Hi, my name is Ayla Hanafi and I’m a rising senior majoring in English and Art. Over the summer I worked as a collections intern at the Fort Walla Walla Museum. The Fort Walla Walla museum is a relatively small museum but has quite a large collection of artifacts and many varied exhibition spaces. The museum specializes in the local history of the Walla Walla valley with an emphasis on history from the early to mid-18th century through to the 1960s. The museum’s mission is to be a space in which the local community can gather and collectively learn.
My work at the museum was varied but I primarily worked with the museum’s collections and artifacts. This work involved cataloging incoming donations to the museum, organizing various sections of the museum’s repository, and taking inventory of the objects in the museum collection. One aspect of this work that I really enjoyed was exploring the archives and discovering interesting, beautiful, and weird objects from the past. I loved doing inventory or cataloging objects and stumbling across things like a vintage jukebox, or fire extinguishers composed of glass balls full of liquid.
One of my favorite objects I found while exploring the repository was a blue letterman style jacket with patches on the front. One of these patches depicts a baseball with text stitched on top of it that reads Southeastern Champions Washington. This jacket ended up inspiring me to create a display case on local baseball history along with my fellow intern. Our process began with conducting background research and making sure there were enough resources to provide content for a case. Then, we found objects to include by searching the database of the museum’s collection as well as physically looking through artifacts in the repository. We ended up finding some well-preserved scrapbooks that contained a variety of older team photos, newspaper clippings, and business cards. With more specific research, we put together a timeline of the history of baseball in Walla Walla that was the centerpiece of the display case, combining written text with photos and other ephemera from the scrapbooks. Writing the text for the case was a process of multiple rounds of revision. In a museum where people have a lot to see, signage needs to be clear, concise, and generally short–this can be surprisingly difficult when there is a wealth of information to be consolidated. Once we had a finalized list of all the artifacts that would be included and had the text written, it was time to decide the layout and install everything.
My internship at the museum was a valuable opportunity to learn more about museum work and try my hand at curation and research.