My first week at Eckley Miner’s Village was largely orientational, with much of my time with my supervisors present being spent touring around the complex and being told of its history, introduced to Argus (the PHMC’s collections management software) and its functions, and some basic instruction on handling and cleaning artifacts.
While being shown around the village, I had the lucky opportunity to see the coal breaker, a monolithic structure that has towered over the village’s south side since the 1960s during the filming of The Molly Maguires (1970). However, the very weekend before I started my internship, a significant portion of the structure collapsed due to rot. On Thursday morning, emergency state action prompted the tearing down of the wreckage, unfortunately doing away with a crucial historical component of the site.
A distant view of the coal breaker, towering over the trees around it.
A closer view of the coal breaker’s wreckage.
After much of the clerical requirements were out of the way, John Fielding (the curator and the person I will be working with for most of the internship) assigned to me a few simple projects for Tuesday and Wednesday, the two days he would be away for since he is typically only at Eckley on Thursdays.
First, I had to transfer a series of archival materials from older acidic folders to non-acidic ones to ensure their longevity in storage. These particular materials were a set of several hundred grievances filed against a mining company in the area by workers. I moved each file (which varied from one to several pages of delicate typed paper) from the original folder to a new, non-acidic one, then mark the new folder in pencil with the corresponding grievance number.
My second project was more ambitious. I was assigned to scroll through our collection in Argus filtered to only show items catalogued that were not approved for public web-page view (like many other museums, the collection is, with limits, able to be viewed by the public with simple descriptions and images posted). I was then to manually check each item and copy and paste the internal artifact description (if there was one) to the public web description, as well as its title and date, thus hopefully allowing at least some of these artifacts to be approved for public online view. From Monday afternoon to Thursday morning, I managed to sift through over 1,200 artifacts in Argus, with maybe one tenth of them having descriptions to be copied over. Unfortunately, a significant amount of the artifacts not approved for web view simply do not have enough information to be viewable by the public, be it a lack of any sufficient internal description or images of the item itself.
Next week, I will be tackling more hands-on projects. I have been assigned to spend one day of next week cleaning a house occupied by the Nicholas family on-site (dubbed by John the ‘1940s house’), using a specialized vacuum and brush method to carefully lift dust and debris off of artifacts in the house so it will be suitable for public view during the Patchtown Days event in June. Next, I will spend another day similarly cleaning the inside of the Doctor’s Office, another home that has been converted into an exhibit interpreting an early on-site doctor’s office in the village. The rest of my time next week will be spent converting my notes from the Argus perusal into an Excel sheet for easier submission to Collections Management for review.
