Great thrift
To prepare for working with the very dirty (real dirt, not naughty dirt) collection below, I visited a number of thrift stores in the Salt Lake City area. The best ones were the DIs (Deseret Industries). Nope, that's not a typo. These very clean, organized, and super-cheap thrift stores run by the LDS folks. Speaking of clean, I cleaned up with $5 and $3 jeans and a couple of $5 shirts. Can't beat it with a stick!
The Mayflower/New Park Mining Company Collection
Here's where it started for me, well, a portion of it started here. Some of it started below:
What you're not seeing is the 1/4 in. of dirt and dust covering all of it.
It's also hard to see how very interesting this collection of mining company records is. It's full of canceled checks (with corresponding duplicates and some triplicates), vouchers, union news, stockholder information, personnel records, and more from between 1927-1963.
Some of the records were not in any boxes, stacked loosely (and dustily) on shelves. But we (the History Chicks and I) lightly brushed loose as much dirt and dust as we could outside the storage facility and packed up a truck full of boxes.
We moved the truckload of records from a suburb of Salt Lake City to another (new, very clean, and climate controlled) storage facility down the highway from Park City.
Since the move, we've been sorting through the records -- some packed into small file drawers in very haphazard ways, and some very tidily filed in alphabetical (mostly) order.
We have a lot of work to do, arranging this collection and re-ordering the records that were seemingly shoved in a box or drawer without logic. Describing it all should be fun, I think, because there's just so much meaty stuff -- from the records on the military men who were sent to work in the mines to the mine surveys.
Some of the adventure will take place in the storage facility, and some will happen in a processing area within the archives of the museum. At the moment, though, we're waiting for some much-needed supplies to arrive. In the meantime, I'll be working my way through Past Perfect, creating the framework for the digital descriptions. Frankly, I think there's no better way to learn a new program than by putting it to practical use while keeping the manual open in front of me.
That's the view as I drive back to the museum from the storage facility. I had just taken the photo right as the light turned -- no, I wasn't driving and taking pictures at the same time.
Museum Doings
In preparation for next Saturday's Park City Historic Home Tours, the museum folks (volunteers and staff) tie ceremonial ribbons around historical homes around town. I walked with a fellow History Chick up one of the streets with quite a few historical homes (some even in the booklet I helped prepare for this year's tour), tying the purple and gold ribbons around posts so that the folks taking the tour could find the homes easily.
I'm pretty excited to see some of the homes (and businesses) that will be open to tour-takers on the 26th. While some of the houses are in rough shape, the open ones have been updated and/or restored since they were originally built in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
Tonight, the Castillos came to sing Mexican ballads and folk songs (as well as some classic American songs) and talk to museum visitors about their lives. Visitors asked them questions, and the Castillos graciously answered all the questions.
Pride in SLC
I wish I had taken more and better photos of Pride weekend in Salt Lake City. But, it was good just to be a part of the experience. It was bittersweet, though, because being there alone really made me miss Thom, Rosie, and Bo -- all of whom would have had a good time at the festival. SLC makes quite a big deal of the thing with a weekend-long celebration -- loads of live music, a big parade, marches, rallies, and more.
So, that's my update for the first half of June. Hopefully, I'll have another one before the end of the month.
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