Updated Tour of the Collections

Twoish weeks ago, some maintenance men came into our storage unit in order to do some work on some important pipes or something in the ceiling while Kevin was gone. He was very clear that the men needed to be careful because the whole room was filled with historical artifacts. Unfortunately, this happened:

That doesn't look good...

Yeah. That's Teflon. The smudgedness isn't from Kevin trying to clean it up. The workers noticed the spill, yet continued to work as they had been. So we get this:

Why stop when everything is obviously okay?

And this:

That will buff out

The Teflon got on everything.

Dollhouse

When Kevin tried to clean it off some of the metal and wood objects, it only stripped the finish, so the items that were entrusted into Ramsey County's care have been marked and damaged because some workers were lazy and negligent. It's very sad.

On a more positive note, here is an interesting object in our collection:

Rusty wheel

Kevin researched and researched and was absolutely confounded as to what this piece of farming equipment is or how old it is. All he knew was that it came out of the barn at the Gibbs Farm, which is the living history 1870s farm owned and operated by RCHS. Eventually, a volunteer who had worked at the farm years ago was browsing the collection, as we frequently do, and found these. He was incredibly surprised to see it labeled as an artifact because it was a modern tool that the employees at the farm had made in order to move heavy equipment around. So while this had a catalog number, and therefore a historical Gibbs piece of equipment, it was completely modern! This wheel was a really good lesson in being careful about artifacts in a collection, because anything can have an inventory number written on it.

Cool Gibbs tag

Here are some fun pictures of stuff I found this week:

Some sort of farm something

Newly donated Mounted Police jacket

Mounted Police shirt

Bicycle. Keep away hipsters. Not yours.

I ended up not doing my usual archaeology project today, but before Kevin called and told me to do something else, I got it all set up and loved these metal bits.

Good thing I got a tetanus shot. I think...