Students in Dr. Black’s HIS 341 course (fall 2015) processing archival material in the MU archives
Misericordia regularly sends our students out into the community to build their professional experience and serve others. Since 2016, MU has sent several students to internships in Washington, DC; Baltimore, MD; Scranton, PA; and Eckley, PA. Read more about our students’ work in area historic sites, museums, and other related public history endeavors below.
Antonio Ferraro
This week was my final week at Eckley Miners’ Village. Almost all of it was spent putting together and finalizing the materials for my exhibit to be installed in the lobby of the Eckley visitor center.
I concluded my research (for which I kept a comprehensive log and bibliography) on lighting instrument development in coal mining patch towns in the beginning of the week and completed a write-up and some labels to be printed out for the display. The main label had to be a 300-word maximum summary of the history demonstrated by the exhibit. Specifically, I wrote about two paragraphs totaling to just shy of the word limit, with the first briefly covering the overall scientific development of lighting technology from ancient candles and oil lamps to modern kerosene lamps and electric bulbs. The second focused more so on the application of lighting tech in Eckley, where there was a significant delay in the introduction of new technology. My findings indicated that the majority of lower to middle class Eckley residents in the early- to mid-twentieth century used a wide variety of lights in their homes, with there being significant overlap between archaic oil and gas lamps and newer kerosene lamps, even after electricity was introduced and standardized in the 1930s.
My exhibit reflected these findings, with some examples of the aforementioned technologies pulled from our artifact storage being used to demonstrate a simple timeline. Wednesday was spent printing out my labels in the proper format and pulling the needed artifacts. John and I perused our artifact storage house (the same one I inventoried last month), and we found a few nice examples of the lights I researched, except for a simple candlestick… We have several in our collection, but they are all being used for interpretation in homes or are on display in exhibits.
The process for making the labels for the exhibit was interesting. They had to be typed up in a large, readable font and then printed onto paper, which was then adhered to white foam board and cut to size. The labels had to follow a very specific format set by the PHMC, which includes the title of the artifact, a date of origin, a brief subtitle (optional, for provenance of the specific artifact’s ownership or use) and/or an interpretive description (optional, explaining general historic use or context), and the donor information with accession (ID) number. Pasting the labels onto the board was not difficult, but cutting the board cleanly and perfectly with a box cutter was a bit challenging; I messed up a few times and had to correct or start over to ensure a clean edge on the labels.
My exhibit was completed with about an hour to spare before my shift ended. I am very proud of the work put into it, even if it is a small temporary exhibit in the lobby of a museum, considering it is my first mark on the field of public history that I can confidently claim as my own. The process was very rewarding.
My Keystone Internship at Eckley Miners’ Village has been a long, difficult, and sometimes tiring experience, but it has been incredibly fun and valuable in every way, providing me with a wealth of irreplaceable experience I hope to use wherever I wind up working in the future. I’d like to extend an enormous thanks to the wonderful people I got to work with at Eckley who made my time there feel warm and welcoming every single day!
My exhibit demonstrating a brief history of lighting instrument technology in coal mining patch towns, Eckley Miners’ Village Visitor Center.
Antonio Ferraro
This week at Eckley, I continued my project of inventorying the archives, as well as researching for my small exhibit I will be putting together next week.
During this week’s inventory, I have encountered more newspapers than anything else (given the fact that half of the shelves I tackled were almost entirely newspapers), as well as many photographs and business-related documents from several Pennsylvanian anthracite coal-mining companies. Whether or not I am able to complete the entire room before the end of my internship on this upcoming Wednesday is yet to be seen … it will be very close—I only have two whole days at most left to work on the project, as I anticipate my last day being spent installing the exhibit, and there is about 1/4 of the room left to do.
The research for the exhibit has gone quite well. Information on the history of lighting technology is fairly easy to find from reputable sources online, and there are plenty of primary accounts of the use of different instruments by Eckley residents from our collection of oral histories, so I should have more than enough information to install an interesting display with an accurate and informative short write-up, which still has to be done.
A booklet discussing the war-time usage of anthracite coal in the United States, 1940s.
A newspaper ad for women’s dresses, 1940s.
A photograph of the Women’s Relief Corps, 1937.
A photo of a well-dressed man and his dog, c. 1940s.
A newspaper article discussing the Battle of the Somme, September 1916.
A newspaper article discussing the heightened fears of German invasion in western Europe, 1939.
A newspaper article announcing the unconditional surrender of the Imperial Japanese Army and end of World War II, September 1945.
A newspaper ad for menswear, 1940s.
Antonio Ferraro
This week at Eckley, I began the next step in the inventory project as well as continued my research for my small exhibit.
The process for inventorying archival collections (the portion of Eckley’s collection that I am now working on) is slightly different than that for normal artifacts. Artifacts are typically stored either in boxes or directly on shelves, and each individual object has a unique identification number tied to each part of the object—often, objects with many parts will have each part numbered individually for record-keeping’s sake. Meanwhile, archives are typically stored almost entirely in boxes when able, and are often grouped in small collections, where each acid-free paper box will contain between one and several small collections of papers, documents, etc. that are all catalogued under the same identical number that, when searched in our database, will yield a description for all of the objects under that number. For example, in the archives, there could be a box that contains a small collection of letters pertaining to a certain person, and such those letters will be grouped together under the same number, e.g. AB12.3.
On the other hand, there are sometimes objects in archival collections that are numbered individually, like artifacts, that are stored together with other objects that have different numbers. For example, there could be one box that contains dozens of completely unrelated articles, from workers’ time books to letters to postcards to advertisement booklets, all with different numbers. Such distinctions are very important to make when making corresponding records in our system.
A WWII-era Army propaganda news bulletin made for distribution to schoolteachers that describes school-age boys’ contributions to the war effort, c. 1940s.
A pamphlet for a WWII-era flag-raising ceremony at Eckley, c. September 1943.
A Great War-era American Expeditionary Force (AEF) US Army book of songs, c. 1918.
A timesheet for “breaker boys,” who were young boys employed in coal mining operations who worked in the coal breakers, where they separated mined coal from impurities like rock and soil, c. late 19th – early 20th century.
Often, there are duplicate records created in our database for those collections of multiple objects under the same number, such as one collection I recently inventoried that had over a dozen separate recipe books that were all numbered the same, part of the same collection, but had unique records online under the same duplicated number. This separation causes unnecessary confusion because of the duplicated numbers (Collections Management may often be wondering why there are a dozen different records for objects all numbered AB12.3 yet with unique descriptions and names), and furthermore takes up unnecessary space in Argus, our software, which is very limited and must be conserved. An important part of my job while inventorying is to catch these duplicated records and consolidate them when possible—unfortunately, there are quite a large amount of these bad records left over from as long ago as 1997, the last time much of our archival collection’s records were updated.
Having to change my approach to inventorying this part of our collection has been jarring, but nonetheless interesting and valuable to my experience in working with collections, as many curators manage both artifact and archival collections from time to time (depending on where they work).
Front cover, a catalogue from a clothier / department store in New York, NY offering clothes, housewares, sporting goods, and other items catered mostly to women, but also to men and children, c. 1918-1919.
Catalogue, a page dedicated to the stylish golden age of menswear.
Catalogue, a page dedicated to mens’ workwear.
Catalogue, a page dedicated to womens’ skirts (almost all with pockets – shocking!!), suits, and coats.
Antonio Ferraro
This week at Eckley, I finalized (the largest portion of) a major project that culminated the past several weeks and began two new projects that will take me to the end of my internship.
Tuesday was spent finishing the inventory of the Artifact Storage House. I knew based on the number of artifacts left to inventory that I would only need the better part of a day to finish it this week, so it was no surprise that the house was completely inventoried by Tuesday afternoon. It was an incredibly tiring and monotonous process, but as I have said before, the experience and knowledge gained through performing an inventory by myself is incredibly valuable and taught me an inexplicable amount about handling and inventorying artifacts of all shapes, sizes, natures, and conditions. That portion of the “2023 Inventory” for Eckley is now mostly complete, save for any clarifications or revisions I may have to make if Collections Management has any questions about artifacts or notes I made.
A twentieth century miner’s helmet, exterior. This helmet was produced from the same materials as and in similar fashion to WWII-era American military M1 helmet liners.
A twentieth century miner’s helmet, interior.
A WWII-era M1 helmet liner for comparison. The body is made from compressed fiber giving the iconic orange-brown triangular pattern that can be seen on the miner’s helmet as well. The inner suspension is made from olive drab cotton webbing with a leather sweatband (again, very similar to the miner’s helmet).
A temperance education booklet designed for “school and family” use, c.1884.
On Wednesday morning, I had another Keystone Learning Session over Microsoft Teams, where I got to sit in with other interns and get industry insight on museum education from the planetarium director of the State Museum of Pennsylvania and the educator at the Lumber Museum in Ulysses, PA. We got a whole wealth of information on and got to ask questions about the process of rising in museum work as a career, the challenges of interacting with the public, and developing both valuable and realistic educational programs for public history.
That afternoon, I received the data for inventorying the Visitor Center at Eckley, which mostly includes our archival storage and some other loose artifacts on display in the lobby—I will not have to inventory the main exhibit hall, which is located in the same building, since that was done a couple years ago already as part of the 2023 Inventory.
My final few weeks at Eckley will be spent doing a combination of that portion of the inventory, as well as completing a new project I was given by John: I will be researching, developing, and compiling a small single-case exhibit display that will be shown in the lobby of the Visitor Center. I was instructed to peruse the oral histories of Eckley residents collected in the 1970s that are publicly available on our website and to choose a specific topic that could be shown through artifacts in our collection. After doing some reading and basic research, I have decided that my exhibit will act as a simple timeline of the development of lighting instruments in nineteenth- and twentieth-century patch towns—everything from candles to oil lamps to electric wall sconces. This project, as well as the remainder of the inventory, will be completed on a day-by-day basis, likely alternating one day at a time for each to vary my schedule.
Antonio Ferraro
This week at Eckley, I continued my project of inventorying the old artifact storage house.
The week started off with me continuing from where I left off two weeks ago (I took the week of the 4th off for vacation); I had gotten about eighty percent of the room I had been working on done, which in total accounts for roughly one half of the objects I would have to inventory in the house. The last several things in that room that I started with on Monday were a mixture of hundreds of millions of years old anthracite fossils (of which there were dozens) in incredibly varied shapes and sizes, then finally a collection of a couple dozen earth sample boxes. These were long rectangular wooden crates that were used by the mining companies to store samples of earth taken from prospective mining locations, which would be tested for viability of mining.
After that room was finished, I did a once over of the entire east side (the side of the house I had been working on) to check any small things that had been missed either by me or back in June by Collections Management. After catching a few things, I moved on to the west side, where I have been since. I started by plugging any holes in the upstairs rooms, which had already been inventoried last month, checking to see if any random missing objects could be found or were just missed before. All that was left, besides some stragglers that were mishandled in our database, was the front room downstairs on the west side. As of the end of the week, I managed to get through about ninety percent of the room, with only a few free-standing things left to inventory (as well as some objects stored on the floor). Once that room is done, I should be done with the project unless Collections Management reaches out to ask for clarification on anything they need to know more about from the data I will submit (which is likely, since there is always a chance I missed some details on describing an object, etc.).
This project has been incredibly rewarding thus far. While difficult at times and very tedious, as explained in my previous blog posts I am gaining an incredible amount of valuable experience working with artifacts and the appropriate means of handling, describing, and storing them that I hope to use in the future.
Attached below are some interesting objects from the week:
A copy of the Hazleton Standard (1930s).
A copy of the Hazleton Standard (1930s).
A diphtheria treatment kit.
An amputation kit, complete with bone saw and scalpels.
An army sewing kit, likely private purchase and post-WWII.
Contents of the sewing kit.
A sign posting a reward for information on a burglary of the Eckley Social and Sports Club (1951).
Antonio Ferraro
Every day of this week at Eckley, I continued my big inventory project at our artifact storage house. Just as I had started last week, I went through each and every artifact in the house (of which there are thousands!) verifying that everything was where it should be and described properly in our system, ARGUS. Thankfully, I was able to be issued a laptop, so I could now access our spreadsheets more efficiently.
The process is fairly repetitive, going shelf by shelf through the house at an efficient yet careful pace. Over the span of this past week, I probably made it through approximately forty or so shelves, each of which house anywhere from zero or one to upwards of a few dozen artifacts, depending on their size and nature.
While about half of the artifacts that I have inventoried so far are quite mundane, there are many interesting objects sprinkled around that are striking:
A pair of carved wooden prosthetic hands.
A prosthetic arm with a hook for a hand.
A pair of safety goggles.
A book with a relevant title, in many regards.
A nickel-plated trumpet.
A nickel-plated Euphonium.
Engravings on the Euphonium.
A miner’s carbide head lamp, which uses calcium carbide to produce light.
The inventorying process has been hard and tiring work, but it pays off in experience with handling artifacts and the necessary process of inventory itself. This project is anticipated to take me several weeks—essentially, for most of the remainder of my internship at Eckley.
On the mornings of Tuesday and Thursday, I was fortunate enough to be able to sit in on the first two of several “Keystone Learning Sessions,” which are specially curated remote learning sessions for Keystone Interns hosted by significant people in the Pennsylvania Historical & Museum Commission (PHMC). Tuesday’s session was hosted by the PHMC’s chair as a general bureaucratic introduction, while the one on Thursday was hosted by a site director and a regional director who discussed the key processes of museum administration. These have been an excellent opportunity thus far to network with people in crucial positions with notable experience, as well as learn from their history and routines. There are several more planned throughout the summer that I will be attending.
An adorable ceramic turtle that I inventoried.
This week at Eckley Miners’ Village, I spent some more time cleaning spaces for public view, while also completing another task regarding our internal collections database, and then finally returning to the major inventorying project from a few weeks ago.
Monday was spent cleaning the site’s Catholic church. I spent the entire day there, beginning with wiping down each and every pew with a cotton rag. They were incredibly dusty all throughout and needed thorough cleaning. Since there are a few dozen in the building, it took most of the morning until lunch to properly clean every pew. Afterwards, I also wiped down the windowsills, railings, and any other flat surface around the building’s interior that had accumulated dust.
That afternoon, I had to sweep the church’s floors. This was an even more tedious task—due to the closeness of the pews to one another, and the sheer size of the church, there was an incredibly large surface area of floor that had to be swept in a certain way to ensure all of the dirt, dust, and dead bugs, etc. were properly swept up and not just pushed around under each seat. Ultimately, it took a good few hours to finish sweeping, and there was quite a lot of debris piled up at the end to be picked up!
While assuredly tedious and uneventful, cleaning mundane areas such as this is essential in consideration not only of the delicate nature of the building itself, but also its popularity as a site for public view. And, in the case of this church, the process of sufficient cleaning is often time-consuming, but it was undeniably rewarding at the end of the day when the church looked significantly tidier.
On Tuesday, I was asked to go through artifacts catalogued in ARGUS (our internal collections software) that had been denied for online publication and give certain objects generic online descriptions. Several weeks ago, I had been asked to do the same for items at Eckley, but this time I did so for the collection at the Anthracite Heritage Museum in Scranton, PA. This project took the better half of the day and was significantly quicker than the process for Eckley, considering there were far less relevant artifacts to assess for the Scranton site.
It was interesting to familiarize myself with a portion (albeit small) of the collection at the AHM, since I have never been there nor really investigated many of the artifacts held there.
For Wednesday, I began what will likely be a several-week project for my time at Eckley—I continued the inventorying of an artifact storage house on-site. This was, as before, a slow and careful process of comparing records of artifacts in our database regarding their condition, description, location, etc. (as of 2004, usually) to the actual details of said objects. However, this time was much slower considering a few factors. Firstly, I will be performing the rest of the inventorying on my own, whereas last time there were one to two other people working as well. Secondly, because of the lack of a device with access to the spreadsheets containing the relevant records, I had to print out the sheets as well as a paper form I made to write notes and compare records. This added several more steps to the process of finding an artifact, searching for its number and supposed location, and, in the event of details being incorrect or insufficient, writing down proper information and ensuring it will be plugged into the spreadsheet at a later date, because everything had to be done on paper and by hand as opposed to typed directly into the sheet, and it is far more difficult to search for records by number or description without computer shortcuts.
It was understandably frustrating having to take even more time than needed to perform an already lengthy and tedious job. However, I made do, and I did make some progress. Tentatively, I will have access to a state-issued electronic device for the remainder of this inventory, so it should go smoother here on out.
This week at Eckley, I spent most of my time preparing various interpreted spaces for this past weekend’s public event, Patchtown Days, which is the largest of the year at the site.
On Monday, I cleaned the eastern side of the Exhibit House, a two-family sized home on the upper end of town that is on display for public view with a “lived-in” set-up with artifacts throughout. On Tuesday, I cleaned the western half. This particular house is interpreted in a fashion representing an immigrant family’s rise in social status after some time living in a patch town. The western side is furnished with more simple, cheaper articles—the stove is a basic cast-iron coal-burning model, the dining room table is simple with a long bench, the kitchen utensils are simple pewter, there is little decoration aside from a small print nailed to the wall, and the walls themselves are painted flat white. Meanwhile, the eastern side depicts the same family much later—the walls are painted in color, the furnishings are more ornate, the utensils are nicer and there are more modern kitchen aids, there are numerous framed pictures, and the sheer volume of items (including foodstuffs) is much greater.
The Exhibit House.
Exhibit House, western side kitchen.
Exhibit House, western side kitchen, dining area.
Exhibit House, western side bedroom.
Exhibit House, eastern side kitchen.
Exhibit House, eastern side kitchen, dining area.
Exhibit House, eastern side bedroom.
On Wednesday, I briefly cleaned the site’s Episcopal church. This particular building is not technically original to Eckley (it was donated from nearby White Haven in the ’70s), it is practically identical to the original church that was demolished several decades ago because it was built with the same designs and at the same time.
St. Paul’s Episcopal Church.
St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, interior.
I spent Thursday cleaning the Slate Picker’s House, a small shack off a back street that would have historically homed a slate picker (a worker responsible for separating slate and other refuse from coal) and his family. This home is one of the smallest on-site, and the interpreted furnishings within reflect the lower status of its inhabitants.
The Slate Picker’s House.
Slate Picker’s House, kitchen.
Slate Picker’s House, kitchen, dining area.
Slate Picker’s House, bedroom.
A photo from Saturday at Patchtown Days in Eckley.
Over the weekend, I actually had the opportunity to attend the Patchtown Days event with some friends. We met numerous living history reenactors, vendors, and other interpreters set up in buildings with valuable stories to tell.
The work of preparing interpreted exhibition spaces is, while undeniably tedious and time-consuming, very rewarding and valuable. The process involves carefully assessing each and every artifact in every room, regardless of size and complexity, and, while handling it properly, cleaning it with the appropriate methodology. Although seemingly straightforward, it has taken some time to become undeniably comfortable while handling artifacts, especially more fragile ones. However, performing these tasks routinely the last several weeks has allowed me to reach a point where I know just how to handle different kinds of objects with confidence and care. Ultimately, I have attained a solid mix of respect for the condition of historical artifacts and an understanding of their presentation to the public.
This week, John and I tackled a large inventory project at Eckley. Some folks from Collections Management at the State Museum in Harrisburg, PA came up to inventory a significant number of artifacts being stored in a house on-site. From Monday to part of Wednesday, we meticulously went through each and every shelf (of which there are dozens, loaded to the brim with objects) ensuring everything was accurately accounted for. On Thursday, I spent my time familiarizing myself with online-published oral histories of Eckley, as well as taking proper photographs of the same two artifacts I catalogued last week.
The house used for artifact storage that we spent the week in.
The inventorying process was not necessarily difficult, but it was time consuming. We broke up into two teams, and each covered one half of the house. One person would be on a spreadsheet with internal artifact info to check records of everything we saw, while the other(s) would read off accession (internal identification, essentially) numbers of each and every artifact. Often, we had to provide better descriptions than what already existed or simply provide entirely new descriptions and pictures for artifacts that were either not catalogued, or improperly so. Many artifacts had not been inventoried since 2004, so the general pattern for the process was speed by half of a shelf full of things that were fully accounted for, then get stuck for a short while on a small group of things that either had incomplete or no records.
Some of the most notable objects I had the chance to see in storage were a bottle of poison antidote, an original copy of The American Weekly periodical from 1951, and several early twentieth century men’s dress shirts and detachable starched collars. I also had the opportunity to identify an object that had a poor description (was described internally as “round metal object,” or similar) with a quick online search; the artifact was a cutter made for shaping donuts out of dough.
A copy of ‘The American Weekly’ from 1951.
The donut cutter that I identified.
A bottle of poison antidote.
An empty bottle of hydrochloric acid.
