When any cultural institution undertakes the creation of a new exhibit, an entire world of activity ensues. And when that institution is a cutting-edge maritime museum, known throughout the country as demonstrating best practices in exhibits and education, the activity takes a long and focused effort.
Behind the scenes in the Steamboat Building at the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum (CBMM) during recent weeks, a team of curators, exhibit designers, scholars and volunteers moved quietly and efficiently, in and around photographs, tools and placards with quotes piled all over the floor. The team has been busy placing objects, photographs, models and interactive elements into position for “Push and Pull: Life on Chesapeake Bay Tugboats”, a new exhibit opening this Saturday, April 21 at the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum in St. Michaels.
The concept for a tugboat exhibit was born long ago at the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum. And ever since then, a team of academic and professional staff – accompanied every step of the way by dedicated and multi-talented volunteers – have built a fantastic exhibit.
If you think about it, a celebration of the tugboat seems kind of unlikely – they’re not the grand giants in the harbor like container ships or mega-yachts. Tugs are the scruffy worker-bees, hustling to and fro, day in and day out in the background of the harbor. Leave it to the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum to highlight this aspect of the Bay’s maritime culture – one that’s hidden in plain sight.
Pete Lesher, Chief Curator at the Museum, started rolling this idea out over a year ago, conceiving and designing the exhibit with key staff. The mission was to decide not only how to tell the story of tugboats on the Chesapeake, but to choose which stories to tell. Nothing moves on the Chesapeake Bay without tugboats. The goal was a living exhibit – one that would tie with the past and the future, and change over the two-year time span, with additions and new stories brought out over time. Bringing the various elements of a museum together – building collections and then translating them into exhibits and programs – is part of Lesher’s expertise.
His team has a broad background. Lindsley Rice is an independent consultant of exhibit design and development who curates collections and does graphics. Rob Forloney, Director of the Center for Chesapeake Studies, brings years of program design and education experience to the table, and Lynne Phillips, Michelle Zacks, Eric Applegarth, Tracey Munson and Marie Thomas each contributed their own professional skills and creativity.
The boatbuilding team – Mike Gorman, Jenn Kuhn, India Gilham-Westerman, Richard Scofield, Don MacLeod, Ken Philips, and Joe Redman– spent the last year restoring the tugboat Delaware, marking her 100th year. She has been launched and is motoring again on the Miles River.
Volunteers integral to the project include Bob and Mary Sue Traynelis, Kathy Bergren Smith, Bill Day, John Lindinger, Mac McConnell, Ellen and Norm Plummer, Paul Ray, Bill Sewell, John Stumpf, Ed Thieler and Chuck Whitehead.
Michelle Zacks, the Museum’s folklorist (yes, that’s a real job) started working on the Tugboat project in 2011. Her expertise is in collecting information about the people and the culture around a topic, in this case – the tugboat industry. Looking at the industry’s present participants through a historic lens, Zacks pursues questions around the relationship among communities, the environment and technology. In the last year Zacks has immersed herself in the tugboat industry and the communities around the Bay where men and women on tugs help shape the Chesapeake economy.
Interviewing 22 individuals over the past year, Zacks collected oral histories by traveling into Baltimore harbors, to Tangier Island, riding up the Wicomico Rivers to Salisbury aboard a tug carrying grain from the western shore to the eastern shore. She sat at kitchen tables with boat captains, walked docks, drank coffee in cafes, and learned about the lives of generations who worked on these boats. As those generations changed, technologies shifted, and the jobs themselves changed too. What started out as groups of men spending weeks at a time together in tight quarters, working, cooking and eating together, shifted into smaller crews working shorter shifts and using more computers than manpower to operate the tugs and their tasks. Zacks’ contribution is to both the permanent collection – hours of recordings will be available to scholars forever – and the exhibit – quotes she culled from interviews will line the walls, adding voices of individual experience to the larger story.
Tugboats are “cute”, some people say. Kids relate. A whole cultural response to tugboats can be seen in children’s popular literature and movies. Examples of kids’ books and toys about tugs are included in the exhibit. But ask a guy who works on one, and he’ll tell you what he told Zacks, “there’s nothing cute about getting out at 4:00 in the morning in the cold and snow…..”
Because of the natural environment of the Chesapeake Bay, tugboats have a unique and different role here than anywhere else in the world. Their role encompasses port work, moving gigantic container ships into and out of major east coast shipping ports – Norfolk, Hampton Roads, and Baltimore. Open water work at the mouth of the Bay requires different kinds of tugs and different skill-sets for crew. Tugs working canals have their own role and on the small rivers on the Eastern Shore, tugs are the only way to move grain, for instance – from the big open waters up to end users on Delmarva. The exhibit demonstrates all of these roles. Since tugs both “push and pull” cargo, boats and ships, examples of both will be displayed in the exhibit. Museum visitors will even have a chance to push “cargo” through a river and under a bridge, through an interactive display.
The Museum has an extensive collection of objects, photographs, maps, recordings, books and manuscripts, encompassing anything and everything maritime and Chesapeake. It’s Lynne Phillips’ job to manage the collection – she knows what the Museum has and where to find it, can put her hands on exact information about every piece of the collection. She’s the one who handles documents and organizes photographs and artifacts borrowed from other institutions. Phillips was seen early this week sitting just underneath the exhibit’s monster 2-story steam engine, labeling photographs and recording notes, one careful step at a time. Built in 1924, the 700 hp steam engine from the railroad tug “Chessie” is typical of its day. It stands in the rear of the exhibit, and will be operated from time to time – it still works.
The person who animates all of the objects and brings research to life at the Museum is Eric Applegarth, who has been the CBMM’s Exhibits Specialist for some 25 years. Walk through any of the buildings of the 18 acre museum complex, and you’ll be looking at his work. He built virtually everything there, with assistance from staff and scores of volunteers. Applegarth dreams up the physical look of the displays, imagines how to construct things and creates the “stuff” that teaches. His creative eye and artistic talent can be found in every single exhibit on the campus. From scratch, he, staff and volunteers put together every display in the tugboat exhibit, and he’ll have his hands on it every step of the way as it changes over the next two years.
The education staff at the Museum will have a huge role to play as well. Their job is to translate the exhibit into educational experiences for visitors – children and adults of all ages. On Wednesday, project manager Forloney offered a presentation to some 40 museum volunteer docents and educators, who will walk visitors through the exhibit. These volunteers are critical in helping visitors take home the stories of the tug industry, and incorporate that information into their own understanding of the Chesapeake Bay history and culture. A very specific training event will take docents step by step through the exhibit in May, and they will learn how to use the objects and visitor’s questions to teach and tell stories. Always engaging, always learning and sharing, the Museum’s volunteers show up day in and day out, teaching visitors individually and in groups.
And so goes the life of a museum exhibit. Starting with the concept, to design, execution and finally to educating visitors – the thing that the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum does best, every single day.
Push and Pull will open on Saturday, April 21st at the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum in St. Michaels.
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