Independence Culture

This week I hung out with the friendly crew in Cultural Resource Management (CRM).  My first day was spent having some great conversations about how the prime historians, archaeologists, and archivists ended up working for INDE. They each explained their part in running the department, and showed me around the many storage rooms filled with thousands of historic files, NPS records, old photographs, maps, flat files, and books.

CRM handles all the archeological, historical, and environmental regulations that federal agencies must comply with. Something as small as cutting down a tree falls under these regulations, and has to be properly approved and recorded. For bigger projects, the NPS reports it online and gets the public opinion. I spent some time with their administrative director looking over PEPC, a database where the public can comment on anything the parks are doing and CRM can look over it and decide if changes should be made.

The next day, I hung out with a volunteer who was working on archiving very old photos of Philadelphia. We made sure that all of the existing labels matched what was going on in the photo, and when they didn’t, we used magnifying glasses to find details in the photo that might reveal where it took place or who was involved.

Later that day, a group of park managers from South Korea visited to listen to the head of CRM talk about how INDE manages its resources and ask questions. The Superintendent joined in about halfway through, and through the interpreter they had a great discussion about how parks work with outside organizations to complete projects and serve the public. It ended with the group gifting a beautiful piece of art to the department as a thank-you.

I received a great one-on-one tour of the Bishop White house, and the next day I got to do an inventory of the entire building. I’m big into books, so I was allowed to take some time to handle a few old books like a Bible from 1800 and magazines from the 1700s.

On Wednesday I worked with museum item managers Gloria and Nicole inside the Second Bank. We unrolled and re-packaged a ton of old textiles including American Flags from the 1800s and hand-embroidered tablecloths from the 1750s. We checked for any type of damage and found evidence of bugs inside one textile, which we quarantined and reported to out resident pest-control.

On my last day Gloria and I finished up textiles and tackled an inventory of the Todd House. Inventory involves checking to make sure that every single item in a historic house is accounted for, which can be extremely tedious, but flew by thanks to Gloria.