by Colleen Jenkins, 2016 Tom Desilets Memorial Intern
Last week, I asked my dad for a drill so I could take apart a cabinet at work. To which he replied, “I don’t understand what is historical about taking apart cabinets.” This has been an ongoing joke regarding my role here at the FHC. I thought coming in I would dress nicely every day and be sitting at my laptop writing up excel sheets and transcribing old documents. And while this has been a large part of my internship, an equally large part has required comfortable clothing and some physical labor.
I am not the cleanliest person in my daily life, so it is almost ironic that I spend so much of my time here cleaning! My first week, I started the project I have spent the most time on, which is cleaning out the attic. When I got here, the attic looked like a typical attic, filled with boxes from miscellaneous collections as well as tools and documents regarding the FHC. But Stacen (FHC Curator) had bigger plans for the attic, which required clearing the boxes out of half of the space and giving it a deep clean. This took some time because the boxes have to be put in the correct place, and if they do not have an established location, we have to figure out the best place for them.
Luckily, we were able to move enough out to create a space for our Smith Collection. This is one of our largest collections, containing Japanese items that we acquired nearly a century ago. So as you can probably imagine, this was taking up a lot of space in another collections room, which happens to be the same room that houses the Dennison Mfg Co Archives, so it was confusing and not conducive to house both collections in the same room. In fact, because of the spacing issue we couldn’t keep the Dennison Archives together. It was the perfect time move out the Smith Collection as we are getting closer and closer to making Dennison Archives a displayable collection.
It took two days of work but Laura (FHC Education Coordinator) and I not only moved the Smith Collection out, but reorganized the rest of the collections room! Whereas before the Dennison Archives was in two different locations, it is now all together on one wall of shelves! After all the work that so many people have put into making this collection pristine, the fact that we now have made space to have it physically be an organized collection is so wonderful. I am glad to have been a part of that movement.
Though the duties of this internship haven’t seemed particularly traditional to what I thought someone who works for a museum does, they have helped me fully grasp that museum workers do everything. Everything that needs to be done in this building is done by the staff and volunteers, which speaks to the amount of work and dedication each member here puts in to making this place run as efficiently as possible. I think the multitude of jobs held by a person working in a non-profit museum is really undervalued mostly because they are not understood. It took a few weeks of being here consistently for me to really grasp that. I have a great respect for everyone I have come into contact with at FHC because they are all so dedicated to preserving history. Without people like that in the world, who knows how much of our history we would really know.
