Preserving History

Hi, my name is Paloma Link and I’m a rising senior majoring in art with a minor in psychology. This summer I’m working as a collections intern at the Fort Walla Walla Museum. The museum is a small non-profit organization focusing on the history of the Walla Walla valley, and they strive to preserve important artifacts from local history, serve as an educational resource for all, and shape the future through what gets represented in the museum. As a collections intern, a large portion of my position involves caring for artifacts. This can look like cataloging objects when the museum receives donations, organizing the collections, and working on upkeep tasks like taking inventory. Working hands-on with the artifacts has been one of my favorite parts of my experience so far. I love seeing what kinds of donations people bring in, and hearing the stories that go along with them.

One project I’ve been working on this summer has been designing a display case on the history of tourism in Walla Walla. The museum has a few older cases that they want to take down and repurpose into something new, so I was lucky to have the freedom to choose almost any concept for what I wanted to make. Early on, I’d come across some souvenir felt pennants from various events and booklets advertising Walla Walla as a travel destination. Experiencing the town today as a place mainly famous for its wineries, I was curious about how other aspects of tourism have developed here throughout the years.

I began the process by doing background research on some of the things Walla Walla is most known for, such as the origin of the region’s wine production, agricultural events and fairs like frontier days, and the evolution of downtown. At this point I started looking for objects to include from the museum’s collection, both by searching the database and actually wandering around the repository where all the artifacts are housed. As I collected things I wanted to display, it led me to more specific areas of research. The next steps were writing the text to go along with various aspects of the display. This was a completely new kind of writing for me, and it was a challenge to keep things as concise as possible considering the space I was working with. I’m currently finalizing these blocks of text and how they will fit into the overall layout, but I’m hoping for the case to be finished in the next couple of weeks.