How the Story Ended

From lancasterhistory.org

Well. It's been a long time. A ridiculously long time. I didn't even finish telling the story of my fall internship. Suddenly graduate school applications took up my free time and then it was busy Christmastime. But now I'm hoping to pick up my poor, neglected blog once again for the spring. I begin a new internship with the curator at Wright's Ferry Mansion on Tuesday, so I will be glad to share that story! I'm not really sure what I'll be doing yet, but I think it involves a project concerning the 150th anniversary of the Civil War in this area. Related to Wright's Ferry or Columbia, of course.

However, before I begin with that next week, I definitely need to sum up the end of last semester's internship. First, Barry gave me the extremely difficult task of designing the small children's exhibit that will make its appearance in the new gallery. It had to appeal to children, yet still look classy and fit the overall theme of "County, Commonwealth, Country." Talk about awfully challenging. I don't think my small ideas would have been so bad, but it was almost impossible to come to a consensus among everyone involved.

I never got to finish that job because the time came for the historical society to move back to its newly expanded home on President Avenue. The new building looks great! I spent my last few weeks packing up assorted odd objects, and then unpacking in the new (or should I say old?) location. The collections are now in open storage so that visitors can walk through and see them. It's really quite neat, especially since most of the objects are in storage at any given time and only a small portion are on display in the gallery. During most of my semester, the objects were stored off-site because the downtown location didn't have enough space. So I rather enjoyed this entire process since it was the first time I had seen anything besides paintings. My favorite part was unwrapping all of the glass and silver glasses, teapots, and trinkets. It was like Christmas! So that is pretty much how my internship ended. The rest of the month of January they will be unpacking, setting up, and completing an extensive inventory. The historical society will re-open in February for researchers, but will continue to prepare the gallery for the grand opening in April. I definitely want to be there for that!

So now I will look forward to telling all about Wright's Ferry Mansion! Stay tuned!