Exhibition Mondays

So,

I've decided that instead of writing about random stuff on Monday, I will instead write about the Exhibit I'm building. That way my inventorying posts don't get to be quite so long as the last one. Though, that was mostly about car trouble than the exhibit. Also. I really suck at writing random stuff that doesn't relate to the museum.

Last Thursday I wrote that I was going to the museum with a friend on Saturday. Unfortunately, my friend cancelled Friday night so I went to the museum alone on Saturday. It was a really busy day too! That flintknapper was there but because I was so focused on upstairs I actually never saw his demonstration. : (

However! Thanks to my excitement about playing upstairs I did find those cameras I was looking for! As well as a bunch of other stuff I can possibly use. I won't go too into the inventorying bit, but I will list off what I found. I found: over 20 barbies and 8 kens, some kitchen equipment, and a couple of old toys. Not to mention the cameras.

These cameras are fantastic too. We have some old box cameras. A Brownie, a Brownie Junior, a Kewpie. There were at least two polaroids, a box of kodak film, and a nice Argus 75. So pretty much, its a good range of age for the cameras and I'll be able to exhibit the progression of technology nicely. But even cooler than the cameras was the picture that was taped to the Kewpie.

The picture taped to the Kewpie was a picture taken in 1915 of Mr. Dewey Parker. His daughter, in her 90s, was a prominent figure of a nearby town ( I think Ceder Bluff but I may be wrong) because her husband used to own the bank. Until it crashed at least. Anyway. I showed the Director the picture and he saw the name Dewey Parker and got to thinking.

In the Cherokee County Alabama: A Pictorial History, there is a picture of the man who discovered the complete piece of pig iron that is displayed in the museum. That man, is Dewey Parker. Now I was excited to see the picture because we know it was taken with the Kewpie because someone very nicely wrote it on the back of the picture. Now I have to tie in the pig iron with my exhibit. Luckily that should be just an easy bit of added information tacked onto whatever I'll write about the camera and the picture.

It was pretty cool to see the picture of Mr. Parker at 17 and the one taken much later when he was an elderly gentleman.

Judging by what I've found in the boxes upstairs so far, I've decided to focus on inventorying all of the boxes with artifacts in them. (Quite a few have books and papers stored in them and I will most likely leave those till I'm ready to deal with the archive and library materials.)

So here's a little side note on something interesting I found in one of the boxes. In two weeks the museum will be holding a book signing for the son of Governor (?) Wallace. I actually don't know much about Wallace or any Alabama history because I spent a majority of my childhood in or around Texas. According to the director though, Wallace was shot sometime during his time in office.

Anyway, there's an old Chevy truck downstairs with a Wallace sticker on it and the director asked me if I would do some research on it. (I'll get to that in a bit) Well. I said sure and I went upstairs to inventory some more boxes. The last box of the day, which I still haven't finished inventorying, gave me a pleasant surprise. Inside the box was a record from, my guess, a speech of Wallace's. As well as, three beautiful pictures of Wallace campaigning in Centre, right by the museum! The director was really happy to see those three pictures.Since they were stored in the box, he didn't even know we had them.

Before I left that afternoon, I took the liberty of looking up the truck in Past Perfect to see if there was any information on it. The only information I got was who it had belonged to. Originally, I didn't quite know what information the director wanted. After writing this, however, I have a better idea. You see, like me, the director is not from Alabama. So he doesn't really know much about Wallace either. So I'm probably going to research information on the truck, as well as information on Wallace and then hand it to the director, hopefully by Saturday.

Well that's it for this Exhibition Monday. Bis Später!