Name: Iris Wright
Class Year: 2029
Intended Major: Linguistics
Internship Organization: Lakewood Historical Society
Internship Title: Generalist Intern
Location: Lakewood, Ohio
What’s happening at your internship? We would love to hear what kind of work you are doing!
At the Lakewood Historical Society, one of my favorite things that I do is leading tours in our local house museum – The Oldest Stone House, built in 1834. I love getting to share fascinating bits of history with curious visitors. Our community is small enough that a lot of museum guests have family roots in early settlers of the area, so I often get to learn information from the visitors as well, which is always exciting.
Leading tours at the Oldest Stone House Museum always lead to interesting questions about the gravestones we have outside – they are from an old family cemetery and were moved to the site of the house
I also spend time helping with administrative tasks and organization, which is helpful to better understand what exactly goes on behind the scenes in a historical society. Many people will send in questions about local history which I get to research in the historical society’s archives. I love seeing how excited people are when they finally get their questions answered.
Why did you apply for this internship?
I applied for this internship because I was interested in having a better understanding of what working in a museum and a historical society is like. I also am interested in history, especially the local history of the Rust Belt and North East Ohio and am always interested in learning more.
What is something you have learned from your internship that you didn’t expect?
The inside of the house is set up how it would have looked in the 1830s-1850s, with almost entirely authentic artifacts found in other old houses in Lakewood. This is the parlor, where much entertainment was had
Growing up in the area, I learned a lot of local history in school and had attended summer camps and events led by the historical society as child. Because of this, I thought I already knew most of what there was to know about our town’s history. I was immediately proven wrong! There is always so much to learn. One of the tasks I had was sorting through all of the books in the library – a daunting, but exciting task for a book lover like me.
There were so many interesting books, including many autobiographies and memoirs from Lakewood residents, historical and current, with fascinating stories. I also learned so much from giving tours from community members and other docents, about local history and other things they were interested in.
What is most rewarding about your internship?
I did a lot of research into Lakewood’s Plank Road, which was a toll road. Here is a picture from our archives of the old toll house, which is now a regular family home in Lakewood
The most rewarding part of my internship has been being able to see the community engage with local history. I got to help out at the historical society’s summer camp, which introduces kids to local history through hands on experiences. It was so fun to see what parts of history brought out the kids’ interest and curiosity. They would ask questions I had never even thought about and bring a whole new viewpoint to the history I have become so familiar with throughout the summer. Outside of that experience, it was also rewarding to get to see other community members gain interest in history as well. The historical society does a century home program, and seeing people so excited to see their houses turn 100 this year was so amazing!
My tasks are varied from day to day, dependent upon my supervisor (the Museum’s chief archivist)’s needs, but some of the highlights of my internship so far have included working on a collection of photographs endowed to the museum featuring artists of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. Chiefly, I was able to identify many of the subjects of the collection’s photos whose identities had previously been unknown to those working with the collection. Another current project which I am especially excited about involves a large collection of Georgian-language books, many of these materials were printed abroad, especially in France, where following the Soviet invasion of Georgia, a “Menshevik” opposition government was run in exile. The work of an archivist is piecing together a narrative from the available puzzle pieces and it has been a fulfilling endeavor to do just that with these Georgian books, not only unsheathing the little-known history of these international publications but also unveiling the personal histories of the individuals who bequeathed these materials to the museum in the first place.
After dedicating my previous two summers to intensive Russian study, both domestic and abroad, I knew that I wanted to utilize this summer to gain practical experience in a field in which I could utilize the language skills I had worked so hard to develop. I have a long-standing, albeit casual interest in (and love for) museums, even taking a museum studies course a few semesters ago. I thus jumped at the opportunity to synthesize a latent passion of mine with the language that has served as the backbone of my undergraduate career.
Many of the skills I am acquiring over the course of this internship are important in that they involve linguistic skills I would be hard-pressed to acquire solely in a classroom setting. For instance, I am developing a novel, field-specific lexicon in Russian, a skill set I can see lending itself to future museum work. I have also become increasingly comfortable with reading Pre-Reform orthography (fun fact: Russian was written differently prior to 1917), a crucial skill when working with any sort of Pre-Revolutionary materials and of especial interest to me as a linguistics student.
