Pretty much every museum has them, unless they have a massive army of curators or registrars madly accessioning items as they come in the door. They are the dreaded . . . Collections Backlogs. [Cue the offstage scream.] The Museum Cataloging Process With the downsizing of the Silent Generation and retiring Baby Boomers, both of whom amassed a good many items during the post-World War II pro-consumerism era, museums are being flooded with items being…
When I put together my history bucket list on The Pragmatic Historian, I included as one of the items “Watch fabric dying and weaving within an old mill.” Well, I haven’t been able to watch the processes of weaving and dying fabric within a mill, but I did have an opportunity to take a tour of a woolen mill. Not far from where I live, in Randall, Minnesota, is a fiber arts mecca that started…
A block from my house is one of the oldest industrial areas of the city. The first railroad depot was along this stretch and there used to be a granite works in the strip, which was many blocks long and ran along the railroad line. Most of the track has been abandoned and a feed mill, which operated there for years and years, has pretty much vacated a two-block stretch of property. On one block…