Howdy! I have been involved with my internship for one who week now. This blog entry is for those of you who are dying to hear what I’m actually doing. Here’s the scoop. Strawbery Banke has an old house called the Wheelwright House. It was built in the 1780’s. Until very recently it has housed an exhibit of ‘real’ ‘old’ artifacts. My job this summer is to come up with a plan to make the first floor into an ‘interactive, experience based’ exhibit. Basically we want to set up the kitchen, family area and formal living room just the way those rooms would have looked in the late 18th century. The catch? Everything inside can be touched, sat on, tried out, etc. The goal is to have different experiencial activities for the public to try, ie: kneeding bread dough, writing with a quill and ink, churning butter.

The first steps (which I have jumped head first into) are to research other museums that have exhibits that might be similar and to research estate inventories from the Portsmouth region between 1760-1790. These house inventories will give me a look at what the average home had during that time period.

So far I’m having fun. The people have all been quite nice and I’m looking forward to getting some ideas and research down on paper.