Winter Collections Management Intern

When flood waters hit Iowa in 1993, The Des Moines Center of Art was on ground high enough to protect the art center from immediate danger. However, when the municipal water-purifying plant lost power/was damaged, the streets raging with flood waters were of no help to The Des Moines Center of Art. The museum had to truck in thousands of gallons of water each day to maintain steady relative humidity levels to protect The Des Moines Center of Art collections from irreversible damage.

With the rising snow accumulation levels on everyone’s mind in the Virginia area, we can all relate to the dangers of winter weather. At the B&O Railroad Museum in Baltimore, MD, that danger became reality in February of 2003. The roof of the museum collapsed under the strain of gathering twenty-five inches of snow within a twenty-four hour period. Half of the museum’s Roundhouse roof collapsed on the oldest and most comprehensive collection of American railroad equipment and artifacts. The museum has since estimated that it would take at least six years for the objects and locomotives to be repaired.

Disasters, both natural and man-made, occur on a daily basis. However, not everyone believes a disaster, whether large or small scale, will directly affect them. We are also not able to fathom the destruction and heartache a disaster can cause. The museum field, looked upon by the general public as protectors of our cultural resources, has to not only believe that disasters can happen to their buildings and collections, but prepare and train their staff to help mitigate them. If cultural resource institutions do not prepare for the “worst case scenario,” they risk damaging not only their most important assets--their collections--but also risk putting visitors and staff in danger and hurting their professional reputations.

For my third internship here at Stratford Hall, I have taken on the task of updating and rewriting the institution’s Disaster Plan. It has proven to be a challenging yet incredibly educational experience, especially for someone who is an aspiring Collection’s Manager. Even as someone who cares for collection objects on a daily basis, it is astounding how many ways pieces in the collection can be harmed and how much responsibility it is to keep them safe. Objects aside, a museum must also plan for the safety of its staff and visitors. Everything from responding to a small injury to reacting to a bomb threat must be considered and carefully planned for. Luckily for me, disaster planning is a big business in the museum world so there is an unlimited amount of resources out there and a very willing staff right here to help.

A Disaster Plan addresses the prevention and response to natural disasters and risks an organization is most likely to face. Most plans cover disaster: mitigation and prevention; preparedness; response; and recovery. Disaster mitigation and prevention attempts to eliminate or reduce the probability and effects of disasters by making large-scale improvements like:

• building structures to withstand earthquakes or floods;
• removing trees that are close to buildings; and
• installing security and fire suppression systems

or things as small as:

• keeping gutters clean;
• periodically testing generators;
• regularly servicing equipment; and
• performing routine building inspections.

Disaster preparedness is simply being as organized and equipped as possible to immediately respond to a disaster in order to save lives, minimize damage, and facilitate the recovery stage. A few examples of disaster preparedness include:

• providing training for staff;
• performing practice drills; and
• having procedures in place for saving high-priority assets to the organization.

Disaster response provides temporary care and relief to victims and ensures avoidable casualties and property damage does not occur. Examples include:

• following evacuation procedures;
• having easy access to disaster packs with emergency supplies and instructions; and
• using clear communication and a quick response time for getting emergency responders on the scene.

Finally, disaster recovery includes those tasks which return life and daily operation of the organization to normal or at least to an improved level. Some important examples include:

• salvaging and conserving the collection objects;
• receiving relief from grants, donations, and government funds
• restoring the buildings; and
• reinstalling the objects and reopening the exhibits to the public.

Too many cultural institutions do not have Disaster Plans in place, be it due to the lack of staff, time, or money, or pure naïveté and denial. However, even if you do have a plan, you cannot always account for all the possibilities or grasp the potential damage that could occur. Below are a few more examples of museum and historic structure disasters.

• The Buckingham Palace has caught on fire not once, but twice. In 1992 a fire broke out that damaged more than 100 rooms and numerous items from the Royal Collection. The fire started because of a spotlight shining on a curtain in the Queen’s Private Chapel. Then in 2002 a smaller fire broke out but luckily spared artwork and historic treasures.

• Just last year the Historic Archives of Cologne, Germany suddenly collapsed due to subway construction beneath the building. One of the only collections in Germany to survive World War II completely intact, the collection spanned more than a thousand years worth of documents, maps, drawings, photographs, books, and artifacts.

• In June of 2008 the University of Iowa Museum of Art had flood damages of $5.5 million to the museum building and $500,000 to its contents. Due to a well conceived and implemented flood plan, the museum was able to evacuate 80% of their collections in less than four hours – that’s over 10,000 objects!! And fortunately, there was no lasting damage to the rest of the collection.

- Kathryn “Kat” Marshall, Collections Management Intern

Behind the scenes: the curator in winter

What does a museum curator do in the depths of winter when her museum galleries and historic house rooms are closed to the public? Research and writing, of course! The quiet of these weeks since the new year have allowed me to focus on some major tasks that often fall by the wayside during our busy seasons.

One of my winter projects has been the detailed planning for the room settings in the upcoming Southwest outbuilding (you may have seen a Facebook video talking about the building, and read more about the project here and here). I've been planning for object conservation, reproduction objects like trunks and a bed, working with a private collector who will be lending a table for the chamber, and discussing textile options with an historic textile scholar. 

 

I've also been working on an object list and furnishing details for the Northwest Stair Passage in the house (which Phil Mark, our Director of Preservation, has touched upon quite a bit in his blog posts). There's not much floor space in this stair passage, but a few key objects will be on display: a clothespress (for linen storage), a folding bed (for overnight guests or servants), and a close stool (a toilet for, well, personal hygiene).

Another of my goals this winter has been to catalog a backlog of objects that have been sitting waiting for a little bit of research. We had two pistols, for instance, that were found by our accounting staff in a vault in our administration building. 18th-century pistols, I should clarify. Were they accepted for the historic collection and just never transferred over? I've been working with a firearms dealer to help with the identification of the pistols, researching their makers and the marks on them.

Directional Update from the Preservation Department...

It feels like lots of my time lately has been spent in a directional space here at Stratford Hall, these spaces being the Northwest Stair Passage and the Southwest Outbuilding. Each project is moving along, but it can be a little hectic trying to juggle the two and keep them both safely in the air.

In the Southwest Outbuilding, two of the three rooms are about 90% complete. In the workshop space I began to finish the cleaning and conservation of the chimney breast. I am continuing where the conservator left off so he can return to finish conservation of the horse mural. This cleaning and conservation consists of picking off the remaining paint with a scalpel and then washing the wall with distilled water and cotton. My intern, Abby Muse, helped me one day and the two of had so much fun it was difficult to contain ourselves...

The Northwest Stair Passage is also progressing. There have been a few recent snags, but nothing major. Every day, the spaces begin to look more and more like rooms again. The plaster contractor, Cooke's of Richmond, Va, has been hard at work plastering the spaces. They are almost finished with the lower level and will be moving to the Main Floor space next week. They have been very cooperative and respectful while working in the Great House. Our other contractor, Chuck Rackley, is getting closer and closer to wrapping his work up. He was here this week installing some beautiful door architraves that he made. His assistant, Billy, has also been a great help on the project. Next week we will be bringing in a ladder stair that Chuck and Billy made for access to the attic. When the ladder stair is in the room, the plasterers will be able to close everything up and finish the plaster work. Decisions on paint color have been made but I will save that for a future post, so stay tuned!

Interpretation Department Happenings

With our shortened hours, visitors may wonder what we're doing during the winter months here at Stratford Hall. I wanted to report on some of the projects my staff and I are working on this January, February, and March so all of our readers could understand what goes on behind the scenes--while we may not be open to the public seven days a week right now, we're certainly keeping busy!

Our biggest project right now is revamping our school programs for elementary students. The first step in this process is going through our current programs and making some necessary changes to those. For one thing, we're making each station approximately an hour, instead of 25 minutes. This means putting a couple stations together--for example, beginning in the fall, when teachers want the Indentured program, they'll also get the slavery program, too (these were previously separate, and it was possible to choose one over the other). If we talk about indentured servitude without talking about slavery, students are only getting part of the picture of workers on this plantation when the Lees lived here. Thus, we're putting those programs together, adding additional hands-on activities, updating the information we tell students when they're here, and tightening up all of the programs' ties to the Virginia Standards of Learning (SOLs).

We're also updating the information that goes out to the schools--pre-visit information will become more detailed and post-visit information will ask how this trip affected the students' learning, so we can judge whether or not our programs are effective. This is going to be a long process, but we have high hopes that all the work will be done by the summer so we can use these newly updated programs for the fall 2010 school visits. To do this work, I've asked several of the interpretive staff to spend their time researching, brainstorming, writing, and doing these programs. I also have two interns from the University of Mary Washington working with me to create a new school program and update several of the older ones. We're all working together to make school visits here top-notch.

Along with this big project, the interpretation department is conducting a lot of training this winter. Aside from several in-service days where we discuss (and practice!) techniques to working with school students, the importance of a theme in tours, and the different types of interpretation, we are also visiting several local historic sites to see how those places do their tours and programs. Last week, we went to Montpelier to see the changes made there and how its staff works in an atmosphere that is always evolving (a very helpful learning experience), and soon we're going to drive the opposite direction to visit Shirley Plantation and Berkeley Plantation on the James River.

These are just a few of the projects going on in the interpretation department this winter--as you can see, we're keeping busy learning new things in order to make your visits to Stratford Hall better every time!

Winter Changes at Stratford Hall

For the months of January and February, we are following new winter hours. Stratford Hall's Great House andVisitor Center will be open only on weekends and holidays--January 18th for Martin Luther King, Jr. Day; January 19th for Robert E. Lee's Birthday (not an "official" holiday, of course!); and February 15th for Presidents' Day. On March 1, we will return to normal operating hours. The grounds are still open every day from 9:30-4pm, so people are still welcome to hike the trails or visit the beach and look for fossils.

While we operate on this shorter schedule, we're making some changes around the site. For starters, we will be opening a new cafe in our current gift shop building, putting the food services and gift shop together. This cafe will offer light fare for people to purchase, including sandwiches, soups, and salads, and will be open on days Stratford is open to the public. The cafe will have both indoor and outdoor seating, so visitors can enjoy sitting outside during the warm summer months. It will officially open in the spring, once Stratford returns to its normal operating hours. The photos on this blog posting are of our contractors working on the new bathroom in the gift shop/cafe.

This also means that our dining room will now be open only for catered events (this is a permanent change). To book a catered event, please call Kay Campbell at (804) 493-8038, ext. 9696, or e-mail her at kcampbell@stratfordhall.org.

We hope you'll be able to visit us in the spring to experience the new changes at Stratford Hall!

Progress in the workshop thanks to the M-WTCA

Phil Baker and Neil Bohnert of the M-WTCA look over potential tools with Phil Mark, Stratford's Director of Preservation

With the official reopening of the Southwest outbuilding slated for April 2010, we are coming down the home stretch with furnishing research.  The workshop area of the building (the first room you walk into) is in good shape thanks to the support of the Mid-West Tool Collectors Association (M-WTCA).

These avid tool collectors and scholars have been helping to identify period-appropriate tools for a woodworking shop and are helping us understand the meaning of notations from our Lee family documents.

In the inventory of Stratford taken in 1758, for instance, we see listed:

Coopers Ditto [tools]

sawyers tools

Carpenters Do [tools]

What specialized tools did each of these kinds of craftsmen need?

And in Richard Henry Lee's memorandum book [in the Huntington Library collection] we have been finding even further information about woodworking at Stratford.  In the document are notations for Lee lending J. Paxton, Stratford's joiner, tools such as "1 1/2 inch Mortice chisel" as well as planes and other items.  This raises questions for us:  What does a 1/2 inch mortise chisel look like in 1787?  Where did the Stratford joiners, carpenters, sawyers, and coopers get their tools?  Who were these men?

We hope to answer these questions and many more with our new display.

Christmas at Stratford Hall

Our yearly Christmas at Stratford Hall will be held this Saturday, December 12, 2009 from 12pm until 8pm.

This year, we're doing things a little bit differently. From 12pm to 4pm, we will have a variety of children’s activities in the Visitor Center, including Christmas crafts and visits with Santa Claus. We will also take pictures of children with Santa Claus and will charge only $1 per picture to print them. This family-oriented portion of the day will also include fun activities in the area around the Great House, where children and parents alike can learn about Christmas during the Lees’ time at Stratford Hall.

At 4:30pm, visitors will begin visiting the Great House to learn about Christmas in the 18^th-century. The evening will begin with refreshments and entertainment in the Visitor Center. Then, as you travel across the bridge to the gift shop area, you will enjoy a bonfire where you will meet your guide. From there you will step back into Colonial times as you are guided through parts of the Great House, where you will see how food was served and view the festivities with the Lees’ guests in the Great Hall. You will end your visit in the outdoor kitchen, where you will learn how food was prepared for the Lees and their guests. African American foodways historian Michael Twitty will be cooking in the kitchen. The last tour will take place at 8pm.

Please note that the Great House will be closed until 12pm on December 12, 2009. If you have any questions about this program, please contact me at llawfer@stratfordhall.org. The cost is $10 for adults and $5 for children ages 6-11.

Hope to see you here at Stratford Hall this Saturday!