00:00 - Good morning.

00:01 - I'd like to welcome all of you to our last of the sessions.

00:04 - The last Saturday morning session here at the,

00:08 - And our session is entitled Interpreting.

00:10 - Industrial History and Working Class Lives in the Mid-Atlantic.

00:15 - I'm Michael McCoy.

00:16 - I'm professor of history and chair of the Department of Global Studies,

00:20 - at Orange County Community College in New York.

00:23 - And today, I have the pleasure of chairing a panel that brings together

00:27 - three wonderful scholars working in the field of public history.

00:32 - And our goal today is to explore the

00:34 - the challenges and the rewards of telling the stories of labor,

00:39 - immigration and of class in industrial towns.

00:45 - This roundtable, then, I would suggest, is about doing history, right.

00:49 - And it's about doing history at sites focused on the lives

00:53 - and experiences of working folks.

00:56 - As such, I think what we'll find is

00:58 - and our goal here is to address a range of of what we would describe as historical,

01:04 - methodological and even practical issues that that seem

01:08 - to arise at the intersection of working class history and of public history.

01:13 - What are the sorts of questions

01:15 - we've been thinking about or we hope to think about?

01:17 - Well, maybe like why and how do we present the lived experiences of minors,

01:23 - factory hands and those who are engaged in a variety of waged and then waged work

01:29 - that shaped the life and world of an industrial town?

01:33 - How do we engage with various publics,

01:36 - and how do those publics shape our narratives?

01:40 - How do we strike a balance between issues of structure and those of agency?

01:46 - How do we confront the archival limitations

01:49 - that sometimes stand in the way of telling the stories

01:52 - that we want to tell, the stories of working folks?

01:55 - What sort of lessons?

01:57 - Positive or negative,

02:00 - have panelists gotten from their efforts to present the past?

02:05 - What's the future of working class history?

02:08 - I mean, a historian of working people.

02:09 - I hope it's really bright.

02:12 - But let's find out.

02:14 - And I think one of the sort of bigger questions that we, that I would

02:17 - really like to get to is a is the nature and purposes

02:21 - of public history as both a discipline and a practice.

02:25 - In short, we were hoping to tackle quite a bit

02:28 - during our time together here.

02:31 - What we're going to do is run this, or try to run

02:33 - this as much as a real roundtable as humanly possible.

02:37 - We'll begin with a very brief set of introductions from each of our panelists.

02:41 - And from there, we're going to move into, borrowing from the language

02:45 - that you guys sent along and open Frank and wide ranging discussion.

02:51 - We hope that this roundtable will be one

02:54 - defined by genuine conversation.

02:57 - And we gladly welcome.

02:59 - In fact, note we encourage comments

03:02 - and questions from those of you who've joined us today.

03:05 - With that, I'll shut up and we'll move into, the important stuff for the day.

03:11 - These are just some pictures of what we look like and what we do

03:14 - as an institution.

03:16 - The pictures sort things.

03:19 - Yes. Google.

03:20 - Right here.

03:20 - This is our visitor center was built as a textile mill in the 18 tens.

03:24 - In the 1870s, converted to produce

03:26 - powder kegs for transport, transporting and selling gunpowder.

03:30 - These images on the bottom right are the interiors of some of the

03:34 - interpretive spaces in the foreman's house that are used for school programs.

03:38 - It's all teaching collection.

03:39 - So kids are using the wood burning stoves or using the furniture.

03:43 - The interior,

03:44 - some of the DuPont products that are in our collection,

03:47 - the historic home and what the site looked like at its industrial height.

03:53 - Some of the things

03:54 - we do, we talk about the uses of black powder at our site.

03:57 - Again, hands on immersive programing for school groups and all of our audiences.

04:01 - Mechanical exhibits that still come to life,

04:03 - from steam engines to water powered, belt driven equipment.

04:07 - But we also have all of the records of the DuPont company and the DuPont

04:11 - family from 1802 until 1921, as well as some records beyond that point.

04:17 - So when we talk about archival limitations and challenges, we have the opposite.

04:22 - We can tell you everything about us.

04:25 - There nothing was thrown out.

04:26 - We have every single ledger book from the first day

04:29 - the company went into operations until now.

04:31 - So the powder is closed to 21.

04:33 - So for us, we actually have a challenge of what goes into the interpretation

04:37 - as opposed to how do we find enough to, to have the interpretation,

04:41 - because we have everything from the band that the workers organized

04:44 - with the, vice president of powder production.

04:48 - We have World War One records from men, women and people of color first

04:51 - made a large scale appearance and powder operations, as well as photographs,

04:55 - first person accounts, from throughout the 19th century.

05:00 - As well as oral histories that were recorded in the 1950s and 60s

05:03 - by people who were then in their 80s and 90s,

05:05 - who had worked in the powder yards when they were young.

05:07 - So we have too much information about ourselves.

05:10 - So that's Hagley in a nutshell.

05:20 - All right.

05:21 - My name is Lynn Kania. Let me.

05:24 - Lynn Carling. Yeah.

05:25 - I run Roebling Museum.

05:27 - So how many of you do you know what the Roebling company made?

05:31 - Pop quiz.

05:32 - Shout it out.

05:34 - Bridge wire. Great. Yes.

05:36 - So the the Golden Gate bridge. The Brooklyn Bridge.

05:38 - People are usually surprised to hear the Brooklyn.

05:40 - Bridge was made in new Jersey, but it was, we're on the Delaware River.

05:43 - We can see Pennsylvania.

05:44 - We're basically across from William Penn's house.

05:46 - If any of you are familiar.

05:48 - And we have, about a seven acre property that's been, opened in 2010.

05:54 - We are still an active Superfund site.

05:56 - So if anyone wants to engage

05:58 - in environmental history conversations, we would love to.

06:02 - But, yeah.

06:02 - So our,

06:03 - mission, you know, the executive director is supposed to know the mission by heart,

06:07 - but I usually say it's rolling, rolling, rolling.

06:09 - So we talk about the Roebling family, the Roebling company,

06:13 - but then also Roebling, new Jersey, which is the company town

06:16 - that they created for their workers. So,

06:21 - you can

06:21 - see, one of the we have exhibits, seven galleries of exhibits.

06:25 - We do a ton of school groups on our property.

06:28 - You can see that picture at the end. It's neat.

06:29 - In our historic mill yards of the steel mill, isn't there anymore?

06:33 - But we do have gigantic chunks of industrial machinery,

06:37 - dotting the property, like sculpture garden.

06:40 - And one of the things we've been working on since I was hired

06:43 - is really, taking a look at what the resources are.

06:47 - So we have the museum, we have the company town.

06:50 - We've started to do outdoor walking tours

06:52 - because all of the houses are still there,

06:54 - which is incredible on the Delaware River in new Jersey.

06:56 - Those should have been knocked down for McMansions by now.

07:00 - And then we have the historic yard.

07:01 - But we also, a couple months after I started,

07:05 - I convinced the board to buy a house in town.

07:08 - So we are turning that house into a museum space

07:11 - that will interpret 1940 lowest paid laborer and steel mill.

07:16 - Is your neighbor kind of life in town?

07:20 - This is a deranged

07:21 - photo of me giving a tour with much enthusiasm.

07:25 - But one of the other things that I've really been focused on

07:28 - is watching us over to a worker centered interpretation.

07:31 - So, I did encounter some pushback, which I'm sure might come up later,

07:36 - but I've been busy collecting everything I need for that.

07:39 - So Mike was just talking about how he's lousy with records.

07:42 - Not all businesses are, but these that you can see at the top and bottom.

07:47 - We have 15,000 worker records from about 19, 1945,

07:51 - and they were kept in some guy's garage until 2021,

07:55 - when he donated them to me.

07:58 - So we still haven't gone through them.

07:59 - And you can see there's people of color that worked at Miller's Women.

08:02 - There's all kinds of amazing.

08:03 - This is an absolute historic resource that needs to be,

08:08 - looked into more.

08:10 - And this is the house that we bought right across the street from the mill.

08:13 - This is also the same house.

08:15 - So we've been,

08:16 - really just trying to learn more about, like, everyday life in a steel mill town.

08:20 - And it's been tons of fun.

08:35 - All right, lastly, I am Chris Stockham.

08:38 - I am as I'm a week, museum educator at the Anthracite Heritage Museum.

08:42 - But before almost five years before that, I was the, development manager

08:46 - at Miners Village, which is a sister site to the Anthracite Heritage Museum.

08:51 - I'm mostly be talking about equity,

08:53 - because I haven't done much and I with my new position.

08:57 - So equity, is a 19th century anthracite mining,

09:02 - company town or patch town as the regional vernacular is established

09:05 - in 1854, is sort of a spin off operation of the Lehigh.

09:09 - Mining and Navigation Company based in Chunk City.

09:12 - Jim Thorpe.

09:13 - And it's typical of patch

09:15 - towns, of the period and of the region, represented a total community.

09:20 - And so, it we have 90 acres today.

09:24 - All of the housing, the religious facilities,

09:25 - the doctor's offices, the colliery structures,

09:29 - the industrial buildings, all of this was owned and provided by the company

09:32 - in this rural industrial site.

09:35 - It operated as a company town from its founding in 1854, all the way up

09:39 - until 1968, when it was selected as the filming location for, The Mall.

09:44 - In Maguire's film, Sean Connery's attempt to pivot from,

09:48 - playing James Bond into a serious actor.

09:51 - Somebody who's written about the movie

09:52 - says it's not a very good film, but it often looks like one.

09:56 - It is a sort of striking visual document.

09:59 - It captures something of the,

10:01 - the difficulty of life in the 19th century mining community,

10:04 - the violence and oppression suffered by the workers.

10:07 - It was received,

10:09 - in a sort of a mixed way by the local community.

10:11 - Many people felt that it had a condescending

10:13 - look at working class life, which is maybe something we can talk about later.

10:17 - But the movie, for better or worse, didn't save the town from being raised and

10:21 - strip mined to rob the pillars of coal had been left to support that overburden.

10:25 - Converted the town into its sort of 19th century appearance.

10:28 - And that's what we preserve today.

10:30 - On this 90 acre site, we have, about 52 primary structures.

10:35 - And so those are, two churches, an Irish Catholic and an Episcopal church.

10:40 - A few mine operators homes.

10:42 - Several reconstructed buildings for the film, like a company store,

10:45 - is a vestige of the film.

10:48 - And then the preponderance of buildings that we have, our miner's homes.

10:51 - And those are arranged in sort of a socioeconomic gradient.

10:54 - You enter the site on the eastern extreme of the property, which would have been

10:57 - the most recently arrived.

10:59 - Lowest paid, lowest skilled workers.

11:01 - And as you move through the property,

11:02 - you end up at the mine operators mansions at the far end.

11:07 - What we focus on at actually is the surface life of the miners.

11:10 - And so we, you know, talk a little bit about the technology

11:13 - and a little bit about the changes from deep mining to surface mining.

11:17 - But we focus really on what, what people did outside of work.

11:20 - And so we, talked about the domestic labor of women and children.

11:24 - We have a summer kitchen that's represented

11:27 - we have a couple of miner's homes that are interpreted

11:29 - to the 1860s, the 1880s and the 1940s.

11:33 - We talk about recreational experience.

11:35 - So actually, like many anthracite mining company towns, supported,

11:39 - recreational baseball teams that played at other company towns.

11:44 - We also,

11:46 - increasingly had been looking at some of the broader contexts

11:50 - that actually exists in

11:55 - and so since, about 2015, we've had a productive partnership

11:58 - with the University of Maryland's archeology program.

12:01 - That's recently produced a botanical study of the village.

12:05 - We have more than 50 fruiting and, not producing trees

12:09 - on the property, that were cultivated by the mining families there.

12:12 - We maintain a display garden on the property to talk about

12:15 - some of the subsistence practices of the miners.

12:20 - We focus, a lot on the musical traditions.

12:23 - That's something we've done recently.

12:24 - Is Jay Smart, who's a member of sort of a local community.

12:27 - We're fortunate to have in northeastern Pennsylvania

12:29 - that keeps a lot of these sort of union songs and site songs alive.

12:34 - We've been working recently on landscape interpretation.

12:36 - And so actually is sort of an island that's ringed by active,

12:40 - anthracite strip mines.

12:42 - Some of our property is reclaimed mined land.

12:45 - The Anthracite Heritage Museum sits

12:46 - at the center of McDade Park, which itself is a reclaimed mine land.

12:50 - And so thinking about these ongoing, landscape legacies of anthracite

12:55 - is also part of our, our mission increasingly, at the bottom left.

12:58 - There you see, a snippet of a virtual reality

13:01 - tour that we produced recently with Penn State that takes, viewers

13:05 - down into these working strip mines, which you're looking at.

13:07 - There's a high wall at a place where they did rob that

13:10 - existing, or the leftover coal from deep mining.

13:14 - And expose some of the workings on the face where they had driven,

13:18 - railroad tracks for the gangway and some of the support pillars and things.

13:21 - And then we also talk a lot about sort of craft traditions.

13:24 - And so we have we're making workshops, basket making workshops.

13:27 - Again, thinking about these subsistence practices.

13:30 - In terms of some of the archives

13:31 - we have, we mostly collect in the domestic life of miners.

13:35 - We have a lot of artifacts we've drawn from the people

13:37 - that live directly in people's lives, in surrounding communities.

13:40 - And these range from things that are anthracite specific

13:43 - and so we have, you know, safety lamps and, helmets and those sorts of things.

13:46 - But we also collect souvenirs that people purchased when they visited.

13:49 - Niagara Falls in the 1940s. Right.

13:51 - Because that's also a representation of this,

13:54 - cultural formation in northeastern Pennsylvania.

13:58 - We have a good corpus of oral histories that were collected in the 1970s

14:02 - from some of the people who were still living at actually

14:04 - at the time when it became a historic site.

14:06 - And that's what the sketch at the top right is drawn from,

14:08 - is that those oral histories, which is one of the better insights

14:11 - we have into

14:12 - not just, you know, the experiences these people had, but specifically how

14:16 - they talk, some of the local vernacular they developed, some of the,

14:21 - mythology that had survived from the slab of countries they originated from.

14:25 - So that's another source that we've recently digitized to try to get

14:28 - some more eyes on.

14:35 - Sounds like a out

14:38 - this doesn't look book.

14:41 - It's hard to believe that we met on zoom.

14:44 - We've been exchanging emails for weeks,

14:47 - and it looks like a a real dog and pony show here.

14:51 - It's.

14:51 - I guess we wanted to get down to the sort of heart of our discussion,

14:55 - which is about telling the stories of working people.

14:58 - So why don't we start with that?

15:00 - And what we had come up with as a group

15:02 - is a set of questions that we really wanted to try to dig into,

15:05 - and we were hoping that this would also bring out

15:08 - questions and discussion from those who are here with us.

15:12 - And I think probably the one

15:13 - that we wanted to all start with, or at least we agreed to start with, is

15:17 - okay, why are we

15:18 - telling with stories of working people and why do we do this?

15:23 - And why does it matter for, for the public

15:26 - to hear them?

15:30 - It's critical, just shifting.

15:32 - So let me when you're moving this time working people stories, right.

15:37 - You so

15:41 - every day people make history.

15:43 - And I think that's an easy way for visitors to see themselves.

15:46 - And so our story is like 1905 through 1974.

15:51 - So we live in a much more recent history than a lot of the panelists

15:54 - that I've heard speak, since we've been here.

15:57 - So it's really almost like a genealogical experience.

16:01 - And if any of you have also read those studies

16:03 - about how people engage with history,

16:04 - they might think that history class is boring,

16:06 - but they love hearing stories from their grandma.

16:08 - Like I'm stories from your grandma.

16:11 - That's what we're doing at the museum, basically.

16:15 - So we can really tap into that.

16:17 - We also, so it was a majority immigrant workforce.

16:20 - So these are those stories of the Ellis Island

16:23 - era that are still very romanticized and nostalgia.

16:26 - And here's what I heard from my dad.

16:28 - And that is super, super powerful and emotional.

16:31 - And it gets people interested, even if you're talking about like, Steve

16:35 - and Hungarian, people are like, oh, my grandfather, yada yada.

16:39 - He's from Italy.

16:40 - But like, they can still make those connections.

16:42 - And I think like they there's often stories, especially where we are in new Jersey,

16:48 - you know, those folks who

16:49 - came over having these industrial jobs and it's hard to escape that sort of work.

16:53 - So it's very, very easy.

16:55 - I can't think of another way to talk

16:58 - about the history of Roebling, except through the,

17:01 - the experiences of the people who were holding the wrenches at the mill.

17:05 - You want to just mix?

17:08 - Yeah. I mean, it.

17:10 - I think that there's a sort of urgency argument to interpret,

17:15 - industrial history now because some of these structures

17:18 - that we have, some of the records that we have won't persist

17:21 - as we go in the future. Right?

17:22 - So the the company homes that actually were constructed to last the duration

17:26 - of the policy, and so they're 75 years beyond their expiration date.

17:31 - Right. And so they were, you know, they were built quickly.

17:33 - They're built cheaply.

17:35 - Almost the instant the miners moved into those houses and started

17:38 - constructing additions and connecting the summer kitchen onto the main structure,

17:42 - they did that quickly and inexpensively with scavenged materials and improper

17:46 - foundations, because if they, you know, lost their jobs, they got evicted.

17:49 - They couldn't take those additions with them. Right.

17:51 - And so all of those structures, the outbuildings that they put

17:53 - up, the house, you know, goats and sheep and chickens things,

17:56 - these are all really difficult structures to preserve.

17:59 - And so, you know, if we're not paying attention to it

18:01 - now, 20, 30 years from now, those things are going to be standing.

18:04 - The same goes, I think, for some of the,

18:08 - personal effects, the personal archives of the people that are in the village.

18:11 - I mean, we're fortunate that the state collected

18:12 - those oral histories in the 1970s, because today anthracite is a

18:16 - continually dwindling industry.

18:19 - You know, there's

18:21 - fewer than a thousand people employed in the industry

18:23 - all across northeastern Pennsylvania.

18:24 - And, of course, that industry looks very different than it did in here

18:27 - that we mostly interpret.

18:29 - We're fortunate to have a maintenance foreman who's a former miner.

18:31 - Some tour guides were former miners, but they're they're,

18:34 - you know, late 60s and early 70s.

18:36 - But we have all of these resources, that that will time out eventually.

18:40 - And so,

18:41 - I, you know,

18:42 - I think for that reason, it's important that we do this work now specifically.

18:45 - Right?

18:45 - So there's that moment.

18:47 - But I also, Lynn, talking about this idea that, you know,

18:51 - about connecting to people, right?

18:53 - I mean, and in some might do you want to throw into that at all.

18:57 - And yeah, ours for us.

18:58 - We revised our mission statement in 2022, the one that was on the slide earlier,

19:03 - where Hagley Museum and Library

19:04 - seeks to inspire all people to be innovative in their own lives.

19:07 - I can do the rest of it, but just trust me, I know it.

19:11 - But the idea that we were shifting to

19:13 - it wasn't a celebration of the story of the DuPont family.

19:16 - That was part of the narrative we could tell,

19:17 - but we wanted to tell a richer story with the end goal of being

19:20 - what are the key components of being innovative?

19:22 - It's being risk taking.

19:23 - It's having perseverance, being empathetic.

19:26 - But ultimately, in order to be innovative, you have to innovate.

19:29 - At some point, you have to do something or change something.

19:32 - And for us, the story had long been about the contributions of the DuPont family.

19:36 - But how can you see yourself as a potential innovator if you don't see

19:40 - historic examples of people like you being innovators?

19:43 - So for us, making the shift towards

19:46 - a greater emphasis on the stories of the workers of our site,

19:50 - we're always been part of the narrative but never stars of the show.

19:53 - They've always been the supporting. You know,

19:55 - it's a cast of thousands that had been that kind of supporting role.

19:58 - So it's important from that perspective of we at the same time,

20:02 - took on a collection of 4000 patent models.

20:05 - If you applied for a U.S.

20:07 - patent between 1790 and 1880, you had to submit a scale model

20:10 - of your invention along with all the paperwork.

20:13 - We already had a thousand.

20:14 - We thought, why not add 4000 more to the collection?

20:17 - So only the Smithsonian has more than we do.

20:23 - But for us, it's kind of just 1 to 2 punch.

20:25 - Take the site

20:26 - that we've always been interpreting as look at the industrial brilliance,

20:30 - but now it's looking at the people doing the industrial work,

20:33 - but also pairing that with the new patent model narrative, which is here

20:36 - are people inventing who are like us, 85% of patents.

20:39 - The 19th century had only 1 or 2 patents

20:42 - to their name the Edisons, the Duponts, the Roebling.

20:45 - The big names aren't really, you know, that's atypical.

20:49 - Most people have one really good idea that they they work at for years and years.

20:54 - And so really pairing those two stories was a way for us to tell

20:57 - a much richer story about what does it mean to be innovative

21:00 - and somebody like you was innovative in the 19th century.

21:04 - So what's what's holding you back?

21:06 - It makes the prospect of being innovative, less daunting and intimidating, right?

21:11 - So if we established that, you know,

21:13 - we want to tell the stories of working people, right?

21:15 - There are all these reasons to do so, both the sort of physical plant

21:18 - that you have there, it's not going to be there

21:21 - unless we preserve it and tell it that the working people's lives matter,

21:25 - that these innovations matter, and people should connect to them.

21:28 - The question then turns to one that that that the three of you brought up to me

21:32 - when we were talking the past couple of weeks was like of audience.

21:37 - Right?

21:38 - And, I mean, I have a captive audience.

21:40 - They come and sit in my classroom.

21:41 - They got to be there right?

21:45 - Whether they want to be or not.

21:47 - But you want your audience there,

21:51 - your stories, trying to draw them in.

21:53 - But what expectations do they have?

21:55 - Do the audience expectations differ from what

21:59 - what you're going to deliver to them, and how do you manage that

22:03 - and how do you how do you manage them, thinking about what your audience is going

22:07 - to expect in shaping the narrative that you're telling

22:12 - how that one first, only because that was a really nice transition

22:15 - for what I just talked about.

22:16 - So selfishly, I'll go,

22:19 - our audience for the most part, does not expect to hear worker stories at all.

22:23 - Our audience comes in expecting to hear about the DuPont family.

22:26 - There are other DuPont estates within, you know, a five minute drive of US

22:30 - winter tour. Longwood, Mount Cuba, Nemours.

22:34 - You swing a stick your head a DuPont thing.

22:37 - And so a lot of the people who are coming to

22:39 - our sites are people who are doing all of the Brandywine estates,

22:42 - having to do all the gardens

22:43 - or all of the houses or all of the something that is DuPont connected.

22:47 - So they're coming with the expectation of, I'm going to have a continuation

22:50 - of the story of this same family

22:52 - that I've experienced at 3 or 4 other sites in the area, but

22:55 - when you come to our site and we talk about the,

22:59 - you know, accidental deaths that are occurring

23:01 - in the powder yards and explosions throughout the sites history,

23:04 - when we're talking about the workers community and the changing role of women

23:08 - in powdering our production,

23:09 - it's not an expectation that people are bringing to the site.

23:13 - But what we have,

23:15 - really found from our interpretive perspective is the

23:19 - the guests are following us on that,

23:23 - we have throughline more than we anticipated.

23:25 - We thought we would need to provide more

23:27 - stepping stones and building blocks to get them from the expectation.

23:30 - And, you know, we we haven't yet cracked the nut on why they're following us along

23:34 - if it's just the personal connection or relation.

23:36 - But, generally speaking, it has not been as challenging

23:39 - of a transition in the narrative as we thought and the guests who come in

23:43 - expecting it to be all DuPont family all the time.

23:46 - As soon as we start explaining the daily lives of the workers,

23:49 - the powder yards, the risk they endured, there's a drama to that story.

23:52 - And I think that might be the thing that people are really, really latching onto.

23:58 - Yeah, I think that,

23:59 - by contrast, maybe the majority of our audience

24:01 - historically has been people that they expect us to discuss precisely

24:04 - when we're discussing the hardships of working and living in a patch town.

24:08 - And I think part of the reason for that is that a good majority of our

24:13 - audience has been people

24:14 - that have some personal kinship, connection to the anthracite industry.

24:17 - Right?

24:17 - So they they want to hear their own stories represented.

24:20 - They want to hear their grandparents stories represented.

24:23 - Tours in those cases often end up being very collaborative

24:26 - because people can share, you know, some family lore about a grandfather who,

24:31 - you know, was crushed in a mine accident or died of black lung.

24:34 - Right?

24:34 - I mean, they have these things

24:35 - that they contribute to the narrative

24:36 - that we're spending on sort of the larger scale.

24:39 - I think the challenge we're facing now is, you know, again, this this industry is

24:43 - gradually fading into the past.

24:44 - We're getting fewer and fewer people,

24:46 - who have those kinship connections or those kinship connections

24:49 - are sort of attenuated, right?

24:50 - They're spread across 5 or 6 generations instead of one, two.

24:53 - So how do you deal with that?

24:58 - Well, yeah, I mean, I think we're still trying to figure that out.

25:00 - Partly that's the,

25:03 - the reason to,

25:05 - look to landscape transformation.

25:07 - We have a lot of new residents in the area who don't necessarily have

25:10 - any family ties to the region, but they do understand.

25:13 - Look, we have these huge, moon scapes that I drive by on the way to the store or

25:17 - something where, you know, nothing grows but two inch birch trees or something.

25:21 - Why is that? Yeah. Where did that come from? Not necessarily. No.

25:24 - And so we can provide a certain amount of, landscape literacy, right.

25:28 - By explaining the history of this region, the, history of that industry.

25:33 - I mean, something else.

25:34 - We're increasingly focusing on is trying to sort of personalize those narratives.

25:39 - And I think it's it's a challenge.

25:41 - Maybe it's

25:41 - it takes place a future question, but it's a challenge of an archive of working

25:45 - people that you often read about working people, sort of in the aggregate.

25:48 - Right?

25:48 - It's it's it's easy

25:49 - to find statistics on the number of people that died in the mines in 1876.

25:53 - It's pretty difficult to find their individual names and where they did,

25:57 - who their family members were, they sort of, you know,

25:59 - come in and out of the archival record is they endure different injuries.

26:02 - Or maybe they had a union grievance.

26:04 - You don't have these, you know, full life there.

26:06 - So trying to reconstruct those,

26:10 - you know, use specific names, use

26:13 - specific examples of how people dealt with these challenging circumstances.

26:16 - Yeah, yeah.

26:17 - Human story and show how they dealt with things that are sort of universal, right?

26:20 - I mean, they're dealing with life in a new country as an immigrant laborer,

26:24 - and they're dealing with, navigating different health care options, right?

26:28 - Things that have current day residents, trying to bring those into this narrative.

26:32 - Right.

26:32 - Which gets back to sort of question pointing out right now, like it's the same

26:37 - story over and over for many people to experience, they can identify.

26:42 - But so when, if you want to I mean, again, like this is the working

26:47 - people narrative is something different than building room.

26:51 - Right. So.

26:52 - Well, the beauty of being like a basically a brand new museum

26:56 - you only opened in 2010 is that people

26:59 - don't really have expectations, like go to the rolling museum

27:03 - and then I can give them the best experience of their lives.

27:07 - When you know, like on your website, you can tell what people are searching

27:10 - to find your institution. It's museums near me.

27:12 - It's not Roebling Bridge, you know, it is just we need a place to go on a Saturday.

27:18 - And even though we're not that far from like Trenton, new Jersey,

27:21 - we are sort of off the beaten path.

27:23 - We need to go this.

27:24 - You don't drive through it on the way to target.

27:26 - There's no reason to go there.

27:27 - Even people who live in the region, if they're not called to it,

27:30 - they don't even know it's there.

27:32 - But we have a similar issue with the generational issues.

27:35 - So then when the museum was founded, it was founded by the community.

27:38 - So people who were standing there watching the EPA tear

27:41 - down the factory that their families worked at,

27:45 - and they thought ways about that, and they got the loudest among them

27:49 - to go annoy the EPA into saving the museum.

27:53 - But the exhibits that they installed were speaking to a town

27:57 - full of their peers who went to school, whose grandfathers worked at the mill,

28:01 - whose father worked at the mill.

28:02 - And that is not the community anymore.

28:04 - So people who, generally speaking, were coming to that community museum.

28:09 - They knew the beginning parts of that story already.

28:12 - And now, just like Chris was saying, we have a lot of people

28:15 - who are just drawn to the town because they're like rowhouses.

28:18 - They're great starter houses.

28:20 - It's on the River line. It's very commutable.

28:22 - And they love the history and how it is a different kind

28:25 - of a space to live in, but they don't have a personal connection to it.

28:30 - So it's definitely changing the way we talk about stuff.

28:33 - And it's also important to say that, like,

28:35 - I'm an outsider, just like you're not a DuPont, right?

28:38 - I'm not. And you're not an anthracite miner.

28:41 - I'm just some lady who lives in Philadelphia.

28:43 - I'm not from their town,

28:44 - which is also different from how, I mean, anyone who works in a museum

28:48 - probably is dealing with some level of that.

28:50 - But when you're really trying to have these connections with locals and

28:54 - descendants,

28:56 - sometimes they really let you know you're not from there,

28:58 - and sometimes you can earn their trust in a really good way to community politics.

29:03 - You play a huge role in these museums, right?

29:06 - And so how do you how do you navigate that?

29:11 - I, I,

29:13 - indulge in some, like, strategic ambiguity.

29:17 - When I first moved

29:17 - to the anthracite region to say that I was from Pennsylvania coal country,

29:20 - moved bituminous for, which is the wrong kind of form.

29:24 - Yeah.

29:24 - So, and everyone know that, you know, that,

29:27 - you say. Well, country.

29:28 - My grandfather was a coal miner, right?

29:29 - You can at least get in the door.

29:33 - Yeah.

29:33 - I mean, the community trust issue is,

29:37 - it's challenging and challenging with,

29:40 - you know, getting, artifact donations

29:42 - because often these are family heirlooms, that people treasure.

29:45 - And they want to make sure that they're going to be

29:47 - not only taken care of, but actually displayed. Right.

29:49 - They're not going to sit in the basement somewhere.

29:51 - And of course, we can't display everything at the same time.

29:53 - So that's a that's a challenge.

29:56 - You know, they want to hear their,

29:58 - particular story told.

30:00 - Those are all things that we deal with and think about,

30:02 - but there's a corporate component as well.

30:04 - And so even though the anthracite industry is, much smaller today

30:08 - and it's not nearly the same degree of sort of corporate collusion that you,

30:13 - you know, maybe saw in the late 19th century. Right?

30:15 - It's still a prominent industry.

30:16 - And our next door neighbors on both sides are, anthracite mines.

30:21 - They also are some of our major funders.

30:24 - Right.

30:24 - We can get larger sponsorships from them.

30:27 - And that's it's always interesting to navigate.

30:29 - I mean, on on, you know, on one hand, the anthracite companies

30:34 - today are very happy for us to talk about,

30:37 - you know, sort of small town, tight knit communities, right?

30:40 - If we're just talking about the folkways of the patch town,

30:44 - if we

30:44 - talk about things like labor violence or corporate oppression or the, you know,

30:48 - price hikes in a company's store, you know, they're very quick

30:51 - to distinguish themselves from the 19th century coal.

30:55 - And we're doing something very different today.

30:57 - And I mean, notably, it's, you know, they they brand themselves as,

31:01 - carbon companies. Right.

31:03 - Been sort of popular in the renaming. Right.

31:05 - So the distance and distancing themselves

31:07 - and the particular mineral and instead it's this elemental thing.

31:10 - And so, I mean, it's interesting we have to be sort of careful to navigate

31:14 - all of those.

31:14 - Those are all sort of our audiences,

31:16 - the corporate audience as well as the community audience.

31:19 - And sometimes I think the best you can do is, you know,

31:22 - have an author park or a panel or something at the museum and

31:26 - let the company and let the

31:27 - community sort of trade barbs and hash it out and not weigh anything.

31:31 - Right.

31:31 - I don't think it's necessarily our job to resolve those conversations

31:34 - so much as provide a space where they can continue, right?

31:37 - But if you're going to tell a story, you have to tell,

31:41 - you know, the, the, that side of it, right?

31:43 - That the their budgets didn't stretch very far, that they were they were locked

31:47 - into a we're working with a company store that set the prices,

31:52 - that their wages didn't always cover, that they you have to cover these sorts

31:56 - of things, right, to do justice to how do you how do you dance around that?

32:01 - You know.

32:02 - Well, I would like to on in and talk about nostalgia for a second,

32:06 - because I think you were touching on that a little bit.

32:09 - Nostalgia is fine.

32:10 - Like we were hard working.

32:12 - We did X, Y, z in the past.

32:15 - And if you watch our

32:16 - intro film, it's completely wall to wall nostalgia.

32:20 - It's this was the best place to grow up.

32:22 - Roebling is different.

32:24 - But like, it's a company town.

32:26 - And the way that I see it,

32:27 - the most starkest is when I work with interpretation folks who come in

32:31 - who are just consultants, they immediately go to this like,

32:36 - hero versus villain

32:38 - like structure, like it's the workers against the company.

32:42 - And I'm not saying that it's not,

32:43 - but like the workers in rope, I usually say Roebling, it's complicated.

32:48 - Or it could be worse because it's they they were paid cash.

32:52 - They were not paid in company scrip. Yeah.

32:55 - They the so the general store, they didn't hike up the prices necessarily.

33:00 - And there's some ways that they were better than other company towns.

33:04 - So usually I frame it as a pros and cons.

33:07 - So the people in my tours who are from town or whose grandfathers

33:11 - are they hear the stories that they're familiar with,

33:14 - but then the other side can also be presented,

33:18 - you know, how would you like it if your boss was also your landlord?

33:21 - How do you think that would affect the way you act at work, etc., etc.

33:25 - And I usually really let the.

33:27 - So like I might plan out the walking tour, but who at the participants

33:31 - shape it entirely and it's it's hard to teach volunteers

33:35 - to lead tours like that, because I read way too much about this stuff.

33:39 - And there's there's lots in my head all at once.

33:42 - But having participants really, you know, get involved

33:46 - and share their, their thoughts and questions really helps with it.

33:50 - But there's definitely the pros and cons.

33:52 - And dealing with nostalgia is

33:55 - powerful.

33:57 - Like community, politics, nostalgia.

34:00 - Any of these are fun and exciting topic.

34:02 - Ours is interesting.

34:04 - There were worker housing communities near the powder yards.

34:07 - Some of those still exist today.

34:08 - Some of them are now very high end, high price

34:12 - point homes.

34:15 - But one of the things that is kind of strange for us is at one point,

34:19 - the company was employing

34:20 - nearly 70% of working people in New Castle County, Delaware.

34:24 - So everybody who has any kind of ancestral tie

34:27 - to a third of the state of Delaware has a connection to the DuPont company.

34:32 - Usually through the powder yards.

34:34 - There are generations.

34:35 - There are multiple affinity groups that we work with closely,

34:39 - who are interpreting parts of the family's story.

34:41 - Nearly all people with Irish ancestry in New Castle County, Delaware,

34:45 - are there because their ancestors were encouraged

34:48 - to immigrate to the United States by the DuPont company in the 19th century.

34:52 - So that,

34:53 - emotional resonance that our site has,

34:57 - and the way that that same kind of narrative of, you know,

35:00 - my great grandfather

35:01 - worked in the powder yards and it is looked back at with a kind of,

35:06 - historical fondness or historical rose colored glasses,

35:08 - but a lot like lens experience.

35:10 - We try to flip the story a little bit, not to,

35:15 - you know, we're not trying to, you know, valorize

35:17 - or make heroes out of, the managers of the company.

35:21 - But there's an opportunity for us to say, you know, there was actually a better way

35:24 - to run heavy industry in the 19th century,

35:27 - than a lot of the stories we're used to it.

35:29 - It's it's things like, you know, in the company housing,

35:32 - if you lost, if a worker lost their lives, their, their widow and children

35:36 - could remain in company housing at no cost for as long as they needed to.

35:39 - And they received an annual pension.

35:42 - Apprentices were paid and their wages were kept

35:44 - in restricted accounts with 6% interest.

35:47 - So by the time

35:47 - your apprenticeship was over, you had enough

35:49 - money to buy your own tools, make the down payment on a small farm.

35:53 - There were internal promotions.

35:55 - There were required break periods during the workday.

35:59 - Frequent, annual and semiannual retraining for every position.

36:04 - The DuPont company listed Safety First as one of its rules in 1811.

36:09 - So its commitment to safety and one of the things that our guests like.

36:13 - Lynn is saying that they get the guests will pick up

36:15 - similar things and match them on the tour.

36:16 - And one of my favorite lines we hear all the time

36:19 - is some kind of version of somebody saying,

36:21 - you know,

36:21 - it sounds like if you pay your workers well, treat them with dignity

36:25 - and worry about their safety, it's better for everybody, including the business.

36:29 - I love it when they get there.

36:30 - Yeah, yeah.

36:31 - And you're like, yeah, like there's a there's a moral to that story.

36:34 - And you know, it's it's not you know, we're not taking a side

36:38 - on income disparity and wealth gaps and opportunity gaps,

36:41 - but it is presenting a different version of how history did unfold

36:47 - at our side in an industrial landscape that is is different

36:51 - than what people are anticipating.

36:53 - And so it makes a richer conversation around

36:55 - what are the legacies of these big 19th century industrial companies.

36:58 - Yeah, one second.

37:00 - I do something really similar because the Great Depression

37:04 - kind of like it happened everywhere, but in Roebling it really wasn't that bad.

37:09 - And people, as soon as I say that, they're like, excuse me.

37:12 - And it gets them.

37:13 - But they were building

37:14 - the George Washington Bridge and the Golden Gate Bridge

37:16 - because there's all this infrastructure money.

37:18 - So they pretty much like everyone.

37:20 - There was like a little dip in between where they had,

37:24 - and you can see from the census,

37:25 - like how many people were working for the WPA and all that.

37:28 - But they were really doing okay in a way that is not what you think

37:33 - or what you expect.

37:35 - So I think like those little bits where it's either really bad

37:38 - or it's really good.

37:40 - I think visitors, really speak to.

37:43 - And the other thing with like community politics is terminology.

37:47 - And so I find that when I read more like academic articles and books and stuff,

37:51 - you might refer to people as poor or whatever.

37:54 - And I would never say that about a worker or

37:57 - I am very aware of the terms that we use to describe workers

38:01 - because of how close they are and to speak about them with respect,

38:05 - because not a single descendant I've ever talked to said we're poor.

38:09 - And so, like, I think I'm thinking more of like the Tenement.

38:12 - Museum and places like that.

38:13 - They don't say poor either.

38:14 - They may say poverty, they may see working class

38:16 - like there's all these different ways around it.

38:18 - But visitors say poor sinners say these people were poor.

38:21 - I might say lowest paid laborer at steel mill.

38:25 - But that kind of terminology and like shame.

38:28 - And it goes along with like the hard work nostalgia side too.

38:31 - So it's an interesting panel in our in, you know,

38:34 - like the whole concept of the poor.

38:36 - I mean, like as if there's a group that can go identify,

38:40 - but there is struggle, right?

38:41 - And making ends meet.

38:44 - And the strategies people employ speak to a particular set of social and economic

38:50 - circumstances and a particular set of structural circumstances

38:53 - that surround their lives, you know, in, in their agency.

38:57 - So, I mean, like sometimes like if you if you stood there

38:59 - and said all of that, the folks in your audience would yawn, right?

39:02 - And they're like, what the hell was that?

39:04 - So we do have to choose our terms carefully, but we also

39:08 - have to balance them. Right.

39:10 - And a lot of this thing is, is sort of we've been dancing around.

39:14 - I feel one of the big questions too, that we talked about several weeks ago,

39:17 - which is like innovation, right?

39:20 - Like I we've heard that a couple times, but I'm talking I'm thinking here

39:23 - about innovation in terms of what your museum sites are, do what

39:27 - right or what you have done, what you've tried

39:31 - and what what's worked really well or what you've tried.

39:34 - And it's just like, well, we're not doing that again, right?

39:38 - Do you want to share any of those sorts of things?

39:41 - Because they might be important for folks out here.

39:44 - Oh, when I first came on board, it actually,

39:47 - it was to manage the site strategic plan,

39:49 - that was intended to, improve the site's

39:53 - financial sustainability through adaptive reuse.

39:56 - So the majority of the buildings we have aren't interpreted

39:58 - and they're not accessible to the public.

40:00 - And they represent for us the footprint of a company town.

40:03 - But they're really they're facades.

40:04 - You know, you go inside and we see the joists of the walls.

40:08 - And so,

40:08 - you know, the the strategic plan proposed,

40:12 - several different adaptive reuse strategies,

40:15 - one of which would have been potentially the most lucrative was a wedding venue

40:19 - that, oh, you know, you take the mine owner's house

40:22 - and you rip out all the internal walls and you can have receptions there in terms

40:25 - of the, company homes and to,

40:28 - you know, bridal suites and things like that.

40:31 - There were other, you know, proposals in the strategic

40:33 - plan to, really capitalize on this nostalgia.

40:36 - We're talking about at the expense of the interpretation of working class history.

40:41 - Right.

40:41 - And so it's, you know,

40:43 - today it is sort of charming because the yards aren't productive landscapes

40:46 - and there's not livestock everywhere, and there's not mine dust in the air.

40:50 - And it has this sort of park like setting.

40:52 - And there's there's a way of trying to leverage that that would be innovative

40:56 - and maybe could help us keep the lights on.

40:58 - But at enormous educational expense.

41:00 - Right, right.

41:03 - So we didn't go down that route.

41:04 - It's not a wedding venue.

41:07 - But, you know, we have been trying to find sort of middle paths.

41:11 - And my approach has been to, you know, try to find ways

41:14 - to get new people in the door on the property,

41:17 - who may not have a latent or preexisting interest in anthracite mining history.

41:23 - But while they're there, may develop one.

41:24 - And so,

41:26 - you know, musical performances is something I talked about before.

41:29 - We do have this sort of monumental setting.

41:31 - It's an interesting setting for certain kinds of musical acts.

41:34 - And so we've had, you know, a lot of bluegrass

41:36 - and folk concerts to sort of tap into the regional musical heritage.

41:41 - And then, you know, overheard people who come in

41:43 - and they're on their way to the concert venue

41:45 - and read an interpretive sign and say, hey, did you know they mined hole here?

41:48 - Which in some ways is great.

41:49 - That's the ideal audience

41:51 - who was supposed to come to that bluegrass concert,

41:53 - because then they may go to the museum. Where do you find it? They do.

41:56 - I mean, is there any way that you are you tracking that to track that?

42:00 - And have you found that they were doing that?

42:02 - Some do.

42:03 - So we often ask people,

42:04 - you know, if we're not inundated and it's a little slow how we heard of us.

42:08 - And I mean,

42:09 - we get a number of repeat visitors from these annual concerts that we put on.

42:13 - We then come back

42:14 - and go through the actual museum proper, or who come for the second day

42:17 - of the festival,

42:18 - you know, they'll see the concert on Saturday and

42:19 - and say, oh, I will come back to the Folklife Festival on Sunday.

42:24 - And so we,

42:24 - we do see some repeat visitation from that.

42:28 - But I mean, sort of cynically,

42:29 - we also see an admissions that year from that.

42:32 - And so even if they don't come back right, they are helping us

42:34 - continue our educational interpretive programing

42:36 - for the people that are interested in that work,

42:40 - innovation, work, different,

42:43 - like here's one that we don't know about yet.

42:45 - We are very early in the process

42:47 - of a selective restoration of a garden on our site.

42:51 - It in the early years, it was the first saltpeter refinery.

42:55 - Saltpeter was one of the three main ingredients of gunpowder.

42:59 - So for the first 50 years of the site's life, it was terraces

43:03 - carved into a hillside with water powered equipment by the late 19th century.

43:07 - Is one of the pictures I showed earlier.

43:09 - I was actually the one that's on the screen right now.

43:11 - It looked like that.

43:12 - So it's this big, heavy, kind of

43:16 - gross looking industrial site.

43:18 - That area blew up in 1890.

43:22 - Was largely in ruin.

43:24 - Left and ruined the DuPont company took over ownership of this family home,

43:29 - the family residence,

43:30 - and turned it into a workers club and gutted the interiors and

43:33 - and a dance hall and, games room and that kind of stuff.

43:37 - In the 1920s, the company,

43:40 - a great granddaughter of company founder Louise DuPont, Crown and Shields

43:42 - would go on to be a co-founder of the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

43:46 - She helped, restoration of the white House.

43:48 - She furnished Independence Hall so she, in her own right,

43:50 - should have her own museum in her own story.

43:53 - But she looked at the back of her home

43:55 - that she was restoring and saw this collection of industrial ruins.

43:59 - And like any sane, rational person

44:01 - said, I should turn this into an Italian it ruin garden.

44:04 - So she installed

44:06 - statuary and columns and planting beds, and she had a breakfast terrace,

44:11 - and she added a swimming pool

44:13 - and the foundation of what had been a refining building,

44:16 - she found large refining kettles, some of

44:19 - which are ten feet in diameter and four feet deep.

44:22 - She had them put up on giant brick plinths,

44:23 - and she would fill them with a tar mixture so she could light them, like them

44:27 - on fire, to be her kind of fire balls to light her evening parties and,

44:32 - you know, and all of this is happening during the Great Depression.

44:34 - So there's a layer of complexity in that part of the story.

44:38 - When Louise died in 1958, she left that entire portion

44:41 - of the property to the museum.

44:42 - All of its contents, the garden,

44:44 - the house, the first office, all of this stuff came to the museum.

44:48 - And at the time, the powers that be said

44:51 - were a gunpowder factory where the history of early and industry on the Brandywine.

44:55 - And what in the name of God does a bath house designed to be a scale

45:00 - model of the Parthenon to have to do with early industrial history?

45:04 - So they came through with the wrecking ball

45:06 - and they took out quite a bit of her garden, which, ironically,

45:09 - she was a founder of the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

45:12 - And within three years of her passing,

45:14 - things that she left were being ripped out.

45:17 - A lot of it was photographed.

45:18 - So we have images of what we know, what the garden looked like.

45:20 - There were paintings and, pictures, aerial photography of it from the 1930s.

45:26 - I'm telling you, we have everything about our site.

45:29 - But now we're in the process of figuring out how to interpret that site.

45:32 - And so what we're looking at is a full scale,

45:34 - restoration of that garden to put it back to where it was in the woods.

45:38 - Crown and Schultz, time would run us somewhere between 40 and $50 million,

45:42 - which we do not have because we're a museum.

45:46 - So what we're looking at said is what we're calling a selective restoration

45:49 - where we are, we've identified three key locations in that garden

45:53 - where each of those three locations

45:55 - will be interpreted as a different century in the garden's life cycle.

45:58 - So it's early industrial history.

46:00 - It's kind of peak industrial height that you can see in that image.

46:03 - And then what it, how it was used as a kind of pleasure

46:07 - garden entertaining space for of shields.

46:10 - So we are very early in this process in terms

46:13 - of how to take an innovative approach to looking at the site,

46:15 - because any one of those generations of that specific location story

46:19 - is worth telling in its own right.

46:21 - They all have to deal with workers, whether the crown of shields gardeners

46:24 - or whether they're the people with the draft animals

46:27 - hauling sulfur and saltpeter through the industrial site,

46:31 - so trying to tell all of those stories and quite literally

46:35 - and figuratively, layers of history.

46:37 - So, we're in the middle of that. I'll report back later.

46:40 - You know how that's going.

46:41 - But, trying to figure out a new way to tell

46:45 - all of the story of one location that had different uses and its story

46:51 - can help us

46:52 - find this a lot more simple.

46:56 - It's not a $40 million, right?

46:58 - No. Yeah. Oh, yeah.

46:59 - We're doing this for, like, $1 million version now.

47:01 - Just with the million? Yeah.

47:02 - Just a mine costs $0.

47:05 - I do a lot of laminating of,

47:08 - historic, like, primary sources that I just print out on the printer.

47:12 - So I guess it's like $100 because,

47:15 - but really getting primary sources in front of visitors.

47:18 - So on the walking tours that I started in 2021,

47:21 - they kind of came out of like the response

47:23 - to Covid, like no one was going into the museum.

47:24 - We started doing tours outside.

47:27 - But like those worker records I pull and they're kind of like index card.

47:31 - I just copy them double sided,

47:34 - and then we stand in front of that guy's house and we talk about him,

47:38 - and the visitors get to look at them and they're like, wow, he was only five three.

47:42 - Why does it say he's from Romania?

47:44 - But he like so they end up doing that and like doing history

47:48 - right there in front of me.

47:50 - And it's amazing.

47:52 - And then we also I printed out there's

47:55 - the company town was very proud of what they were doing,

47:58 - and they made postcards of everything the general store, the pharmacy,

48:01 - the houses for the poor people and the rich people and everything in between.

48:05 - The boathouse.

48:07 - And I am like a little bit crazy

48:10 - about eBay because a lot of this history of the mill only closed in the 70s.

48:13 - That's our history. Still in attics and basements.

48:17 - So I,

48:18 - we have a full run of all the images, but it's the messages.

48:22 - So the one of the big immigrant groups were Swedes.

48:25 - They knew how to make steel.

48:26 - So, like, I'll just copy a bunch of these old

48:29 - postcards and just put them in the gallery.

48:32 - And then I hear people like, this one's in a different language.

48:35 - What is it?

48:36 - Then they take out their phones and they're like Swedish,

48:39 - and then they discover something.

48:42 - And I think that the discovery and the participating in the treasure hunt,

48:47 - like really trusting your audience that they can do this stuff

48:50 - and that it's just as interesting to them as it is to you.

48:52 - I think it really works

48:53 - and is very cheap, but it only works if you are dealing with small groups.

48:58 - If you have like a trillion people a year coming to your site, I'm looking at you,

49:02 - not you,

49:04 - but, you know, it really is fun.

49:07 - It's also maybe it's just fun for me because of my background.

49:12 - So how would you

49:14 - sort of, like, take some of these and or like what?

49:18 - What lessons would you take away from these?

49:20 - Like if, if you, if there are other sites around the Mid-Atlantic region

49:25 - that, that are trying to continue to tell the story of working people

49:29 - starting to tell the story of working people thinking about working people,

49:34 - what what less?

49:36 - What key lessons

49:37 - would you have from a sort of museum perspective, from an educational record?

49:40 - Whatever angle you want to to to tackle it from like what advice?

49:46 - I have a superpower now where I can see the workers everywhere I go.

49:49 - I went,

49:50 - I shouldn't say this on TV or anything, but I went to Thomas Edison's laboratory

49:55 - and you see machines, but there's no people

49:58 - because obviously there's no people in there.

50:01 - But like,

50:01 - they have to know the names of some of those workers,

50:04 - and it's more like workers were here

50:08 - rather than more specific.

50:11 - And I think that there's a huge opportunity.

50:13 - And I, of course, in the person that worked at the gift shop, I was like, hey,

50:18 - because like using the census

50:21 - generally, depending on what I don't know what years that operated,

50:24 - you could probably find out where people were working,

50:26 - newspaper articles, like they probably had a magazine.

50:30 - Like there's there's more than you think there is out there.

50:33 - You just have to get real creative in how you look.

50:35 - And I wanted to know about those women that were doing whatever in the dark room

50:39 - at Thomas Edison's, laboratory.

50:42 - I think they can hire me.

50:45 - I want to be a consultant

50:48 - script.

50:50 - Yeah.

50:50 - I think similarly, personalizing,

50:53 - individualizing some of these work with that stories.

50:56 - I think is the way to avoid

50:59 - having this, like, monolithic notion of the working class as this thing

51:03 - that somebody's born into and they die and spend their whole life in.

51:07 - And I mean, what you find in the interest region is there's there's many paths

51:11 - in and out of the, you know, traditional wage

51:14 - dependent working class, you know, maybe industrially unionized, right.

51:19 - Some some people have different portions of their life fit that to a tee.

51:23 - At other portions, they didn't.

51:24 - I mean, one,

51:27 - one popular path out of,

51:29 - you know, sort of the most poorly paid and minor was certainly through

51:32 - unionization and advocating for wage gains and better contracts.

51:36 - But another popular path for small business ownership

51:38 - and a lot of the car dealerships and the construction firms that actually

51:42 - in the surrounding towns, you know, have the same surnames.

51:45 - We have Bally's, construction of the family that came from, actually,

51:47 - you can see that that legacy,

51:49 - that was a path out of dependency on the mine bosses to become the boss.

51:52 - Right.

51:53 - We have other people.

51:54 - One of the founding partners at Berkeley was a former coal miner.

51:57 - And so he, you know, he became one of the bosses, right?

52:01 - Not through industrial unionization, but through this other route.

52:04 - There were other people who, you know, at times were wage earning miners

52:08 - and other times were bootleg miners who were digging illegal dog holes

52:12 - out in the hills and Cooper County, outside of a cash economy,

52:16 - almost entirely. Right.

52:17 - And so I think attending to

52:20 - those individual lives and how real people actually got by,

52:24 - gets us away from,

52:27 - you know, this idea that it's been it's a it's a permanent identity,

52:30 - fixed identity.

52:31 - There's only, like, one kind of working class person.

52:33 - I think, by the same token, you know, that

52:35 - the emphasis we put on children's work and women's work at Berkeley

52:39 - also helps us talk about, think about these other people who were,

52:44 - you know, propping up these working class lives, acting as families,

52:47 - business managers,

52:48 - often running sort of small businesses out of their homes at the very same time

52:52 - that, like the guy that's on the census record was in the mines.

52:56 - They're trying to tell the stories at once.

52:57 - It's difficult.

52:59 - But I think that's the best way to avoid you know what Lynn said?

53:01 - Like workers were here, right?

53:04 - Right.

53:04 - Yeah.

53:04 - I mean, so, yeah, that, which side of the

53:07 - or the sort of hidden side of labor,

53:11 - you know, the backdrop of that, you know, house work is is work, right?

53:16 - Is it's wage work without the wage.

53:18 - So how do you tell something like that?

53:21 - I mean, do you have the you have the documentary evidence for that?

53:24 - Do you have

53:25 - a story that's been told or how do you put that together?

53:29 - I mean, the simplest way we tell that is by talking

53:33 - about changes in domestic labor and domestic economy.

53:37 - You know, through the time that people lived in the village.

53:39 - And so having several different, say, kitchens or living rooms

53:43 - that are interpreted to different periods allows us to talk about,

53:46 - you know, the introduction of labor saving devices.

53:48 - And so you go from, you know, a,

53:50 - a manual map of state of matter to a mechanized potato masher.

53:54 - Right.

53:54 - And you go from,

53:56 - you know, a hand sewing kit, needle and thread

53:58 - to a sewing machine being right, these are things that,

54:02 - sort of free of domestic labor as time to then do something else,

54:05 - maybe have like a piecework business that they're operating out of their home.

54:09 - And so, you know, having those real,

54:12 - restored, interpreted domestic spaces, I think, like,

54:16 - makes that story a little bit more tangible for people.

54:20 - And I mean, as I said before, the oral histories are great documents of this.

54:23 - I mean, they have,

54:26 - you know, there's there's all sorts of dramatic narratives of hardships

54:29 - that people faced in their lives, you know,

54:30 - a, an illness that ripped through the household.

54:32 - And then you know how,

54:35 - let's say, like the, you know, matriarch of the family

54:38 - figured out how to get everybody.

54:39 - Well,

54:40 - and it's this dramatic tale of, you know, you go to, like, the churches for faith

54:43 - healing and you get patent medicine from the company store, and you're,

54:47 - you know, scavenging,

54:49 - different plants for, you know, culture says that you can make

54:52 - your combining all these things to get your family through that process.

54:56 - And then, you know, you remind the people that you don't think patron fact.

54:59 - Right?

55:00 - And yet you're describing, like, a week's worth of work.

55:02 - Yeah.

55:05 - Like lessons for others interested in.

55:08 - Yeah.

55:08 - I think one of the big things that we find is this kind of been touched on,

55:13 - during some of my colleagues comments, and it's the idea that if you don't

55:17 - have the whole story, that might not be what the audience is

55:20 - looking for anyway.

55:24 - And we, you know,

55:24 - we talk about, you know, people don't all come to museums for the same reason.

55:28 - They don't all come to read all the panels. They don't.

55:29 - Some people don't come to learn anything.

55:31 - They come there because they learned that earlier.

55:33 - It's going to do on a Saturday,

55:34 - or they want to take a picture of their kid there so they can put it on Instagram.

55:38 - So it looks like a better mom than the other moms.

55:39 - Like whatever reason they're coming to the museum is, it's perfectly valid.

55:44 - And it takes the pressure off because to just, you know, be open

55:47 - and transparent with with visitors and to say, here's what we do

55:51 - have of the person story.

55:52 - Here's a struggle they went through.

55:55 - For all as much documentation as we have, it's very challenging for us

55:58 - to recreate the full life of one of the workers

56:01 - the way we can't of a DuPont family member.

56:03 - But if the person is coming because they want an emotional connection

56:07 - to a historic site in their own neighborhood,

56:10 - I don't need their whole life

56:11 - to get that emotional connection and emotional resonance.

56:13 - If somebody wants to, you know, think about how people in the past

56:17 - made decisions because it helps them make a decision in their own life.

56:20 - I don't need every decision that working class person made.

56:23 - I need.

56:24 - Here's a time when that person thought, do I move to a different firm?

56:27 - Do I stay with this company?

56:29 - You know that you know, historic choice helps us understand

56:32 - that humans have always been struggling with options and opportunities and

56:36 - and that human connection that we're able to make is what people are looking for.

56:39 - So if you can find those,

56:41 - mining the archives for those nuggets of gold,

56:43 - you don't need the whole you don't need a whole bench.

56:45 - You just need a couple nuggets.

56:47 - And and think about

56:49 - starting with the audience and doing the audience research

56:52 - or the audience questions, or looking at how people are coming to your website.

56:55 - One of the search terms they're using, what pages are

56:58 - there's a lot of great stuff you can find on Google Analytics for free,

57:02 - how people are getting to you or what are they saying on your social pages?

57:05 - What are the comments on your Facebook posts?

57:08 - You can learn a lot about your audience to learn their motivations and

57:11 - what we have to do in the public history field to just exceed those expectations

57:14 - a little bit.

57:15 - We don't have to give them everything because that's not what they asked for.

57:18 - That's I think it's it takes the pressure off of you as an institution

57:21 - because we're not it's we we can't it's not alchemy.

57:25 - We have to use what we have available to us.

57:27 - Speaking of art, there's nothing from my own.

57:29 - There's. Yeah.

57:30 - And we have, like, 12 minutes left, so.

57:33 - Or less.

57:34 - Mike. Yes.

57:36 - So go more insights,

57:37 - that are associated with some prominent individuals probably on

57:43 - or on others

57:45 - as you interpret the word side of things, who are you?

57:49 - Are certain stories of your individual sites?

57:54 - You know, they found

57:56 - people, workers, family members, kids, whatever,

57:59 - and have very compelling stories, relevant stories.

58:02 - And what you're trying to get across here is. Who?

58:08 - I have one who actually put a picture somewhere

58:13 - where she's some

58:15 - in the bottom right hand corner of that slide

58:18 - is a woman named Mary Hazard Collins, which also her middle name is hazard.

58:22 - What a great name for working at a gunpowder factory.

58:26 - She and a friend during World War one.

58:28 - A friend,

58:30 - said to her, you know, DuPont is hiring.

58:33 - All the men are off at the front.

58:34 - They have a bunch of jobs open.

58:35 - We should get a job there.

58:37 - She went to her mother and said, my friend and I are going to work at DuPont.

58:39 - She her mom said, absolutely not.

58:41 - She said, I'm going to do it anyway.

58:44 - And within a year, she ends up as,

58:47 - to use the term that was used for her as the foreman of a,

58:51 - packing house site where propellant powder for mortar shells was being packaged

58:56 - to be shipped over to the from America hadn't entered the war yet.

59:00 - Would've been

59:01 - early in 1917, just about around the time of writing in the war.

59:05 - But she's over it.

59:06 - So any,

59:07 - you know, propellant powder that's been used by Allied forces

59:10 - in the trenches in World War One?

59:11 - A lot of that is coming from Hagley,

59:13 - and it's being packaged to be shipped to the from under the supervision of Mary.

59:17 - Hazard Collins, a 24 year old woman of color.

59:21 - After the war ended, she got a job with the DuPont company in their office

59:25 - buildings as an elevator operator, where she worked for 30 years.

59:29 - And then in the 1950s, we had the foresight to record her oral history.

59:32 - So we also have that whole story and her voice.

59:37 - And this was a discovery in our archives maybe a year ago,

59:40 - and she has become one of the major stars of as we start to talk

59:44 - about working class people and worker stories,

59:47 - hers really rises to the top because it's such a unique story.

59:51 - You know, all of our other pictures

59:52 - are rows of white guys with mustaches lined up next to each other.

59:56 - And so to have this story of this, you know, 24 year

59:58 - 764 old woman of color who is managing this, this explosives facility,

01:00 - 05.535 in 1917 and 1918, it's really a standout story.

01:00 - 10.549 Yes. Right.

01:00 - 11.684 First.

01:00 - 13.586 Oh. Come on, quick question for both.

01:00 - 15.387 Alice, everyone.

01:00 - 19.315 How many of you are members of the Fairmont Society

01:00 - 22.352 for history

01:00 - 23.596 interest?

01:00 - 24.297 Shame on me.

01:00 - 26.966 Oh, how high is that?

01:00 - 28.634 Atomization?

01:00 - 31.470 Few decades younger than

01:00 - 33.772 the historical association.

01:00 - 35.474 I guess most people.

01:00 - 36.176 It doesn't really.

01:00 - 39.936 All I can say is things.

01:00 - 43.406 But what strikes me is this. How?

01:00 - 46.919 Could possibly

01:00 - 50.179 have also been at a national conference

01:00 - 53.125 that,

01:00 - 56.152 it was interesting the overlap and of,

01:00 - 59.956 the few cognitive Piaget

01:01 - 03.226 this morning where there was a session,

01:01 - 05.638 well attended

01:01 - 07.239 discussing this late in history.

01:01 - 09.308 And then what we're talking about here,

01:01 - 12.335 we have states that are very much industrial.

01:01 - 15.948 There is an overlap between the people, both the thing

01:01 - 18.951 and then a public history that, you try to do.

01:01 - 23.346 And one comment about that, that's, different organizations,

01:01 - 27.092 ways of looking at themselves.

01:01 - 30.162 So they just formed like a working group, I want to say

01:01 - 34.424 is their terminology for iron, steel, coal.

01:01 - 36.069 Yeah.

01:01 - 39.095 Yeah, I'm speaking in March.

01:01 - 41.140 But that seems really, really interesting.

01:01 - 44.543 And it sounds like they're pulling together a lot of, like, this

01:01 - 45.378 sort of a thing.

01:01 - 48.638 And I think we should all look to Bethlehem for this conference.

01:01 - 52.317 Anyone who cares about industrial history would love to do a panel

01:01 - 55.611 or several panels, because that's a really good place to do it.

01:01 - 57.991 Yeah.

01:01 - 01.150 Our, historic site administrator at, both actually,

01:02 - 02.795 in the Anthracite Heritage Museum.

01:02 - 07.223 Bodie Morin is a industrial archeologist by training, which is it's been helpful in

01:02 - 11.570 thinking about how these working class lives are embedded

01:02 - 12.638 in industrial landscapes.

01:02 - 14.897 I mean, that's his work is in copper mine reclamation.

01:02 - 18.811 Which is his dissertation work.

01:02 - 22.881 And so, you know, thinking more broadly about these longer narratives

01:02 - 25.317 of environmental change, environmental hazard hazards

01:02 - 27.019 that are still affecting these communities.

01:02 - 31.347 And even though the anthracite industry is at a fraction of its historic scale,

01:02 - 35.527 there's still effects on air quality and water quality and land use and,

01:02 - 38.554 you know, soil pH and and all these other things.

01:02 - 40.432 I mean, it's also,

01:02 - 42.201 you know, some of the particular challenges

01:02 - 45.561 that we face in looking at preserving workers housing,

01:02 - 48.207 looking at preserving the remnants of industrial structures.

01:02 - 49.008 We have, looking at

01:02 - 53.145 preserving the Scranton iron furnaces, which is also under our, umbrella.

01:02 - 55.647 I mean, these are their somewhat unique challenges, right?

01:02 - 57.449 These are,

01:02 - 00.319 they're buildings built for a very specific function,

01:03 - 02.521 and they can't be preserved in quite the same way

01:03 - 05.758 as, you know, your typical historic home or something like that.

01:03 - 06.024 And so,

01:03 - 06.793 so thinking about it

01:03 - 08.427 through the lens of industrial archeology

01:03 - 10.763 is, I mean, it's a toolkit that we have to use,

01:03 - 13.589 because there's, there's sort of no other existing toolkits out there.

01:03 - 21.940 So, yes, this is kind of related.

01:03 - 24.967 And I was curious about,

01:03 - 29.105 conservation projects or how you approach

01:03 - 33.810 materials like what you're seeing from varying.

01:03 - 42.828 We've had an interesting run recently.

01:03 - 45.855 So in addition to this site itself, with about 200 buildings,

01:03 - 49.001 18 buildings under roof,

01:03 - 51.770 museum collections are about 70,000 objects.

01:03 - 54.797 Library collections are several thousand linear feet.

01:03 - 58.801 So in terms of the object conservation side,

01:03 - 03.081 we have three conservators on staff or a large organization.

01:04 - 06.876 So we have three conservators, an objects conservator and two paper conservators.

01:04 - 10.613 If we didn't have them, I'm not sure how we would function.

01:04 - 13.692 If anyone ever tried to leave, we're going to grab them by the ankles,

01:04 - 15.594 so they can't get out.

01:04 - 17.996 We also faced a major challenge in 2021.

01:04 - 22.501 In September, Hurricane Ida, traveled up the Appalachian Mountains,

01:04 - 26.405 settled in central Pennsylvania, and the Brandywine River, which is usually

01:04 - 29.775 about six feet deep in the main channel, was 24ft deep in the main channel.

01:04 - 33.903 So the entire historic powder yard was under about, ten feet of water.

01:04 - 38.608 The basement of our visitor center at 180,000 gallons of water in a.

01:04 - 43.388 We were one week away from opening a, our exhibit on paint models,

01:04 - 45.852 which had already been delayed a year because of the pandemic.

01:04 - 48.060 So that has been

01:04 - 51.087 our major conservation task over the last few years.

01:04 - 55.191 We are, this month, we wrapped up the last,

01:04 - 59.571 FEMA approved restoration project from damage.

01:04 - 03.175 And in 2021, so that's that's been our biggest project.

01:05 - 06.011 And that was everything from masonry restoration,

01:05 - 08.914 repair and building systems and maintenance.

01:05 - 11.149 I strongly recommend, if you don't know how.

01:05 - 14.176 FEMA works, learn it before you need it.

01:05 - 16.355 It is not what we thought it was.

01:05 - 18.557 I think a lot of people think it works like an insurance adjuster.

01:05 - 19.259 You have a problem.

01:05 - 22.251 Fuel comes out right through the check, and that's how you get your money.

01:05 - 25.364 It's a you have to fix it first and submit for reimbursement, but

01:05 - 28.391 you have to get approval for the projects before you do any of the work.

01:05 - 30.469 So for the first few months that was sitting

01:05 - 32.971 looking at our severely damaged historic property,

01:05 - 35.941 not able to even get quotes or do anything.

01:05 - 38.968 So if you if you don't know how FEMA works, learn it now.

01:05 - 40.602 You'll need it.

01:05 - 45.574 So our museum was restored by the EPA.

01:05 - 49.612 I might be the only museum that has been restored by the EPA.

01:05 - 51.256 And they did a really great job.

01:05 - 53.292 That was in 2010.

01:05 - 57.796 And it's very usable, Ada compliant, all that kind of stuff.

01:05 - 01.233 So it's fantastic. But that was in 2010.

01:06 - 04.236 And now every system they install is breaking

01:06 - 07.439 and the building is owned by the township.

01:06 - 11.267 I just operate the nonprofit that runs it, but we are in charge of all maintenance.

01:06 - 14.379 So that is an issue because again,

01:06 - 17.516 it was the Steelman and Steel Mill admin building.

01:06 - 20.543 It was not, you know, some glorious mansion.

01:06 - 24.089 And then the so we just kind of ignore

01:06 - 27.116 all that maintenance.

01:06 - 29.328 Wish I was kidding.

01:06 - 32.355 We have some really great volunteers that help out as needed.

01:06 - 35.634 But the house that we bought across the street, we've been doing a lot

01:06 - 37.135 where we just did a preservation plan.

01:06 - 38.170 We're about to start

01:06 - 42.174 the restoration of that structure, and it has been really interesting

01:06 - 45.177 trying to work with preservation architects

01:06 - 48.747 when I'm like, look at this row house, this is what we're restoring.

01:06 - 49.771 And they're like,

01:06 - 53.485 because it's not what is typically restored.

01:06 - 56.512 It's not the same materials and it's in a company town.

01:06 - 00.559 So in one case, I was it was suggested to me that I hire a paint

01:07 - 04.920 analysis person, $25,000 to tell me what color the front porch was,

01:07 - 06.732 but the company only use two colors.

01:07 - 08.533 This isn't like a Victorian whatever.

01:07 - 10.569 Like there are two colors to choose from.

01:07 - 13.596 I hope that the fee could be last.

01:07 - 16.908 And so I think there's a lot of really interesting things

01:07 - 19.945 going on with that, but it's definitely like I did interviews

01:07 - 22.347 with some preservation architects and I'm like, this is different.

01:07 - 23.348 This is working class.

01:07 - 25.484 We have a different vision for this house.

01:07 - 26.985 Everything needs to be touchable.

01:07 - 31.256 And it's been hard to find people who, you know because they're so used to it.

01:07 - 31.990 This is what they do.

01:07 - 32.859 They do,

01:07 - 36.962 especially in new Jersey, a lot of like revolution kind of houses and structures.

01:07 - 39.989 And I'm like, no, this is the 1940s.

01:07 - 43.426 So that's been really a learning experience.

01:07 - 47.372 And any other questions from

01:07 - 50.399 from out here in our audience? Yes.

01:07 - 56.472 Let's there's a whole.

01:07 - 00.085 And how that relates

01:08 - 03.321 with respect to time and the already

01:08 - 06.348 a gesture.

01:08 - 11.020 As visible and especially, you know,

01:08 - 14.790 on the parapet, you.

01:08 - 18.938 Restoration.

01:08 - 21.964 Recreation

01:08 - 23.108 stuff that comes from

01:08 - 26.202 the same time that mentioned to you for,

01:08 - 29.314 how do you,

01:08 - 32.475 how do you give the individual that, you know,

01:08 - 37.379 I think,

01:08 - 40.392 One of my approaches is to, try

01:08 - 44.854 to make visible the things that, in fact, are visible, but, like, disappears.

01:08 - 46.498 Background noise on the site. Right?

01:08 - 49.762 So you come to actually and you see the buildings sort of cascading down the road.

01:08 - 53.972 One thing that I found exciting about the botanical survey that we had done

01:08 - 57.867 is that, you know, there's I don't know how many trees right on the property,

01:08 - 01.646 a handful of these trees, you know, 50 plus,

01:09 - 05.107 our fruit varieties that are not native to North America.

01:09 - 08.377 Some of the apple cultivars are from Eastern Europe,

01:09 - 10.689 and are today only really found in Eastern Europe.

01:09 - 10.857 Right.

01:09 - 12.657 And so that tells a very human story of somebody

01:09 - 16.418 packing like very few possessions, among which is the envelope apple seeds

01:09 - 19.221 they transport to northeastern Pennsylvania, and they cultivate,

01:09 - 20.766 so that

01:09 - 23.835 they can have a, you know, a free food source.

01:09 - 25.570 And this sort of time of the homeland right there.

01:09 - 28.140 There's a whole sort of human narrative you can tell there,

01:09 - 30.175 but it blends into the tree line.

01:09 - 31.376 Right.

01:09 - 32.777 You know, by the very same token, like,

01:09 - 35.921 I'm really interested in the scavenged materials that you find on these houses,

01:09 - 39.017 breakers in a major industrial building at an anthracite

01:09 - 40.852 colony had about a 30 year lifespan.

01:09 - 43.889 And so once those things came down, people would go in and rip out

01:09 - 45.157 whatever materials they could find.

01:09 - 48.293 And so you find these breaker crates that, you know, we're used to sort anthracite

01:09 - 53.589 by size, used as secure grates on basement casement windows.

01:09 - 57.102 But again, you know, your average visitor walking through the property

01:09 - 01.063 sees a bit of rusted metal, the blends and all of the other bits of rusted metal.

01:10 - 01.307 Right.

01:10 - 04.400 And so I think sort of teaching people how to see those things,

01:10 - 06.244 is helpful in interpreting it.

01:10 - 08.068 But then it's also, you know, gives sort of a,

01:10 - 11.116 a blueprint for interpreting a lot of the other communities

01:10 - 13.285 we hear from people who visit, actually,

01:10 - 16.521 and then on their way out, drive through Jetta, which is the next town down

01:10 - 19.591 that has exactly the same sort of skeleton skeletons, the structures.

01:10 - 22.227 But there's still lived in. And so they have vinyl siding.

01:10 - 24.529 They've got just built on swimming pools in the backyard.

01:10 - 25.630 But once you've seen Actly,

01:10 - 28.400 right, you start seeing all of these little things peek out, right?

01:10 - 30.101 Oh, there's apple trees in the backyard there too.

01:10 - 31.436 And there's some of those breaker crates.

01:10 - 34.463 They're still left on the garage in the back.

01:10 - 36.308 And so, so yeah, I think trying to highlight

01:10 - 39.335 those things that people don't realize have significance.

01:10 - 39.946 Excuse me.

01:10 - 41.713 My approach

01:10 - 43.348 all day there.

01:10 - 45.174 Thank you, everybody. Thanks to our panel.