William Mccoy History Internship

The second to last week of my internship has now ended. It may be one of my most productive ones yet. I believe I have gotten into the groove and am familiar enough with the operations of the archive and the foundation to do my best work. Just like last week, I spent most of my time accessioning new objects and collections into the archive. There is a section on a shelf in the archive where objects yet to be accessioned are stored and I was able to get through all of them this week. I accessioned many slides, photos, old documents (such as an Oakland-Winter Garden high school diploma from 1919), and the objects that are going to be put on display in the coming weeks for the Winter Garden at the Movies exhibit. I find this work to be very fulfilling. It’s not as exciting as research or writing, but not every profession is entirely made up of its best parts. I get to handle, observe, and record details about historical objects, and even if this is not the best part about the position...

This week I spent a majority of my time accessioning new collections into the archive. There were two large donations to the foundation containing objects from two prominent members of the community. The collections mostly consisted of personal correspondence and programs for events. For both collections I separated each document or object into categories, then listed the items in said categories into our archival software. If there was more than one copy of an item, the copy in better condition was accessioned into our collection while the other was set aside to be donated to another archive. One of the documents was a letter from Richard Nixon, with his actual signature, which I found exciting. Once each item was listed on the computer the subsections of the collection were put into folders which were placed in a box along with objects from the collection and placed on a shelf in the archive according to its ID. Also, In Winter Garden there is a children’s scavenger hunt run by th...

Well, it is now over halfway through July, and we are entering the last few weeks of my internship. We have spent this week getting ready to put up the Winter Garden at the Movies exhibit. We have gotten all the items that we might use out of the archive. We still need to decide which movie posters to use, as there are quite a few archived, but most of them are distasteful in one way or another so we have narrowed it down to a couple of different ones. All that is left is to get signs and images printed, and to set it all up. It is a scary thought that the exhibit will soon be displayed to the public, but also exciting. I have put a lot of thought and work into it and so I will be glad to see it finished.  In addition, this Friday my supervisor took me on a tour of the area. Up until that point I had only known important places in West Orange County from what I had read or seen in the archive. It was fun and interesting to see in person all that I had written about. ...

It has been a good week at the Winter Garden Heritage Foundation, and I hope everyone had a great Independence Day. This week the theater exhibit was fact checked by an expert on the local theaters, Irv Lipscomb. Irv corrected some things, such as the number of seats in an old theater, the Gem theater. I went back and fixed all the other errors that he pointed out. In addition to this, I have cleaned up the captions for the Winter Garden at Work exhibit and have continued my search for information about how railroad laborers were treated around the time that Florida railroads were starting to boom. This has been really difficult; I believe partly because those that wrote the histories just do not care about these people’s experiences and partly because they would be ashamed of how poorly workers were treated then. Based on the few writings I have found regarding this, the conditions of the workers seem to have been unimaginably horrific by today’s standards.  While I ...

I am happy to report that my work at the Foundation has been ahead of schedule. Last week I described how I have finished the writing. My supervisor has proofread and edited my captions, and the intro I have written. I am not particularly egotistical about my writing and so I was not worried about editing and found that it flowed better after the edits. Now the primary focus will be designing the exhibits, getting things such as posters made, and getting permission to use some of the photos. The movie exhibit will be put on display first and so that is where the primary focus is. That exhibit will stay up for some months before Winter Garden at Work is displayed, so my internship will have ended by that point. My supervisor and I have been brainstorming about design choices for the theater exhibit and hope to have a detailed plan soon. Because I am ahead in my work, I have been able to do other things to help the Foundation, such as scan donated documents or do some small...