What I'm Doing

Hi! So at the beginning of the summer, I started an internship with the Ramsey County Historical Society in St. Paul, MN. I have one fellow intern, Lauren and a supervisor named Kevin.

At the beginning of the summer, Lauren and I started working on a textile project in which we unrolled large textiles, like quilts, tablecloths and sheets from quilt racks and then rerolled them after double checking their database information. It was a really tedious and frustrating process, but we finally finished it last week!

Lauren and I are currently working on separate projects until we start our next joint effort. I have really taken a liking to the Archaeology project. What I do is take all of the small artifacts recovered from the Gibbs farm and put them in baggies and give them inventory numbers that Kevin can then enter into the database. It's really tedious, but I love it. It's really relaxing and sometimes I come across interesting fragments like balloon and bandaids. As Kevin keeps telling me, archaeology is trash. It's an interesting way to look at it because he is right. The things that we are finding in the ground would have been considered garbage in their time. Things like charred wood, broken mortar, broken pots and shattered glass. Yet while they were trash at one point, they are now considered valuable fragments of the Gibbs family history.

However, my time in the collections department has really made me think about just what exactly is history, and what is truly worth being preserved? Two weeks ago, Lauren and I unrolled and rerolled over a dozen tables clothes, all identical save their dimensions. It really made me wonder why these tablecloths, that didn't look more than 40 years old, were being saved. I'm sure my grandma could find something similar at a garage sale. What makes a piece history? What makes it worth saving? What makes this tablecloth worth the resources? The tissue paper, the time Lauren and I spent rolling and documenting, the time Kevin will spend entering them into a database, the space they take up on the quilt racks.

While some things seem like they are not quite special enough to be saved, we always come across really amazing textiles. This quilt, it was spectacular:

Supa Coo

The really cool thing about it was all of the names embroidered on it that they considered important: 

Huzzah for Garfield!!!

So while the question of "What is an important artifact?" has not been answered on a grand scale, it's things like this quilt that really make me appreciate the time, effort and resources people are dedicating to their preservation. We'll see what other artifacts I find next week that make me want to tear out my hair or sit and view them for twenty minutes.