Star Gazing in the Desert

Star-gazing IV

This Saturday the museum held it's fourth star-gazing party. Over 160 people - many of them first timers to the museum - came out to enjoy a night with the stars.  Steve, our resident astronomer, gave a brief talk and showed some wonderful pictures he's taken with his telescope.  There were four telescopes for visitors to look through set up around the museum. Many got the chance to see not only a beautiful full moon rising, but also the "Dance of the Planets" when Jupiter, Mercury and Venus appeared together after sunset.  The next "Dance" won't occur until 2021.  One visitor enjoyed the event so much that she sent us an email:  "My husband and I attended your function on Saturday, May 25. I had never been to your museum  . . . What an enjoyable evening! The weather was great, we ran into old friends, saw Jupiter, Mercury and Venus and an informative presentation on asteroids. Well done! I plan on bringing my grandson to your next star gazing function. Thank you!" What worked really well was having enough volunteers that we were able to not only have Steve's talk and the telescopes outside, but also have volunteers answering questions about the Gold Rush exhibit and having volunteers working with the kids doing coiled clay- always a huge hit and always at least 25 kids seemed to be at the tables. Multiple focal points may be a little harder to prepare, but they pay off big time! We even made two of the local papers: IV Press: http://www.ivpressonline.com/news/ivp-news-community-takes-in-dance-of-the-planets-at-stargazing-event-20130527,0,1072911.story The Desert Review: http://www.thedesertreview.com/dance-of-the-planets-over-ocotillo/ Thanks also to Sobe's Restaurant in El Centro for generously sponsoring this event! People used their apps to find constellations Steve presenting NASA's "Near Earth Objects"

A Trip to Providence

Things have been pretty hectic lately. Between finishing our "Gold Fever!" exhibit, writing documents for a museum assessment program, working with people who come into the museum, and trying to fit in some archives work I've been running in circles. Not as much as Jessica has been, but I'm pretty hecitic too.  But I was excited to take a few days off and fly to Providence for a 1 day conference held at the Rhode Island School of Design, sponsored by a group called Conservation Center for Art & Historic Artifacts (CCAHA).  The conference itself was called Out of the Ordinary: Preserving Paper-based Ephemera.  

I know, you just tuned out. But it was a lot of fun. I went with Chelsea Gunn, a friend from Simmons who was also nice enough to let me crash on her couch while I was in town.  We had a great time catching up with each other and listening to presentations on the more difficult aspects of archiving- those little, interesting things that are never really meant to last: ads, posters, buttons, billboards, etc.  The speakers were all very good and I came away with some good ideas- although most of them involved buying very expensive equipment that I won't get at the IVDM. Maybe at my next job.

Then to top things off, RISD had just opened an exhibit we both wanted to see: "Artist, Rebel, Dandy" 
focusing on men's fashion from the Regency and Beau Brummel up to the present.  I was surprised to see modern clothes in the exhibit as well, but it worked.  The Regency era clothes were some of what I liked best, since I like that time period, and the exhibit included newspaper cartoons of the time making fun of dandies, as well as magazines and ads in favor of the different styles of clothes.  It was a good mix and included the tux Fred Astaire wore in Top Hat and a film clip of a dance scene from the movie,  a shirt of Mark Twain's, and the only known surviving shirt belonging to Oscar Wilde (one of my favorite authors!).  It has the initials "SM" for Sebastien Melmoth, which is the name he used at the end of his life when he moved to France after being released from an English prison for being homosexual.  It was a good exhibit, with a nice mix of things.  If anyone's in the area I'd recommend checking it out!

Banyan dressing gowns worn by the Prince Regent, later George IV

Fred Astaire's Top Hat tuxedo

Oscar Wilde's shirt

Gold Fever! Exhibit opening

Rotary volunteers and Interact members

Saturday the 27th was a big day for the IVDM. In the morning, El Centro's Rotary Club and the Southwest High Interact Club spent Rotary's National Volunteer Day curating at the museum.  17 people curated 348 artifacts in 3 hours and found some cool stuff, like a fragment from a porcelain dish and an old Swiss Army knife.

One of the 348 artifacts curated by El Centro Rotary and SW Interact Club. 

Later in the afternoon, visitors from Imperial County, Jacumba and as far as San Deigo helped us celebrate the grand opening of our first traveling exhibit. "Gold Fever! Untold Stories of California's Gold Rush". It's amazing to think that last January we just finished the curation lab and today we have a full exhibit up on the walls.

A major crowd pleaser!

Exploring our new topographical map

Nearly 100 people visited throughout the afternoon to eat tacos at the cart sponsored by the El Centro Rotary Club, listen to traditional cowboy music performed by El Centro's own Jugless Jug Band, and view the exhibit. Adults and children alike enjoyed testing their knowledge of the area and identifying good hiking areas our new
topographical map of San Diego and Imperial Counties.

Families enjoyed our miner's cabin and trying to identify different objects in the miner's trunk a miner would have brought with him for work and for fun. El Centro's own Jugless Jug Band played timeless favorites like "Buffalo Girls" and "Little Brown Jug" and quizzed the museum staff on the historical meaning of each verse to "She'll be Coming 'Round the Mountain".  We didn't know nearly as much as we expected we would. (I guessed right about the 'she' in the song being the mail coach, but who knew the white horses were because the mail coach used Percherons almost exclusively, and they are grey/white?)

Jugless Jug Band

This was really exciting for me as my first major exhibit opening and getting to see all our hard work pay off.  I learned more about the Gold Rush than I ever imagined, and even more about how to put together a fantastic exhibit with only a small starting point.  I'm going to try and write an article about it for publication and a conference- we'll see how it goes!

William Swain Exhibit

The painting that inspired an exhibit

By the time I’m finished with the Gold Rush exhibit I’m sure you’ll all be pretty sick of hearing about it.  But it’s not only the most exciting thing going right now, it’s a great professional experience.  I never studied to be in museums, but I find I enjoy working on the exhibits as much as I do the archives. 

            One of the panels we got for the travelling exhibit is a painting of a miner’s cabin with miners carousing outside while one man is visible writing at a desk inside the cabin.  Neal looked at the painting and decided he’d build a miner’s shack to be part of an interactive exhibit.  Inside the shack we papered one wall with old newspapers and set a panel on “The Life of the Miner”.  One quote in the panel referred to William Swain, a peach farmer from New York who went across land to the gold fields of CA.  According to the quote, Swain wrote numerous letters back home to his wife Sabrina.  This raised my archival instincts and I went in search of William Swain and his letters.  Turns out they are archived at Yale’s Beinecke Library.  Yale has only digitized one journal entry- the first entry Swain wrote while packing his trunk to head to California.  This was a little disappointing since I was hoping for more entries and a few letters, but it was still something.  We printed out the entry as well as part of a letter and I transcribed them on the back of each page so people wouldn’t be scared off by the handwriting and would read the pages. 

Swain desk with letter and journal

            An entire corner of the museum suddenly became the William Swain corner.  The shack had quotes from Swain’s letters on the wall and a trunk we filled with artifacts Swain and other miners might have brought out with them- marbles, playing cards, a miner’s pan, an abacus, a jaw harp, fishing hooks, hardtack.  Little signs encourage kids to try and find what Swain would have used for work versus for fun.  Miner’s clothes hang on hooks on the wall and kids can try them on and have their picture taken.  A little wooden section has been filled with sand as if it was the outside of the cabin and we put shovels and pick axes out leaning against the cabin.  The painting that inspired the cabin hangs above that.  Then we set up a little desk and put Swain’s handwritten pages and the transcripts on them.  A little biography panel of Swain that I wrote hangs above the desk.

William Swain corner

Miner's shack

 My two favorite things (next to the journal entry and letter on the desk) are a map of the United States in 1849 and a picture frame on the desk.  The frame contains prints of daguerreotype images of Swain and his wife Sabrina.  It’s not an exact reproduction of the cased pictures Swain would have carried- he probably only had a cased picture of Sabrina with a velvet lining on the side opposite the picture.  But it’s really nice and I think it’s sweet to imagine William at the desk looking at the pictures while he wrote his letters to Sabrina.  It also does a good job of reminding people that the miners often left family behind.  One woman yesterday asked me if I knew if Sabrina took William back after his adventure, that’s how into she got, wanting to know what happened to the family after the gold fever wore off.  (In case you’re wondering, the answer is yes- Sabrina and their daughter Elizabeth, who was one year old when William left, did take him back and the couple had several more children.  Kids and grandkids for the rest of William’s life had to listen to his tales of life out in the gold fields.) 

William and Sabrina Swain

            The map is a cool old-fashioned looking map, showing states and territories as they stood in 1849.  I printed out little line drawing images of the means of transportation William used- steamer boat from Buffalo to Chicago, flat-bottomed river boat down to St. Louis and ox drawn covered wagons out to the Rockies.  A person walking across the Rockies (because not even oxen were dumb enough to cross the Rockies in spring) and then another ox wagon to the Yuba River in northern California and the gold fields.  I mounted the images on foam board and then the images onto the map to follow William’s path.  It’s really cool looking, pops out to people, and does a nice job of showing, not telling, how William travelled out West.

William Swain's Route

            Plenty of places would have just hung the panels and declared the exhibit open.  But we wanted our exhibit to be more than that.  We wanted to connect patrons with miners and their lives, to make something interactive for all ages and still educational.  We’re not finished with the exhibit yet, but as far as William Swain is concerned, I think we’ve accomplished what we set out to do.

            

Lantern Slide Project

Lantern slides in archival envelopes and box, on display

My favorite project at the museum is the Percy Palmer Lantern Slide collection.  I took over working on the collection when I first got here in September and I am almost finished with it.  The museum has a collection of nearly 800 lantern slides donated to us by teacher and former Brawley principal Percy Palmer.  Palmer taught high school science, especially geology.  Lantern slides were the original PowerPoint slides- glass negatives on 3x4 pieces of glass that could be put into a small 'magic lantern' device and projected onto the wall.  Between 1930-1940 Palmer took photographs throughout Imperial County of different geologic formation to illustrate his school lectures.  He also seems to have either taught or had a personal interest in natural science and architecture, because a large number of photographs are of evolutionary trees and skeletons in museums, cathedrals around the world and historical tourist locations like the Library of Congress and Mount Vernon.  I can only assume he gave lectures on these as well, but he also could have collected them for himself.

Cleaning a lantern slide

My project is to take the slides, clean them, write descriptions of the image and the slide's physical condition, repair any damage that I can, and then re-house the slides in archival envelopes and boxes.  When I'm finished we're going to get them all scanned with a backlit scanner and digitized.  We may set up a separate link on our website to them, we may use the images for prints we can frame and hang on the walls in an exhibit. Palmer didn't do much in the way of writing down locations of the photographs he took, or the names of any people who appeared in the pictures.  I'm hoping to post these 'unknown' photographs on sites like Flicker, Facebook, or other crowdsourcing sites to see if anyone can identify the people and places we can't.  Identification can come from unexpected sources. Some of our Ocotillo friends brought their children and grandchildren to see the exhibit in progress and they saw one of the lantern slide images we have already blown up and framed and are planning to use to illustrate one of the exhibit panels. Palmer hadn't identified the location or the people posed in it, but we were thinking it might connect to one of the mines.  They looked at the pictures and said "That's where we were yesterday!" They had gone on a hike in Shell Canyon and had a picture on their camera that was the exact same location, with one of the grandkids on the same rock as the people in the original 1930s image.  They're going to send us the picture so we can use it as a 'then and now' in an exhibit after the Gold Rush.  It is a great example of never knowing who will be able to help you out and know something that expands what you have already.

Adding Mylar over slide

Most of the slides I have are in good shape and only need a little cleaning. I use an eyeglass cleaning cloth on them and they are fine.  Some are broken in pieces or cracked and need extra support.  For these I encase the image in Mylar and easily removable archival tape along the edges and make notes in the Excel database I've created for the slides. I'm considering working on an article about the collection and my work with them to get published in one of the archival magazines, since getting published is something that potential employers always seem to like to see. I love the collection, and working on the slides is sometimes the best part of my week.  I got a taste of glass negatives in Martha Mahard's Archival Photographs class at Simmons, and getting my hands on actual slides has been a fantastic experience.  Whether it is one others would consider worth writing about, I don't know. But I'm more and more drawn to old photographs- daguerreotypes, tintypes, glass images, etc. and it would seem a shame not to write about this collection so that when I'm finished with it, it will be a collection others know about and can use for research.  That is, after all, one of the points of an archive.

Ghost Mountain Hike

Blair Valley

Monday was the one day out of the week that I wasn't feeling ill from a migraine, which was good timing because that was the day Bill took us up to Blair Valley for some hikes.  There were three circuits- one hike to a pictograph location, one to see some morteros, and one up Ghost Mountain.

Section of pictograph rock

I think the pictograph hike was my favorite.  It was mostly flat, but some challenging inclines for those of us not in great shape, and the plant life included many things we don't get to see lower down in our part of the desert. Giant stalks of agave and yucca run wild there, which is cool because those are the two plants you hear talked about as what the Native Americans use for everything. Yucca in particular is very fibrous and can be turned into cord, shoes, and all sorts of things we wouldn't imagine trying nowadays. The pictographs themselves were cool.  No one knows exactly what they mean, so we can all have our own theories.  Mel's favorite was that they showed pictures designing a new fish trap and a real estate opportunity- act now!  It's very interesting to think about the people who were here first and what their stories might have been, why they drew things in certain places and not others, what the images meant, if they were added to over the years. And how long will they last? Geoglyphs are disappearing due to erosion and people driving over them, will pictographs all face similar fates? Some early archaeologists worked to 'save' some pictographs by repainting them so they'd still stand out. That seems more like ensuring a tourist attraction than respecting a culture's images to me, but I could certainly be convinced to a different way of thinking.

Pictograph rock

The mortero walk was shorter but nice for getting another image of how people lived.  Morteros are indentations in rock where people ground acorns, seeds, etc. to make flour.  Some are pretty shallow, others deep enough to be more like a mortar and pestle arrangement.  When the Kumeyaay were going through this area they would stop here to grind what they'd gathered. Women's work of course, since men wouldn't have the patience for it. The sign at the head of the trail talked about how you should sit and quietly image what it would have been like for people using the area. We all laughed at this- none of us are willing to believe that a large group of women, having time to themselves, are going to sit quietly to work and not gossip, joke, and talk about their husbands while the men aren't around!  Some things don't change that much over time!

Some deeper morteros

The last hike was the hardest.  We went to climb Ghost Mountain to see the ruins of Marshal South's home. South is famous (here anyway) for packing up and moving his family out to live on top of Ghost Mountain back in the 1930s.  The official idea was that he was a writer and wanted to go 'back to nature' in the truest Romantic Emerson/Thoreau tradition, live like the native peoples had and then write articles about it for people back East so they could romanticism this way of life. According to Bill, who worked with one of the sons, the wife and kids hated it (and him too by the end I expect). They lasted about 10 years before Mrs South divorced her husband, took the kids and left. When we got to Ghost Mountain (they named it, no ghosts associated with the site to anyone's knowledge) all we could think was- why did it take her so long to divorce him? I'd have taken one look at the mountain and told my husband to enjoy his experiment, taken the Model T and headed back to civilization.

Along the 'trail' to the top of Ghost Mountain

Looking up Ghost Mountain, near the top

It's about a mile hike up a steep mountain on a narrow and not especially fun trail.  When the Souths lived there they would have had to haul up anything like food, water, supplies, etc. by hand. Maybe by mule if they had one. We all went up at our own pace and I was last. When I finally got to a flat place high up on the trail I thought I'd made it only to find that now there was a lot of rocks to climb up to get to the top. There's no way this guy just went out there to experience nature. I think he must have been hiding from the mafia or something. There's no other explanation for why it would seem like a good idea.

Ruins of Marshal South home

Long story short, peer pressure got me up the mountain that altitude sickness suggested I not climb.  The ruins of the small house and the water cistern they used are still there, along with the tin can trash pile they gathered over the years.  Kind of takes away from the living off the land theory, but maybe Mrs South put her foot down over something at least. The view was pretty cool, but not worth the hassle of living there. It did give you a good idea of how high up you were though. I've often wondered, especially on the drive to and from Yuma, what people were thinking to come out and settle these areas that aren't always hospitable now, let alone back then.  It must have been nearly impossible. I gain a whole new level of respect for the pioneers who did this. But you also have to wonder a little about their sanity for trying it.  In the case of the Souths and Ghost Mountain, I think you have to wonder about the sanity of the idea a lot. They weren't exactly living at Walden Pond out here.  

Going down, can finally make out the Jeep!

Gold Fever!- the making of an exhibit

The big news here at the museum is that we have our first traveling exhibit! While we are mostly focused on Native American and desert work, when we had the chance to display an exhibit on the Gold Rush, we jumped on it.  It arrived almost 2 weeks ago and the official opening date is the end of April. And I'm getting a really good first hand look at what goes into making an exhibit work.

The exhibit that gets sent around is a series of panels with lots of text and some images on them.  Lots were pictures of daguerreotypes which really excited me but also made me sad that we didn't have any of the real thing. Martha Mahard's class has clearly ruined me for reproductions.  We are responsible for providing any artifacts that might enhance the panels.

Everyone knows that very few people are actually going to read text panels all the way through. Especially when they are really heavy on text and there are nearly 20 of them.  People want to see stuff.  We don't have too many artifacts that directly connect to the Gold Rush, but have been able to work with what we have and are in the process of making a pretty cool exhibit.

Jessica cutting newspaper articles

Neal loves building things, so he built a miner's cabin based on one in a panel.  Jessica and I put our library school degrees to good use by doing research for old newspaper articles relating to the CA Gold Rush.  When we've finished printing them out we'll use them as wallpaper in the cabin, as well as a few that are going to be hung on the walls as ads for traveling to CA.  We have some kid's sized clothing to add to the cabin on hooks that kids will be able to try on and get their pictures taken, with a gold pan and a few other little things.  This has taken working until after 8pm several nights in a row to get things the way we want them.

Miner's shack in progress

My favorite part- (remember I am an archivist) is the section I've done in connection to the cabin. One panel mentioned a New Yorker named William Swain who went out to make his fortune and wrote tons of letters and journal entries.  Clearly the panel made it sound like someone had those letters, so I did a little research and found them at Yale's Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscripts Library (where I applied for a fellowship several months ago).  They didn't have as many of Swain's letters or journal entries digitized as I'd hoped, but I was able to print out his journal entry from when he first set off for CA, as well as a few letters from along the way.  I transcribed them and two reproductions of daguerreotype photographs of Swain and his wife.  The journal and letters will go on a little writing desk we found with a biography I wrote up on Swain. We're going to put the photographs in a little case and put that on the desk, just like he would have had them when he was writing.  I've done research on what gold would be worth in 1849, what you'd pay for items in the general store while you were out in mining country in 1849, and some other cool stuff that will hopefully make it into the final exhibit.

I now see why it takes so long to set up an exhibit and some of the work that goes into the behind the scenes aspect. It's been a lot of fun so far and I'm looking forward to finishing it up and showing you the finalized pictures- as well as the reaction at our Grand Opening April 27!