After deciding to finally begin work on the Sprague collection two weeks ago, I knew I had to stick with it. Though it wasn’t what I had hoped — the collection at this point requires a lot of “bagging and tagging” — there was a bit of a thrill to handling something that old.
But somehow, I felt disconnected. Maybe it was because I am only just now delving into these boxes, or maybe it’s because the points are so far from where they were found and there’s no way to bring them home. Honestly, however, I think I might just be not as interested in the collection as I thought I was.
I love the concept of working this far in the past, but I have so little in common with the people who used these points. They lived about a thousand years ago somewhere in the eastern half of North America. It’s hard to say for certain where some of these points came from, and I know next to nothing about the people who used them. I know I eventually will be able to understand so much about these people just from the way the points have been knapped or whatever, but I don’t really know how I feel about it until then.
I know it seems like I’m giving up so quickly. And that is exactly why I’m taking a step back from the collection. I found myself struggling to actually want to come into the museum to work on them, and I don’t want that to happen. I enjoy the museum as a whole and some aspects of it so much, and having to drag myself to come sort points was, at this point, detrimental to my experience.
For these reasons, after two weeks of working with the collection, I’m stepping back for a while. I will return to it here and there, but I don’t want it to be my only project. There are still so many things about the museum that I want to experience and learn!
Most recently, one of the other interns taught me how to work with textiles, something I haven’t done yet. She showed me how they write the number on tiny strips of fabric and then hand-sew the label into a discreet seam. Because Jessica loves textiles, there are books upon books in the collections room detailing the evolution of fashion since Athens County was initially settled. Right now, all I can say is, “Oh, this looks like it came from sometime between 1850 and 1940…” and I would love to change that.
I think I have officially decided that my passion here is with documents, especially personal correspondence and newspapers. Combined, they are such a rich, contextual records of the happenings of history. I can’t tell if I like them simply because I do or because they’re relatively familiarly easy to analyze. It’s just like reading a book for English class. I do think that personality comes out in amazing ways through personal correspondence, but it can’t be the only way of knowing someone in history. It would be incredible to pick someone in Athens’ history and study him/her, kind of like how I did with Gladys Brooks (a WWII WAC and Athenian) when I was helping with the Women in WWII exhibit. Jumping from artifact to artifact seems impersonal and not useful.
Another new goal of mine is to design and put up an exhibit of some sort before I graduate. Even though I’m not going to be doing it for credit, I fully intend to continue volunteering at the museum next semester and beyond, so I will have time to get really in-depth in a topic. But what would I do? After writing through this, it seems like I should just pull together a profile display on one particular individual’s life. That could be interesting! It would have to be someone who donated a lot of things to the museum… Should I do a profile on one of the members of the Sprague family? That would incorporate both the points and the profile, and so much of our collection belonged to that family. Seems like a good idea to me!
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