South Dakota Adventure: *Insert Wacky Cool Title Here*

HAPPY ANNIVERSARY CLAY AND CINDY!
My amazing host family is celebrating 11 years of marriage at a loverly pub in Huron tonight, so it’s just me, myself, and I for the evening. Probably gonna get some shopping done.
By comparison to yesterday, a very well-rounded day for a Tuesday. I arrived early and helped Jane and Pat rehouse a couple of art pieces. The art we see never fails to impress me. Last week we had a photograph that turned out to be charcoal and today we worked on this amazing piece that turned out to be a piece of burnt linen. Oh yes, there’s a story here. :)
Back in 1913, the Alexander Mitchell hotel burned to the ground. No one was injured, but one of the fireman on a ladder entered one of the burning rooms and spotted a dresser with some expensive-looking valuables on it. Rather than grab the valuables themselves, he simply picked up the entire dresser cover (an embroidered sheet of cream-colored linen) and tossed the whole bundle out the window. After a couple of days, the linen started to change colors. It had been exposed to the heat just long enough to slightly burn the areas not covered by the valuables, but not enough to actually blacken and dry out the material. What was left was a perfectly useful linen now recolored chocolate brown by the fire, but the valuables sitting on the linen left their shape in the original cream color because they protected that part of the linen from the heat. So now, almost 100 years later, I pull a frame out of a box and see brown colored cloth with very obvious cream-colored shapes that a quiet obviously a scissors, two brushes, some matches, a crumpled tie, and a mirror stand. It was SO cool! It looked like one of those X-rays of a person who swallowed a quarter or a toothpick…everything is black, but the white shape of the toothpick is very visible.
After that adventure, I went to the Corn Palace with Laurie Yeo (one of our volunteers) to check out promotion possibilities. I ended up getting handed the project, so now I’m designing some flyers and a kiosk to build in the Palace lobby. Not what I expected to start the with, but I’m all for building something to get Palace visitors attention and out to DD!
From there, I headed back to DD where Lori and I met with Brad Ciavarella, an architect here in Mitchell, and his intern Rob. It was kinda neat to have two professionals and their student interns crowded around a small table for a business meeting. A few weeks ago, DD received some big grant money to do a restoration and construction project on the Beckwith House, primarily the 4 rooms upstairs that are not available or open for showing. She let me read through the grant application she sent in, and wow was it impressive! I think 80% of the difficulty behind getting a grant is collecting all the information they require and submitting it in exactly the write format, number of envelopes, and size font they want! I had no idea there was so much work behind applying for grants!
Anyway, Brad, Rob, Lori and I spent 2 hours walking around the Beckwith House, checking out all the windows, corners, ceilings, closets, and every other possible nook and cranny we could find to get an idea of how much it would cost and how much time it would take to make the upstairs rooms suitable for public viewing as well as fix up the rooms that are currently open for a higher quality museum atmosphere. Wow! This might have been the coolest part of my mentorship so far. To walk around a historic building with a historic architect and a museum director is quite the experience! I got to hear all about really making history come to life and what kind of changes we can and should or shouldn’t make to the house. An exciting twist is that the house has been changed/modified by different organizations who have owned it over the years. After Louis Beckwith died, his daughter Grace turned it into a duplex, so there is a huge wall dividing the house in half that will have to come out if we want to return it to its original glory. Also, it was used by the DWU campus for student housing for a few years, so Mrs. Beckwith’s dressing room is now a fully furnished bathroom, which will also have to come out. We discussed all kinds of exciting changes from removing walls to replacing carpet and wallpaper. It was a lot of fun and very educational!
After Brad left, I worked on the flyers for the Corn Palace promotion kiosk, and entered a few things into PastPerfect before calling it a day. Before I left, Lori gave me a big binder of Grant application information. Since we’re closed tomorrow, we’re going to be writing up an application for another grant. This one’s about twice as thick as the binder I looked through earlier, though, so I think I know what I’m doing with my night. Lori mentioned this is one of her favorite parts of her job. She likes to write, which I can totally relate with. Plus, it’s a more rewarding aspect of her job. Between all the planning she does for events, the book keeping, the exhibit design and construction, the gift shop sales, and inventory, and the research, this is one thing that she can spend a ton of time on and have someone tell her “Good job, here’s a boat-load of money for your work.” Granted, the money is used for museum stuff, but it’s a direct result of all her hard work. I think I’m gonna like digging into this facet of the museum business.
I’m gonna trying to post some pictures of the Summer Festival, my trip to Palisades with my parents, and some of the work I’ve been doing at DD. It’s a lot, but enjoy! :)