publish the Cherokee Harmonizer and most likely the Coosa River News who bought out the Harmonizer in the late 1800s. Its a beautiful piece of equipment but is missing the holder for the type and the handle that presses the press down. Of course, part of that handle is somewhere in the museum but we moved it about two years ago and I neglected to note it down anywhere, a very bad curator mistake.
But enough about the press, let me talk about our exciting Oral History project. As the person who is completing all the paperwork, I can tell you it is not very exciting. But, I have an appointment tomorrow with Jim, the paperwork is all filled out, except what he needs to sign, and I am happily going to be interviewing him for an hour or an hour and a half. I put it out on Facebook that we're doing the project in the hopes that more people will come and I got Martha to agree to come in for an Interview.
Tomorrow we're having a hard-of-seeing group come into the museum to talk or hear about cotton picking. (Not entirely sure because when David told me about it he couldn't remember if I was supposed to talk to them or just provide items.) Hopefully that will be done with by 1:00 and I may have to talk about cotton picking a little. Anyway, a woman will be there who will be tending to her husband and David thinks she might be interested in doing an interview. Guess I'm going to have to get over my nerves and ask her about it.
Well that's what's been going on for the past two weeks. Till next time.
No longer any idea how many items the museum contains.
Monday, May 19, 2014
Monday, May 5, 2014
Super Long Hiatus Broken!!!!
After a very extended hiatus - two years! - I have returned to blog about the doings of History in North Alabama! Lets just say that Grad school leaves no time for anything else. I may drop off the face of the Earth again when I start my Thesis but outside of a little work for Public History I have a bit of a break to possibly post regularly! What?!
For those of you that aren't my grandmother, I am still working at the Cherokee County Historical Museum. Our one disastrous attempt to use interns means that we didn't get any last year or this year. I'm re-picking up this blog because I am now going to be an intern at the museum, instead of just a Volunteer Curator. All of the power and none of the cash. I'll actually be working on Oral histories and I hope to post lots about what's going on with that.
In the two years I haven't been writing a lot has changed. For example, we now have an air conditioner! No more 105 degrees inside the building! Our lovely Pheobe has been kicked off of the program she was on and is only able to come to the museum irregularly. We now have a new docent, Barbara, who is quite nice but very new so we are getting used to her. I actually have a volunteer now too, who is very capable and is helping me get the system together. Kinda. We still don't know everything we have within the museum but we're starting to make progress. And we were able to De-accession a good portion of our broken plows! Downstairs is really starting to look good, the Ambulance is no longer stored there, the truck has left, and our tractor has moved to his permanent spot. (Well yesterday a group was interested in refinishing it so it may leave for that.) Our records are slowly becoming digitized and we're starting to make some connections with the historical community in the state. We're even starting to get some choice donations.
I've learned a lot in the Almost 3 years that I've been at Cherokee County Historical Museum. So much that I decided our entire museum needed a makeover! So in the past few weeks we've been working on re-designing our exhibits. As inexpensively as possible! So, I'll be rushing to do all of that before I finally leave the museum. (Unless they get the money to hire me.) When I finally graduate, which is hopefully in a year! Yay!
Well that's it for this short update. I'll see you all later this week with tidbits about Player Pianos - oh yeah we totally bought one for my mother - and all of the crazy hijinks we get up to in the museum.
For those of you that aren't my grandmother, I am still working at the Cherokee County Historical Museum. Our one disastrous attempt to use interns means that we didn't get any last year or this year. I'm re-picking up this blog because I am now going to be an intern at the museum, instead of just a Volunteer Curator. All of the power and none of the cash. I'll actually be working on Oral histories and I hope to post lots about what's going on with that.
In the two years I haven't been writing a lot has changed. For example, we now have an air conditioner! No more 105 degrees inside the building! Our lovely Pheobe has been kicked off of the program she was on and is only able to come to the museum irregularly. We now have a new docent, Barbara, who is quite nice but very new so we are getting used to her. I actually have a volunteer now too, who is very capable and is helping me get the system together. Kinda. We still don't know everything we have within the museum but we're starting to make progress. And we were able to De-accession a good portion of our broken plows! Downstairs is really starting to look good, the Ambulance is no longer stored there, the truck has left, and our tractor has moved to his permanent spot. (Well yesterday a group was interested in refinishing it so it may leave for that.) Our records are slowly becoming digitized and we're starting to make some connections with the historical community in the state. We're even starting to get some choice donations.
I've learned a lot in the Almost 3 years that I've been at Cherokee County Historical Museum. So much that I decided our entire museum needed a makeover! So in the past few weeks we've been working on re-designing our exhibits. As inexpensively as possible! So, I'll be rushing to do all of that before I finally leave the museum. (Unless they get the money to hire me.) When I finally graduate, which is hopefully in a year! Yay!
Well that's it for this short update. I'll see you all later this week with tidbits about Player Pianos - oh yeah we totally bought one for my mother - and all of the crazy hijinks we get up to in the museum.
Monday, July 2, 2012
Victrolas and Cotton and Shelves, oh my!
I could not have picked three things less similar. Except of course that they all have something to do with the Cherokee County Historical Museum. So yesterday we said goodbye to Amanda. A rather sad good bye too. Still, she got quite a bit accomplished in her few months at the museum.
For example, thanks to Amanda, we now have a clothes making exhibit downstairs. The cotton exhibit (as I call it) is so nice that it really makes the downstairs look like a giant mess everywhere else. Which is okay, cause I'm working on unmessy-ing it.
Actually, currently we're working on measuring all the plows and eventually putting them into the system. (I should say I'm working on it and forcing anyone who will write for me to help.) Its been slow going because the plows are really heavy and difficult to move around, plus they're packed tighter than a can of sardines. (Yes I did just say that.) We've had a few people who've visited the museum, know a thing or two about plows, and have given us rough estimates of what they're worth. The last guy who gave us an estimate, and it was a fairly nice estimate, had only seen half of the plows. (The rest of them are hidden behind a wagon that I eventually will look to see what it might be worth.)
But onto other things. Though I'm writing the rest of this in July, I had some of it written and planned to post in June but time was not on my side, quite a few things happened in the second half of June. One of them being my birthday, which I actually had to spend at work in the library. (Truthfully I enjoyed it which just shows that I am a bit of a workaholic.) No but really good things happened in the museum. Like, we got the Victrola upstairs to work! I've been working on our library, mentioned in the last post I made, and found a bunch of 78 records (78 refers to the type of record.) upon two of the shelves. (I have to remove the others to upstairs, I just haven't gotten around to it yet.) I showed them to the director and he said. Wouldn't one of those record players upstairs work to play those? I had no idea what size of records the Victrola played so I was really excited. The director had to go somewhere that day so that meant I could hike myself upstairs to play with the Victrola.
And play I did. A side note first. We actually have two Victrolas upstairs. One is a standing Victrola, that has sadly been repainted, and the other is a table Victrola (meant for sitting on the table) not repainted. Double unfortunately though, the table one - which looks the best - does not work. Something is wrong with the mechanism that spins the record. Oh! Another side note, for those of you that don't know, a Victrola is a type of record player very similar to a gramophone. The only difference is that the Victrola's horn, where the sound comes out of, is actually underneath the spinner and hidden inside the casing. The standing one, I knew from experience, could play but it didn't play well and it was hard to hear. I decided I would try the standing Victrola. I set a record on it to see if it fit, wound up the spinning mechanism and played with the needle holder until I could hear a faint strain of music. (There's a little knob that you twist to tighten and loosen the needle and I fooled with that because I found it could make the noise just a little bit louder.)
Convinced I had got it to work, I ran downstairs to pull Pheobe, one of the two lovely women who manage the front, to come tell me if I'd done it right. Pheobe came up, I played the record, and she looked at me and said, "Does it have the needle in it?" I said, "Needle? Of course it does", it just doesn't play very loud. So I flipped the needle holder around to show her and she told me, "There's no needle there!" I was very disappointed for a few minutes because it didn't have a needle and now we would have to find one. Then Pheobe says, "What about the other record player?" Bless her heart if the other record player didn't have about 10 or 20 needles in the holder on the side. (Which before this point I had wondered why an empty holder kind of thing was in the Victrola without figuring out what it was for.) We plucked out a needle, put it into the standing Victrola and let that record spin. Boy was it loud! Much louder than it'd been when I was running it without a needle. They could hear it downstairs quite easily.
So now the Victrola is going to go downstairs so we can play the records we found. Most of the records are from children song books from school, which is pretty awesome. Actually, and this is a very happy story for me, one of the records contains a song I have been looking for forever. You see, when I was 8 or 9, I lived in New Mexico and was taking a class (I don't recollect if it was singing or just part of my regular class.) and entered into a contest to sing a song. I remember this quite well because we had to travel about 30 minutes to an hour to get to the high school I had to sing it at. I remember the school being a huge building, I had a cold (or actually I believe I was just coming down with the flu or recovering from it) and was very intimidated. The song I had to sing was There Stands A Little Man. I still know some of the words, but not many. Anyway, for years I'd been trying to figure out where that song was from because my teacher had assigned it and it was part of a fond memory. It turns out that its actually from Hansel and Gretel, I'm not sure from when or if it was a production or not. (I still have to do some research on that.) But I found it and was quite happy to hear them sing a verse or two from the song on the record. It was exciting! (And just so you all know, I didn't win that competition, in fact I'm pretty sure I screwed up rather badly. I don't remember the singing part very well.)
I think soon I will have to record some of the music we often hear at the museum and put into one of my posts for everyone's enjoyment.
So I have discussed some of the cotton, the Victrolas, and other stuff, but now its time to get onto the shelves. This past month we have been working on exhibits. Including mine. Due to some issues with our bank card, we were delayed about two weeks on making any progress on my exhibit. But just last Friday I was there with the director and he had finished building the first half of my exhibit shelves! Which is fantastic! So now I can start putting up some of the things that are going to go into my exhibit. (Its been coming slowly together, in fact the other week we put the two radios down there and a few weeks before that they moved the Print Shop Camera down.) I can't wait! I still have to design the shelves for the other side, it will probably be very similar, but I'm not sure yet. I do that tomorrow, actually. Anyway, this post as probably gone on long enough. So I'm going to quickly list what all we've done to make improvements.
We've cleared out another room downstairs for Jessica's railroad exhibit, we're getting air conditioners sometime around August! Which is great because Friday it was 92 degrees F, inside the and that was just the first floor. The second floor was probably closer to 110 and outside was 103. Talk about sweating the pounds away. It was so hot we spent most of the day sitting around. However, we did get the first side of the library shelves cleared away, so yay! Ellen, who I mentioned in my last post, is a really hard worker. I started her on designing our brochure and she was interested in working on our Sports Room, so that is what she's going to be spending her July doing. If she survives it.
Downstairs mostly in the system/ 15,043 artifacts and shrinking.
For example, thanks to Amanda, we now have a clothes making exhibit downstairs. The cotton exhibit (as I call it) is so nice that it really makes the downstairs look like a giant mess everywhere else. Which is okay, cause I'm working on unmessy-ing it.
Actually, currently we're working on measuring all the plows and eventually putting them into the system. (I should say I'm working on it and forcing anyone who will write for me to help.) Its been slow going because the plows are really heavy and difficult to move around, plus they're packed tighter than a can of sardines. (Yes I did just say that.) We've had a few people who've visited the museum, know a thing or two about plows, and have given us rough estimates of what they're worth. The last guy who gave us an estimate, and it was a fairly nice estimate, had only seen half of the plows. (The rest of them are hidden behind a wagon that I eventually will look to see what it might be worth.)
But onto other things. Though I'm writing the rest of this in July, I had some of it written and planned to post in June but time was not on my side, quite a few things happened in the second half of June. One of them being my birthday, which I actually had to spend at work in the library. (Truthfully I enjoyed it which just shows that I am a bit of a workaholic.) No but really good things happened in the museum. Like, we got the Victrola upstairs to work! I've been working on our library, mentioned in the last post I made, and found a bunch of 78 records (78 refers to the type of record.) upon two of the shelves. (I have to remove the others to upstairs, I just haven't gotten around to it yet.) I showed them to the director and he said. Wouldn't one of those record players upstairs work to play those? I had no idea what size of records the Victrola played so I was really excited. The director had to go somewhere that day so that meant I could hike myself upstairs to play with the Victrola.
And play I did. A side note first. We actually have two Victrolas upstairs. One is a standing Victrola, that has sadly been repainted, and the other is a table Victrola (meant for sitting on the table) not repainted. Double unfortunately though, the table one - which looks the best - does not work. Something is wrong with the mechanism that spins the record. Oh! Another side note, for those of you that don't know, a Victrola is a type of record player very similar to a gramophone. The only difference is that the Victrola's horn, where the sound comes out of, is actually underneath the spinner and hidden inside the casing. The standing one, I knew from experience, could play but it didn't play well and it was hard to hear. I decided I would try the standing Victrola. I set a record on it to see if it fit, wound up the spinning mechanism and played with the needle holder until I could hear a faint strain of music. (There's a little knob that you twist to tighten and loosen the needle and I fooled with that because I found it could make the noise just a little bit louder.)
Convinced I had got it to work, I ran downstairs to pull Pheobe, one of the two lovely women who manage the front, to come tell me if I'd done it right. Pheobe came up, I played the record, and she looked at me and said, "Does it have the needle in it?" I said, "Needle? Of course it does", it just doesn't play very loud. So I flipped the needle holder around to show her and she told me, "There's no needle there!" I was very disappointed for a few minutes because it didn't have a needle and now we would have to find one. Then Pheobe says, "What about the other record player?" Bless her heart if the other record player didn't have about 10 or 20 needles in the holder on the side. (Which before this point I had wondered why an empty holder kind of thing was in the Victrola without figuring out what it was for.) We plucked out a needle, put it into the standing Victrola and let that record spin. Boy was it loud! Much louder than it'd been when I was running it without a needle. They could hear it downstairs quite easily.
So now the Victrola is going to go downstairs so we can play the records we found. Most of the records are from children song books from school, which is pretty awesome. Actually, and this is a very happy story for me, one of the records contains a song I have been looking for forever. You see, when I was 8 or 9, I lived in New Mexico and was taking a class (I don't recollect if it was singing or just part of my regular class.) and entered into a contest to sing a song. I remember this quite well because we had to travel about 30 minutes to an hour to get to the high school I had to sing it at. I remember the school being a huge building, I had a cold (or actually I believe I was just coming down with the flu or recovering from it) and was very intimidated. The song I had to sing was There Stands A Little Man. I still know some of the words, but not many. Anyway, for years I'd been trying to figure out where that song was from because my teacher had assigned it and it was part of a fond memory. It turns out that its actually from Hansel and Gretel, I'm not sure from when or if it was a production or not. (I still have to do some research on that.) But I found it and was quite happy to hear them sing a verse or two from the song on the record. It was exciting! (And just so you all know, I didn't win that competition, in fact I'm pretty sure I screwed up rather badly. I don't remember the singing part very well.)
I think soon I will have to record some of the music we often hear at the museum and put into one of my posts for everyone's enjoyment.
So I have discussed some of the cotton, the Victrolas, and other stuff, but now its time to get onto the shelves. This past month we have been working on exhibits. Including mine. Due to some issues with our bank card, we were delayed about two weeks on making any progress on my exhibit. But just last Friday I was there with the director and he had finished building the first half of my exhibit shelves! Which is fantastic! So now I can start putting up some of the things that are going to go into my exhibit. (Its been coming slowly together, in fact the other week we put the two radios down there and a few weeks before that they moved the Print Shop Camera down.) I can't wait! I still have to design the shelves for the other side, it will probably be very similar, but I'm not sure yet. I do that tomorrow, actually. Anyway, this post as probably gone on long enough. So I'm going to quickly list what all we've done to make improvements.
We've cleared out another room downstairs for Jessica's railroad exhibit, we're getting air conditioners sometime around August! Which is great because Friday it was 92 degrees F, inside the and that was just the first floor. The second floor was probably closer to 110 and outside was 103. Talk about sweating the pounds away. It was so hot we spent most of the day sitting around. However, we did get the first side of the library shelves cleared away, so yay! Ellen, who I mentioned in my last post, is a really hard worker. I started her on designing our brochure and she was interested in working on our Sports Room, so that is what she's going to be spending her July doing. If she survives it.
Downstairs mostly in the system/ 15,043 artifacts and shrinking.
Monday, May 21, 2012
Up to my ears in Interns!
Egads! Another post in May? Its a miracle!
Actually the real miracle is that I now have four interns under me at the museum. Can you believe it!!! 4 interns and they're all from Berry college! I'm practically jumping with joy! I don't know what I'm going to have them all do.
Amanda and Jessica have been working beautifully and we now have almost all of the artifact boxes on the 2nd floor completed. (I've only just started on the archive boxes, the library, and I'm still trying to clean the same artifacts I was cleaning two or three weeks ago. More on all that later.) They both work really fast together. Hunter, I actually interviewed for his Internship and just found out today that he'll be joining us this week! Though he won't be there on a day I am. Ellen started last Friday but because of work at the Library I couldn't make it down to Cherokee to meet her. I meet her tomorrow though, which is pretty exciting.
Things are really starting to hop at the museum. I think tomorrow both Amanda and Jessica will be ready to start on the jumble that's upstairs. We're going to clear away a corner for shelving, put artifacts away into boxes, and generally sort the whole mess so that it can be walked through. Of course, Ellen and Hunter will be working on the same task for right now. Especially because both Amanda and Jessica are currently working on exhibits.
Amanda expressed an interest in making a weaving/ cloth making/ washing/ using exhibit. I'm not totally sure what its shaped up to be yet but I'll find out tomorrow when I get her list. I'm pushing her a little fast with this exhibit because she should be leaving us at the end of June. (If I remember correctly. I really need to write all this down.)
Jessica wrote up a lovely list for me of several ideas she had for the museum, including a railroad exhibit. So we're going to let her get a start on that. Tomorrow I'll go downstairs with her and we'll discuss where she wants to put it. Then she'll be making me a list of the items she wants to put into it and making a design plan.
In the meantime, I have to work on my exhibit, for which I have yet to create a design plan. I'm going to try measuring out the exhibit cases I'll need. On top of that, we're preparing for the air-conditioning which might take months to get put it. That means I have to go through the books in our "library" which is currently the wall hiding the staff kitchen and workspace. All of the books I'm going through are ones that were donated to the library. I've been looking through them to evaluate whether they're useful or from prominent people or places in the community. For example we found a book from a town that doesn't exist anymore and told us about the history of clothing up to the 1920s. So it was a double keeper. Some of the books that were donated have been damaged in the past (water damage, pest damage, and so on.) So unfortunately we have to put those in a de-accession pile. And of course, a few aren't about Cherokee, the museum, nearby, or aren't historic resources. For example, the many college text books we have from the sixties. I had three copies of one on home-ec cooking. So those we're going to put in the de-accession pile as well.
I've also started working on the archives upstairs. This last week I found a real treasure. There's a picture of the courthouse that was burned down with the Coosa River News building in the 1880s. We have a copy of a picture from a tintype, but its not really very clear. I found the aniversary newspaper from the Coosa River News celebrating 50 years of reporting - also known as the year of 1928. The paper is not in the best shape but I managed to open it, relatively safely. There right in the middle of the section I was holding was the clearest picture of that tintype that we had ever seen. Get this. In the picture there are two or three people standing around the Coosa River News building. In ours you couldn't even tell there was a single person. And we now know that there was some kind of pavilion in front of the courthouse which could have been just about anything. Though I personally think its a telephone station type thing. The director was really happy with me. Especially because in other sections of that paper we found different pictures which he had never seen before. Score me!
So we've started cleaning some artifacts that are downstairs because they're pretty rusty. (We're only working on the metal ones currently.) I got it started but I haven't been able to complete the first batch. Basically we rub off the rust, apply a baking soda and water paste, and then scrub that off. It works really well. We even got one of the items so clean you can see the maker's mark clearly now. Though its been eaten away a bit by the rust so its only possible to read that the company was placed in Rockford, IL. I'm hoping to get back onto that project but I've been stopped by working on my exhibit. Which tomorrow my lovely F block should be all cleared away. Yay!
Its a little hard switching from library mind to museum mind. I wish I could make it out there more than twice a week (at most.) However, all my interns are incredibly smart and hopefully resourceful so we shouldn't have to much of a problem getting this place into shape. Here's to having all of the artifacts in the system by the middle of August! With four other people helping, I don't see how we can't.
Second floor shaping up!/ 15,043 and starting to shrink.
Actually the real miracle is that I now have four interns under me at the museum. Can you believe it!!! 4 interns and they're all from Berry college! I'm practically jumping with joy! I don't know what I'm going to have them all do.
Amanda and Jessica have been working beautifully and we now have almost all of the artifact boxes on the 2nd floor completed. (I've only just started on the archive boxes, the library, and I'm still trying to clean the same artifacts I was cleaning two or three weeks ago. More on all that later.) They both work really fast together. Hunter, I actually interviewed for his Internship and just found out today that he'll be joining us this week! Though he won't be there on a day I am. Ellen started last Friday but because of work at the Library I couldn't make it down to Cherokee to meet her. I meet her tomorrow though, which is pretty exciting.
Things are really starting to hop at the museum. I think tomorrow both Amanda and Jessica will be ready to start on the jumble that's upstairs. We're going to clear away a corner for shelving, put artifacts away into boxes, and generally sort the whole mess so that it can be walked through. Of course, Ellen and Hunter will be working on the same task for right now. Especially because both Amanda and Jessica are currently working on exhibits.
Amanda expressed an interest in making a weaving/ cloth making/ washing/ using exhibit. I'm not totally sure what its shaped up to be yet but I'll find out tomorrow when I get her list. I'm pushing her a little fast with this exhibit because she should be leaving us at the end of June. (If I remember correctly. I really need to write all this down.)
Jessica wrote up a lovely list for me of several ideas she had for the museum, including a railroad exhibit. So we're going to let her get a start on that. Tomorrow I'll go downstairs with her and we'll discuss where she wants to put it. Then she'll be making me a list of the items she wants to put into it and making a design plan.
In the meantime, I have to work on my exhibit, for which I have yet to create a design plan. I'm going to try measuring out the exhibit cases I'll need. On top of that, we're preparing for the air-conditioning which might take months to get put it. That means I have to go through the books in our "library" which is currently the wall hiding the staff kitchen and workspace. All of the books I'm going through are ones that were donated to the library. I've been looking through them to evaluate whether they're useful or from prominent people or places in the community. For example we found a book from a town that doesn't exist anymore and told us about the history of clothing up to the 1920s. So it was a double keeper. Some of the books that were donated have been damaged in the past (water damage, pest damage, and so on.) So unfortunately we have to put those in a de-accession pile. And of course, a few aren't about Cherokee, the museum, nearby, or aren't historic resources. For example, the many college text books we have from the sixties. I had three copies of one on home-ec cooking. So those we're going to put in the de-accession pile as well.
I've also started working on the archives upstairs. This last week I found a real treasure. There's a picture of the courthouse that was burned down with the Coosa River News building in the 1880s. We have a copy of a picture from a tintype, but its not really very clear. I found the aniversary newspaper from the Coosa River News celebrating 50 years of reporting - also known as the year of 1928. The paper is not in the best shape but I managed to open it, relatively safely. There right in the middle of the section I was holding was the clearest picture of that tintype that we had ever seen. Get this. In the picture there are two or three people standing around the Coosa River News building. In ours you couldn't even tell there was a single person. And we now know that there was some kind of pavilion in front of the courthouse which could have been just about anything. Though I personally think its a telephone station type thing. The director was really happy with me. Especially because in other sections of that paper we found different pictures which he had never seen before. Score me!
So we've started cleaning some artifacts that are downstairs because they're pretty rusty. (We're only working on the metal ones currently.) I got it started but I haven't been able to complete the first batch. Basically we rub off the rust, apply a baking soda and water paste, and then scrub that off. It works really well. We even got one of the items so clean you can see the maker's mark clearly now. Though its been eaten away a bit by the rust so its only possible to read that the company was placed in Rockford, IL. I'm hoping to get back onto that project but I've been stopped by working on my exhibit. Which tomorrow my lovely F block should be all cleared away. Yay!
Its a little hard switching from library mind to museum mind. I wish I could make it out there more than twice a week (at most.) However, all my interns are incredibly smart and hopefully resourceful so we shouldn't have to much of a problem getting this place into shape. Here's to having all of the artifacts in the system by the middle of August! With four other people helping, I don't see how we can't.
Second floor shaping up!/ 15,043 and starting to shrink.
Wednesday, May 2, 2012
Where did April go?
What?! I completely missed posting anything in April! Can you tell I've been busy? Well I have some exciting news for everyone reading this. I've been promoted!
If you can call it that. Its still an unpaid position, but I am now the official curator for the museum! Yay! I think. Its actually a little scary because, I don't have very much training. Everything I'm learning is from reading things, Tilden - the godsend - and grasping at things I've picked up over the various volunteer jobs I've done.
All in all though the museum is looking really good. I mentioned last time that we got permission to do Leesburg's exhibit, and a lovely $500 to supply us with necessary furnishings. Well, the director already had the space and now we're just waiting on Leesburg to give us the artifacts. It actually looks really good, we did sliding glass doors on this exhibit because the space next to it will be for the West Point stuff. (Which the loaner wants to remove occasionally so he can tour it around.)
Tomorrow I should have my first intern appearing, at the moment we have three. Jessica, Ellen, and Amanda. Amanda should show up tomorrow, and since I can't, she'll be familiarizing herself with Past Perfect. So that's some of whats been happening in the museum. Now I'm going to catch up on what I've been doing!
Cleaning, designing exhibits, working on getting computers up, and trying to figure out the basement. Oh which reminds me, I have to redo the basement map because we have one more partition space that I thought we would.
Now when I say cleaning, I don't mean just any old cleaning. I've been removing rust from some of our metal objects around the museum. This means scrubbing the artifact, putting a baking soda/water paste on them and letting it dry, and then scrubbing it again. Actually its turning out really well. I've started on the Blacksmith shop because its a prominent exhibit, and I wanna make some of those tools shine if possible. Unfortunately I just found out that on some of the wood artifacts, like the plow pieces, there is mold growing, which is actually pretty dangerous for our visitors, and us. (Its never good to breath in mold.) So I'm going to have to look into a sealant to seal off moisture from our wood artifacts.
If you wanna know why there is moisture, well, its a basement and they can get cold and damp. It happens. Anyway, the metal artifacts are starting to look pretty good, the four or five I've done, on a couple of them, I've actually unearthed maker's marks! Yay! And with, more cleaning, I think I can get a few of them to shine. So that will just make the blacksmith's shop an even more fantastic exhibit. The important thing is to remove the rust so that the artifacts stay clean and look like they actually would in the time period they were made.
So we recently received two computers from a local bank. We got one of them running, and then had to figure out how to hook it up to the printer. But the other one is just giving us all sorts of problems. At first it wouldn't read the Operating System Disk because it didn't have a DVD reader. Now it simply won't load it, it gets to a certain point and then sticks and won't budge any further. We're a bit worried its broken and may be unusable.
The other two things I'm doing are pretty simple. The basement, I mentioned, is all messed up from the partitions, so my lists don't actually have the objects in the right places. (Not that it matters since we'll all be moving them around eventually anyway but...) As for my exhibit, the director is supposed to get some people to move stuff out of the F block and then I can start figuring out exactly how I'm going to set up the exhibit. I have to talk with him about lighting still, because the lighting in the basement isn't the best, but we'll see how it goes!
First floor almost completely done/15,053 and growing.
If you can call it that. Its still an unpaid position, but I am now the official curator for the museum! Yay! I think. Its actually a little scary because, I don't have very much training. Everything I'm learning is from reading things, Tilden - the godsend - and grasping at things I've picked up over the various volunteer jobs I've done.
All in all though the museum is looking really good. I mentioned last time that we got permission to do Leesburg's exhibit, and a lovely $500 to supply us with necessary furnishings. Well, the director already had the space and now we're just waiting on Leesburg to give us the artifacts. It actually looks really good, we did sliding glass doors on this exhibit because the space next to it will be for the West Point stuff. (Which the loaner wants to remove occasionally so he can tour it around.)
Tomorrow I should have my first intern appearing, at the moment we have three. Jessica, Ellen, and Amanda. Amanda should show up tomorrow, and since I can't, she'll be familiarizing herself with Past Perfect. So that's some of whats been happening in the museum. Now I'm going to catch up on what I've been doing!
Cleaning, designing exhibits, working on getting computers up, and trying to figure out the basement. Oh which reminds me, I have to redo the basement map because we have one more partition space that I thought we would.
Now when I say cleaning, I don't mean just any old cleaning. I've been removing rust from some of our metal objects around the museum. This means scrubbing the artifact, putting a baking soda/water paste on them and letting it dry, and then scrubbing it again. Actually its turning out really well. I've started on the Blacksmith shop because its a prominent exhibit, and I wanna make some of those tools shine if possible. Unfortunately I just found out that on some of the wood artifacts, like the plow pieces, there is mold growing, which is actually pretty dangerous for our visitors, and us. (Its never good to breath in mold.) So I'm going to have to look into a sealant to seal off moisture from our wood artifacts.
If you wanna know why there is moisture, well, its a basement and they can get cold and damp. It happens. Anyway, the metal artifacts are starting to look pretty good, the four or five I've done, on a couple of them, I've actually unearthed maker's marks! Yay! And with, more cleaning, I think I can get a few of them to shine. So that will just make the blacksmith's shop an even more fantastic exhibit. The important thing is to remove the rust so that the artifacts stay clean and look like they actually would in the time period they were made.
So we recently received two computers from a local bank. We got one of them running, and then had to figure out how to hook it up to the printer. But the other one is just giving us all sorts of problems. At first it wouldn't read the Operating System Disk because it didn't have a DVD reader. Now it simply won't load it, it gets to a certain point and then sticks and won't budge any further. We're a bit worried its broken and may be unusable.
The other two things I'm doing are pretty simple. The basement, I mentioned, is all messed up from the partitions, so my lists don't actually have the objects in the right places. (Not that it matters since we'll all be moving them around eventually anyway but...) As for my exhibit, the director is supposed to get some people to move stuff out of the F block and then I can start figuring out exactly how I'm going to set up the exhibit. I have to talk with him about lighting still, because the lighting in the basement isn't the best, but we'll see how it goes!
First floor almost completely done/15,053 and growing.
Friday, March 30, 2012
Really Really Late Post
Hi everybody!
So here is a really really late post. There are two reasons I haven't really been writing. Firstly, now that I have a job, I've been far too busy. Secondly, not much happened at the museum until last week. So here are the things I'll talk about today. Autographed Player Piano Roll, Partition, West Point, TAG Picture, Leesburg, Ashley 5, Reel to Reel Player, and Interns.
Now, when I went into the museum Tuesday the 20th I didn't think that I would spend 30 minutes trying to unroll a player piano roll. In fact when I went in, I didn't even know we'd recieved a batch of player piano rolls. Which, side note, the best one out of the bunch was Down at the Old Water Mill which is a fantastic foxtrot with a lovely catchy beat and tune to it.
Actually I have to first backtrack to Ashley 5, as the director calls her. Ashley 5 was a young woman who was waiting for a job to open up with the State and so they placed her at the museum for a month. The director, who knew I needed help, handed her over to me. I made up a sheet so that she could inventory and measure everything in the bottom shelves of the East Wall and in the Basement. She was a very quick worker, by the end of the month she had both done which would have taken me about 4 months to finish measuring. Thanks to her, I now have all the bottom east wall shelves in the system.
Okay so back to what led up to the player piano roll. While putting in some of the items from her list into the system, I discovered that a whole group from the same donator were not in the system at all. So instead of wasting 30 minuts writing the list down, I made a form so that each new item could be put in and I'd know the date of accession. The director asked me what I was doing and when I showed him the sheet he recieved a great idea. He could use the sheets to mark down all of the new stuff that enter the museum when I'm not there. Then I'd know what new stuff I'd have to add when I'm done inventorying everything else. I really wish we'd thought this up before.
Then he told me, oh yeah. We could use this for those player piano rolls that were donated yesterday and the baby clothes. We weren't sure how good the piano rolls were so he had me go through them. Unfortunately a few of them were moldy, so we had to get rid of those. But a good amount of them were good and still playable. I showed the director the ones I thought we should save and he agreed. I was holding the Under the Double Eagle roll when the director looked into the bottom of the box. It said, Autographed Player Piano Roll. We were like really? I looked to see who wrote the music and was excited. The roll was potentially autographed by Josef Wagner! Wagner! I was so excited, I unrolled the whole thing to see if the autograph was there. Sure enough at the very end of the roll there was his signature. Unfortunately, the rolls is only worth about 5 dollars according to the internet. Since I didn't actually find a Wagner roll, I'm going to try and persuade the director to get it appraised.
The next day I went into the museum was Friday of that week. The director was really excited because a celebration for a student from the area, who was admitted into West Point went really well and ended in a donation of all of the West Point stuff to the museum. It's fantastic because it really added to the exhibit that the director already wanted to do with West Point. (Cherokee county has a long history of West Point graduates.)
That same day, while I was putting stuff into the system, the Mayor of Leesburg came in. The director, after talking with him, told me that Leesburg was one of two towns who he had yet to get to agree to putting an exhibit about the town in the museum. Leesburg voted last week and they're going to give us $500 to put together an exhibit.
Which brings me to my interns, because they'll be helping with it. We have at least two interns from Barry College that will be coming into Cherokee this summer and will be studying under me. Can you believe it? Not only that but there might even be a third student. Anyway, they'll be learning about Past Perfect, how to design and put together exhibits, and various other things about working in a museum. It'll be a lot of fun. One of the girls is really excited and already told the director that she wants to start in May. So in a little over a month, I'll have an intern helping me out. This is doubly great because it frees up some space for me to think about my own exhibit.
Most everything else has a small mention so let me wrap this up. This Tuesday, the director took me down to the basement and showed me what the builders had put up last week. We now have our basement partitioned off into sections so that we can easily build a different exhibit in each, saving one for storage. Also, for my exhibit, I found out that one of our Reel to Reel players had a reel in it. I'm going to ask my dad to help me try to fix it, because well, I want to play the reel. We changed the batteries but nothing happened, if only it'd been that simple. Also on Tuesday, a man kindly brought in a picture of the TAG railroad from around lookout mountain. Though the picture is modern, looked up the artist, its still a great picture for our collection. I really wanna do a TAG exhibit someday.
180/15,053 supposedly
So here is a really really late post. There are two reasons I haven't really been writing. Firstly, now that I have a job, I've been far too busy. Secondly, not much happened at the museum until last week. So here are the things I'll talk about today. Autographed Player Piano Roll, Partition, West Point, TAG Picture, Leesburg, Ashley 5, Reel to Reel Player, and Interns.
Now, when I went into the museum Tuesday the 20th I didn't think that I would spend 30 minutes trying to unroll a player piano roll. In fact when I went in, I didn't even know we'd recieved a batch of player piano rolls. Which, side note, the best one out of the bunch was Down at the Old Water Mill which is a fantastic foxtrot with a lovely catchy beat and tune to it.
Actually I have to first backtrack to Ashley 5, as the director calls her. Ashley 5 was a young woman who was waiting for a job to open up with the State and so they placed her at the museum for a month. The director, who knew I needed help, handed her over to me. I made up a sheet so that she could inventory and measure everything in the bottom shelves of the East Wall and in the Basement. She was a very quick worker, by the end of the month she had both done which would have taken me about 4 months to finish measuring. Thanks to her, I now have all the bottom east wall shelves in the system.
Okay so back to what led up to the player piano roll. While putting in some of the items from her list into the system, I discovered that a whole group from the same donator were not in the system at all. So instead of wasting 30 minuts writing the list down, I made a form so that each new item could be put in and I'd know the date of accession. The director asked me what I was doing and when I showed him the sheet he recieved a great idea. He could use the sheets to mark down all of the new stuff that enter the museum when I'm not there. Then I'd know what new stuff I'd have to add when I'm done inventorying everything else. I really wish we'd thought this up before.
Then he told me, oh yeah. We could use this for those player piano rolls that were donated yesterday and the baby clothes. We weren't sure how good the piano rolls were so he had me go through them. Unfortunately a few of them were moldy, so we had to get rid of those. But a good amount of them were good and still playable. I showed the director the ones I thought we should save and he agreed. I was holding the Under the Double Eagle roll when the director looked into the bottom of the box. It said, Autographed Player Piano Roll. We were like really? I looked to see who wrote the music and was excited. The roll was potentially autographed by Josef Wagner! Wagner! I was so excited, I unrolled the whole thing to see if the autograph was there. Sure enough at the very end of the roll there was his signature. Unfortunately, the rolls is only worth about 5 dollars according to the internet. Since I didn't actually find a Wagner roll, I'm going to try and persuade the director to get it appraised.
The next day I went into the museum was Friday of that week. The director was really excited because a celebration for a student from the area, who was admitted into West Point went really well and ended in a donation of all of the West Point stuff to the museum. It's fantastic because it really added to the exhibit that the director already wanted to do with West Point. (Cherokee county has a long history of West Point graduates.)
That same day, while I was putting stuff into the system, the Mayor of Leesburg came in. The director, after talking with him, told me that Leesburg was one of two towns who he had yet to get to agree to putting an exhibit about the town in the museum. Leesburg voted last week and they're going to give us $500 to put together an exhibit.
Which brings me to my interns, because they'll be helping with it. We have at least two interns from Barry College that will be coming into Cherokee this summer and will be studying under me. Can you believe it? Not only that but there might even be a third student. Anyway, they'll be learning about Past Perfect, how to design and put together exhibits, and various other things about working in a museum. It'll be a lot of fun. One of the girls is really excited and already told the director that she wants to start in May. So in a little over a month, I'll have an intern helping me out. This is doubly great because it frees up some space for me to think about my own exhibit.
Most everything else has a small mention so let me wrap this up. This Tuesday, the director took me down to the basement and showed me what the builders had put up last week. We now have our basement partitioned off into sections so that we can easily build a different exhibit in each, saving one for storage. Also, for my exhibit, I found out that one of our Reel to Reel players had a reel in it. I'm going to ask my dad to help me try to fix it, because well, I want to play the reel. We changed the batteries but nothing happened, if only it'd been that simple. Also on Tuesday, a man kindly brought in a picture of the TAG railroad from around lookout mountain. Though the picture is modern, looked up the artist, its still a great picture for our collection. I really wanna do a TAG exhibit someday.
180/15,053 supposedly
Monday, February 20, 2012
Exhibition Monday: Cameras
Hello Everybody!
So, I would have posted Thursday but I was out almost all day and too exhausted by the time I got home. Its pretty cool though because not much happened on Tuesday. Friday was exciting however and I'll be telling you a little about it today and more about it on Thursday.
Today I am going to talk about cameras, and a little about phones. I mentioned in my last post that I had been making a list of what's in what upstairs. I partially did that so we could get through the artifacts quicker but I also did it to see what's up there that I can use in my exhibit. Now the main things I was looking for were, old games, cameras, telephones, and kitchen ware.
I started two weeks ago but, because of the cold and the fact that its freezing up there, delayed finishing it until Friday. Two week ago I got through the first set of shelves and was quite happy to find, besides the original box of cameras, another box of cameras. Even better, it had at 3 or 4 different flashes that belonged to a Polaroid Land Camera. (I should say one of them but I'll get to that in a bit.) It also had instructions for the Argus 75 which was fantastic but I can use it to explain loading and unloading film in cameras that use 620 film. Because, despite what the director thought, this wasn't a 35mm film camera.
Along with the cameras, I found two boxes of phones. The phones are good because I have two sitting downstairs that are waiting to go in the exhibit. The first box, which I expected, didn't have any spectacular phones. The second box, on the other hand, had one of those old stand-a-lone phones that you picked up the ear piece to and simply told the operator who you wanted to call - no dialing. Its not in the best of shape, but the box was full of dust, so hopefully with a little cleaning it'll look great in the exhibit. If that doesn't work, I suppose I'll have to figure out how to restore it a little.
After that first day, I was pretty sure I had found all of the cameras. So on Friday, eager to find kitchenware and games, I started on the next section. I was on the second to last set of shelves in the second section when lo and behold there was another box of cameras! After a brief moment of amazement, I pulled the cameras out of the box and looked to see if any pictures were tucked away with them. There were two other Land cameras in this box and I pulled them both out. The one in the first box, was open but I couldn't figure out how to get it shut. Both of these Land cameras were shut. So what did I do?
Of course, I opened one. I was happy to see that it slid open fairly easily and that it was in good condition. I looked over the rest of the cameras and then I put them back in the box, except for the open Land. I tried to close it. I looked all over the bottom of it to see if I could get it to fold back into itself. No luck. The lesson I learned, don't go opening things if you don't know how to close them. I had to rearrange the whole box so I could fit the camera in it.
I also found in that section, a box with two newer phones in it, including an early cordless. (Which I found hilarious and interesting because I had never seen a cordless that you tucked the phone into a kind of side box to hold it.) Then I moved onto the next section.
On the second shelf, and this time I was very surprised, I found another box of cameras! I really thought that I'd done with them after three boxes. But no. This box had the greatest treasure of all, though. Well two of them at least. So let me go into the not so interesting one. This box had a film developers kit. Including, one film canister, two trays, a ton of photo paper, two deeper trays, and instructions of some sort. (I didn't get the best look at them.) With all of this stuff was, guess?
Another Land camera. I guess they were popular in Cherokee. It also held a Argus Cintra, which was the camera the director was thinking of. I was playing with it, like normal, and I hit the button to take a picture, and it worked beautifully. So beautifully that I decided to try it again and I hit the lever to move the film forward. It worked so well that, instead of hitting the button again I debated an idea in my head. I just bet this camera has film in it, I thought to myself. So I took the tape off of the sides, popped open the back and closed it as fast as I could! Sure enough, there was a roll of film that hadn't been removed. I left the camera where it was, hoping I hadn't exposed the film badly, since the light was on. I finished my list on the third section, grabbed the camera and practically ran down the stairs.
I talked to the director and showed him the camera and told him about the film. Since we knew it had to be taken out in the dark he said I could take the camera home. However, I am not very good at waiting around and not fiddling with stuff. (As evinced by the now open Land camera.) So I popped upstairs, left the light off, made sure I was rolling the film the correct way, and pulled the film out of the camera. I handed it to the director and he asked if I thought we should have a lottery to guess what's on the pictures.
Thinking about that, we looked in the system to see who had donated the camera. We all thought it would be an individual but we were surprised to see that it was actually the Service Extension who had donated it. (I, being mainly from a city, had to ask what that was, so I'll tell you here.) Pretty much the Service Extension kept an eye on the farmland around the area and assisted farmers and so on and so forth. The director, who is going to get the pictures developed - if I didn't mess it up with that brief second of light, thinks that we're going to find mostly cotton in the pictures. Either way it'll be interesting to see them, if we can.
I won't find out until Wednesday, when I go back to the museum again. If even one blurry picture is saved, you can bet I'll put it in the exhibit.
This Tuesday I have an interview at the library, which is why I'm going Wednesday. Here's hoping I get the job. You all have a wonderful week!
Tune in for Thursday's update and hear about Radios!
So, I would have posted Thursday but I was out almost all day and too exhausted by the time I got home. Its pretty cool though because not much happened on Tuesday. Friday was exciting however and I'll be telling you a little about it today and more about it on Thursday.
Today I am going to talk about cameras, and a little about phones. I mentioned in my last post that I had been making a list of what's in what upstairs. I partially did that so we could get through the artifacts quicker but I also did it to see what's up there that I can use in my exhibit. Now the main things I was looking for were, old games, cameras, telephones, and kitchen ware.
I started two weeks ago but, because of the cold and the fact that its freezing up there, delayed finishing it until Friday. Two week ago I got through the first set of shelves and was quite happy to find, besides the original box of cameras, another box of cameras. Even better, it had at 3 or 4 different flashes that belonged to a Polaroid Land Camera. (I should say one of them but I'll get to that in a bit.) It also had instructions for the Argus 75 which was fantastic but I can use it to explain loading and unloading film in cameras that use 620 film. Because, despite what the director thought, this wasn't a 35mm film camera.
Along with the cameras, I found two boxes of phones. The phones are good because I have two sitting downstairs that are waiting to go in the exhibit. The first box, which I expected, didn't have any spectacular phones. The second box, on the other hand, had one of those old stand-a-lone phones that you picked up the ear piece to and simply told the operator who you wanted to call - no dialing. Its not in the best of shape, but the box was full of dust, so hopefully with a little cleaning it'll look great in the exhibit. If that doesn't work, I suppose I'll have to figure out how to restore it a little.
After that first day, I was pretty sure I had found all of the cameras. So on Friday, eager to find kitchenware and games, I started on the next section. I was on the second to last set of shelves in the second section when lo and behold there was another box of cameras! After a brief moment of amazement, I pulled the cameras out of the box and looked to see if any pictures were tucked away with them. There were two other Land cameras in this box and I pulled them both out. The one in the first box, was open but I couldn't figure out how to get it shut. Both of these Land cameras were shut. So what did I do?
Of course, I opened one. I was happy to see that it slid open fairly easily and that it was in good condition. I looked over the rest of the cameras and then I put them back in the box, except for the open Land. I tried to close it. I looked all over the bottom of it to see if I could get it to fold back into itself. No luck. The lesson I learned, don't go opening things if you don't know how to close them. I had to rearrange the whole box so I could fit the camera in it.
I also found in that section, a box with two newer phones in it, including an early cordless. (Which I found hilarious and interesting because I had never seen a cordless that you tucked the phone into a kind of side box to hold it.) Then I moved onto the next section.
On the second shelf, and this time I was very surprised, I found another box of cameras! I really thought that I'd done with them after three boxes. But no. This box had the greatest treasure of all, though. Well two of them at least. So let me go into the not so interesting one. This box had a film developers kit. Including, one film canister, two trays, a ton of photo paper, two deeper trays, and instructions of some sort. (I didn't get the best look at them.) With all of this stuff was, guess?
Another Land camera. I guess they were popular in Cherokee. It also held a Argus Cintra, which was the camera the director was thinking of. I was playing with it, like normal, and I hit the button to take a picture, and it worked beautifully. So beautifully that I decided to try it again and I hit the lever to move the film forward. It worked so well that, instead of hitting the button again I debated an idea in my head. I just bet this camera has film in it, I thought to myself. So I took the tape off of the sides, popped open the back and closed it as fast as I could! Sure enough, there was a roll of film that hadn't been removed. I left the camera where it was, hoping I hadn't exposed the film badly, since the light was on. I finished my list on the third section, grabbed the camera and practically ran down the stairs.
I talked to the director and showed him the camera and told him about the film. Since we knew it had to be taken out in the dark he said I could take the camera home. However, I am not very good at waiting around and not fiddling with stuff. (As evinced by the now open Land camera.) So I popped upstairs, left the light off, made sure I was rolling the film the correct way, and pulled the film out of the camera. I handed it to the director and he asked if I thought we should have a lottery to guess what's on the pictures.
Thinking about that, we looked in the system to see who had donated the camera. We all thought it would be an individual but we were surprised to see that it was actually the Service Extension who had donated it. (I, being mainly from a city, had to ask what that was, so I'll tell you here.) Pretty much the Service Extension kept an eye on the farmland around the area and assisted farmers and so on and so forth. The director, who is going to get the pictures developed - if I didn't mess it up with that brief second of light, thinks that we're going to find mostly cotton in the pictures. Either way it'll be interesting to see them, if we can.
I won't find out until Wednesday, when I go back to the museum again. If even one blurry picture is saved, you can bet I'll put it in the exhibit.
This Tuesday I have an interview at the library, which is why I'm going Wednesday. Here's hoping I get the job. You all have a wonderful week!
Tune in for Thursday's update and hear about Radios!
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