Hersey Photos and Wedding Dresses: Tackling the Big Projects

Yesterday we were closed at DD, but it was definitely our busiest day this week. Gave two different tours through the Beckwith House and Lori gave at least one. Ran a few errands in the morning and discovered that Lori likes epic movies and symphonic metal/rock music. That sure sparked some cool conversations.
Folded more flyers and made ‘admit one free’ cards in the morning. At noon we went to the Mitchell Depot which is all original building with refinished wood made into a restaurant and bar. Very cool and very good food. We sat in on a Kiwanis meeting, Lori was a guest speaker. Short meeting, but lunch was free and my club sandwich was big enough to rob me of the need to make lunch tomorrow. J
When we got back to the museum, there were several people there, so we were bouncing around giving tours and answering the phone. Mick Hersey brought in about 15 more photos for the Hersey Collection, so Lori let me take the reins on accessioning them. Criminy! I feel like I know this family so well by now and part of me really respects and loves them and part of me wants to string them up! I swear there are at least 4 Thomas’s (all with various nicknames) and maybe 3 Harry’s. Tricky part is all the oldest sons in each family have their mother’s maiden name for a middle name, which is very cool, but it makes it very difficult to figure out generations when all the first names are the same and the nicknames are used half the time. But I got them all accessioned and in the system. Our plan is to email Mick with questions and ask for a complete and thorough family tree (which we know he has) before we put everything away into the archives. I feel like this Hersey project is gonna be the baby I refer to in my presentation back at EC.
Gave a tour to a man and his wife and nine year old kid this afternoon from North Carolina. They’ve been on the road for 2 weeks and they’re making a military move to Alaska. Had a really great time talking with them.
Got back to the house a little early. Cindy is very sore and not feeling well, but still felt fit enough to make a KILLER dinner! She butterflied 2 pork tenderloins and beat them, then made this amazing sauté of onions, mushrooms, parsley, and white wine to put over them. Then she rolled them up and put them in the oven. SOOO tasty! Had wild rice and collared greens with it. DELICIOUS! I took pictures of the process and my plate.
After today, I am exhausted. Completely exhausted.
Judy was gone today so I collected the Hobo sensors (record exhibit and gallery light intensity, relative humidity, and temperature) on my own. Goodness am I getting my crash courses in. Last week was observe. This week is do-it-yourself. AND I LOVE IT!
Sensors were being difficult so I had to enter them into the system manually, even the ones hiding in the window cases. Yup, I got to be that girl that climbed through the secret door into the glass case exhibits. You guys reading this only see that in movies. Hahahahaha! Became obvious our Hoboware reader is dead. We’ll have to replace the whole system. Lori’s not too happy about it, but I think that’s because it’ll take more time than money. At this rate, she’d rather buy a new one and pay somebody else to install it overnight. But I may be the one who gets to do that.
After lunch, I finished manually entering all the Hobo sensor info into the system and returned them to their original places throughout the museum. Pat and I sat in the basement for an hour rehousing a photograph, which was nothing compared to the 3 hours with the charcoal drawing.
I thought I was done in the basement after that, but I was very wrong. Lori mentioned I could dig around down there at my leasure for awhile, and I was totally okay with that, but I thought I’d make myself useful and asked if there were any other wedding dresses that she wanted me to look for to be used in the wedding dress exhibit. I got my list, my gloves, and my flashlight, and headed to the basement with a list of wool suits and silk wedding dresses to find for display.
Four hours later, I had found one of the two suits, and 4 of the 9 wedding dresses, plus a pair of yellow and green stripped wedding stockings (why would you DO that??”) two pairs of shoes, and a child’s shirt made from his Mamma’s wedding gown. Needless to say, I’m a little frustrated with my progress, or lack of it, but Lori was impressed I found as many as I did. The clothing we have is either folded into stacks on card tables in the corner or hanging on racks that are crammed so close together it’s a good thing I’m not claustrophobic. Then there’s the whole BE CAREFUL rule. I had fun though! Found some really neat costumes while I was searching, and one of the wedding dresses that I did find was a white and purple gown from 1845 that was cut up and reused to make the daughter’s graduation dress. Very cool! Plus it was purple.
So today is the first day of work I’m heading home feeling dead tired. It’s a good feeling, I think. The happy kind of tired. Received news from Mamma this morning that all the beans are in back home…WOW! Hats off to all the hard workin farmers in Buckley that beat the rain! You guys never fail to amaze me! Also, in celebration of this great accomplishment, Mamma and Daddy are driving up to Mitchell to see me this weekend…I’m very excited to see them! Can’t wait to introduce Mamma to Cindy…that will be an absolute RIOT!

Really Digging In

A really amazing day at DD yesterday AND today!
Yesterday, Lori and I put out flyers for the Music Festival on Mitchell's Main St. and I made several notes about the different coffee houses and antique shops I need to revisit. After I got back to the museum, I helped Ada, Ruth, and Jean fold membership flyers. Oh those old ladies are sooo much fun! We just laughed and laughed.
After lunch, I spent the afternoon completing a very unique and exciting project. A man named Mick Hersey showed up and had an encyclopedia’s worth of information for us about some old family photos we had in our archives. His mother brought some back in 1967, and he had brought a huge box of more pictures in 1970 and 1974. He was back in town for his father’s funeral, and he has spent the last several years doing genealogy research so he could now tells us who was in the pictures, who they married, where the pictures were taken, who took them, EVERYTHING! Lori let me take care of him, which was so great. We went into the basement for a good 2 hours and I pulled about 60 photos from the 5 huge file cabinets that house our accessioned photograph archives. I would pull them, he would write down everything he knew about them, and then I’d put them back. Some were hard to track down, but we did end up finding all he was looking for and while we were doing it, he was telling me all about the pictures and drawing up family trees for me. So once we got all the pictures found, Lori had me get into PastPerfect, pull up every picture, and add into each picture's file all the information Mick had told me. Took me about 2 hours to get it all entered because there were so many connections among the pictures and PastPerfect was happy to have every possible detail I could dig up. By the time it was all over, I felt like I knew Mick Hersey’s family history better than most of his siblings.
Best part came towards the end of my PastPerfect entries. A few of the pictures were not yet entered into the archives, so I got to give them accession numbers and put my own name down as the cataloger! YAY! I’m in the system! :) Kind of an exciting Monday: I spent most of it alone in a dark, scary basement going through filing cabinets, and the other part of it at a computer entering all my findings into the database!
But that was Monday. Thought I couldn't beat it, then I got to DD this morning.
If yesterday was my crash course in cataloguing, today was my crash course in rehousing. Went to the basement with Pat for 3 hours and worked on a 18” by 22” photograph of a beautiful young woman…or what we thought was a photograph. Once we put on the gloves, took it out of the intricately carved and painted frame and examined it, we discovered it was actually a charcoal drawing. BEAUTIFUL! Took us til noon to get all the scratches, stains, and spots recorded. We even found a few charcoal fingerprints from the artist on the back! Then we cut out new backing and a new frame support, cleaned the glass, put the frame back together, applied the new backing, attached new hanging gadgets, and hung it in the huge stack-like hanging galleries in the basement. Whew! What a morning! Tedious and stressful, but oh so exciting! By the time I got to sit in on Lori’s marketing meeting at 1:00, one of the board members said I was glowing and asked if I had just gotten engaged or something. That made me laugh, especially since my response was, “No, I just got done rehousing this really cool charcoal piece in the basement!” :)
Not a whole lot of action this afternoon. Ran some errands with Lori and got things ready for the Music Festival on Saturday. Cleaned the glass display cases, put up more flyers around town, and made out our schedule for Friday for picking up ice cream, sodas, coolers, etc. Not as much fun as the morning, but it’s all part of the job, and that charcoal piece really did make it all worth it!
Really hot the last few days, but not terrible humid like home. It’s just at that point of hot that I’m glad I’m in AC all day. By the way, I want to give a shout out to my amazing Grandpa Roger, who celebrated his birthday yesterday. I also want to give a shout out to my equally amazing Grandpa Geiger, who passed away fourteen years ago yesterday. I’ve been thinking about him a lot today and how he always smelled like his pipe. Miss you Grandpa!!
Also putting up some pictures of my host family's house! Me and Clay and Cindy worked outside over the weekend so the lawn and gardens look WONDERFUL! Enjoy! :)

Wild flowers in Cindy's yard. We're not sure what they are, but they're GORGEOUS and they smell heavenly at night.

Cindy's Place. It's her little shed with some old antique pictures, furniture, and a fan so we sit out there and read and talk at night.

Clay's truck....I'm helping him fix it up as much as he'll let me. :)

Operation Duck Retrieve

Felt pretty good and optimistic this morning. Cindy didn't go in to work, so no sunrise walk. Hence, I slept in til 7:30. Loverly. We put the air conditioner in my window yesterday, so it is very pleasant in my room.
DD had it’s first soon-to-be-annual Duck Retrieve today! We sent over 750 rubber duckies (armed with pistols and cowboy hats, no less) floating over Lake Mitchell and a fiesty black lab volunteered to dive in and rescue 3 of them for our 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place winners. We raised around $2,000 for the museum! WHOOT WHOOT!
Ended my first week at DD with a Diet Coke and I'm hoping to catch a movie at the local Starlite drive-in tonight. Yup, it’s been a good week. Also got to work with Beth some more and get a few things entered into the PastPerfect program. Boy, have the computer skills I got working at EC admissions helped out with this. Got all the tables put away from the banquet last night, and the nice ladies that hosted it left us about 15 pieces of very delicious strawberry shortcake. I had 2 pieces before lunch. YUMMY!
I got some more pictures of the outdoor buildings around the museum, so I’m posting them, along with some fun ones from the Duck Retrieve. Besides the museum building, there is a one room school house, church, and the old Victorian Beckwith house, all of which were moved to their current location on the DD property. Enjoy the pictures everybody and have a great weekend!!!!

Operation Duck Retrieve Pictures!

Eureka College really IS the Center of the Universe!

   So I wasn't planning on blogging today, but I HAVE to share this! : )
  While Lori was giving a couple a tour of the old Victorian Beckwith House this afternoon, I learned that Louis Beckwith (founder of the first Corn Palace in Mitchell in the 1890s) met his wife Mary in Pekin, IL. I was really surprised to find such an important person for Mitchell and DD to have a connection back to Illinois and so near my college. I asked Lori about it later and she said that yes, Louis grew up in the Tazewell County area and after he married Mary, they moved to Mitchell in 1882. I mentioned that he would have been in the area when Lincoln came to speak at Eureka College in 1856. Lori’s response was “Oh yes! Louis did write in his memoir that his favorite memory growing up was going to the campus with his father to see Lincoln speak. He talked about it a lot to his friends at the Corn Palace.” Once again, Dr. Rodriguez, you were right…Eureka College is the center of the universe! I’m planning to do some further research and try to figure out how much connection Louis Beckwith and his family may have had with Eureka College before he moved to Mitchell. I’ll bet there’s plenty of information to find here, and it may be fun to dig into when I get back to campus in the fall.
     In other news, I worked mostly with Lori’s daughter Jamie today. We focused on the wedding dress exhibit, which we pretty much started today and still has a lot of work to be done, but I'm setting a personal goal of finishing it before I leave DD. Such BEAUTIFUL dresses as old as 1864, some in absolutely terrible shape, but it was a lot of fun putting on the gloves and really handling the artifacts. Getting the dresses onto dress forms and figuring out how to properly display them was fun, but stressful because we had to be oh so very careful. I definitely got a lesson in patience.
      Judy also came in today and did her weekly review of the HOBO units, so Lori had me go ‘on rounds’ with her and see how each of the HOBO units work and how to take readings. Unfortunately, the units haven’t been working properly lately so we had to take most of the units out, haul them back to Lori’s office, and enter the temperature, light, and humidity data into the HOBOware on her computer by hand. Still pretty cool gadgets, though. Ahh…toys of the trade.
     That's all for now. Took some pictures today, but I want to take more tomorrow and I'll get them uploaded by the weekend! : )

It's All Part of the Job...

    Woke up to a beautiful morning and flowers on my desk from Mom, Dad, and Austin. They surprised me at the museum yesterday with a bouquet delivery and balloons. I'm so spoiled! <3
    After a wet and muddy walk with Cindy through the back pasture, I washed up and headed into work early. Rushed out the door a little too fast, though, and forgot my lunch on the counter, but Clay was an incredibly nice guy and dropped it by around 10 during his errands.
   Only me and Lori at the museum today since we're closed. Grunt work didn’t really start til after 2:00, though. She showed me how they use QuickBooks, the museum bookkeeping system, in the morning. Even though we were closed, a family of 9 from Virginia came by, so we let them in. Interesting to be working on the payroll and financial functions at the front desk. This isn’t really what my training focus is here at DD, but it’s all part of Lori’s job and what she does here as the only full-time staffer.
     After the bookkeeping was up to date, we ventured into the paper-covered realm of Lori’s office and tried to make contact with some local musicians. This Saturday is DD’s annual Summer Music Festival, featuring free concert performances by local and regional folk/country/bluegrass performers. They vary in styles, instruments, and backgrounds. One is a math professor on the Dakota Wesleyan campus across the street and another is driving all the way from Minnesota for a 45 minute set. Not too shabby, DD.
     In between making calls and sending emails, and entering every possible new form of contact and performer name into the PastPerfect system, we drove downtown to the local radio station where Lori recorded some radio spots for the Music Festival as well as the Rubber Duck Race we’re hosting at Mitchell Lake Saturday afternoon as a fundraiser. Not sure how we’re going to split volunteers/staff between the Music Festival and the Duck Race, but it’ll work out somehow. Given the choice, I’d go with the Music Festival….museum volunteers are making homemade pies and ice cream! Yay!
Before locking up, we redid the Discovery Land kid’s area. Discovery Land is based around a theme that changes every few weeks or so. We took down all the U.S. Immigration-theme murals, activities, maps, and toys and hauled them to the basement, replacing them with Wild, Wild, West-themed activities and murals, including a chuck wagon with rusting metal wheels pleading for WD-40 with every turn and Shorty, the Dakota Discovery Safety Horse made of an old saw horse, bicycle and tire parts, a colorful antique saddle, and a tiny white plastic cowboy hat. Probably the most awkward thing I’ve ever tried to haul into an elevator. The freight elevator was removed a few years ago, so hauling anything up from the basement that is longer than 8 feet in any direction means bypassing the human elevator and taking the emergency staircase. Some call it an adventure, some call it a vocabulary lesson. Either way, it took both of us and I can’t imagine Lori trying to do that by herself.
    Tomorrow will be a big day. During June, July, and August, DD is open from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. Not sure if I’ll keep those hours with Lori or if Cindy and Clay will want me home earlier for dinner. I have to check with my new/temporary family on what my hours with Lori will be from here on out. Either way, we can expect a lot more visitors.
    Here. We. Go.