First weekend at Crowley

My first weekend back at Crowley was an exciting one. I made several exciting discoveries in the museum's general store exhibit that I hope to incorporate into a small exhibit about the mail-order retail company Sears Roebuck and their predecessor - the Montgomery Ward Company. The timing of this discovery was perfect as I have just finished studying Sears Roebuck and their fellow revolutionary business leaders of the Gilded Age for my U.S. History 1877-Present course. One of the artifacts I analyzed during my visit happened to be a Sears Roebuck catalog devoted to tools and blacksmithing supplies. This is going to be instrumental and surmounting one of the museum's greatest obstacles - identifying the vast array of tools dispersed throughout the general store exhibit. By having a guide as to the identity and purpose of the tools, I can start to reorganize the objects in a way that makes sense. This is one of the biggest projects the CEO has asked me to work on and now we can use an artifact to identify at least some of the other artifacts. This week I will be devoting some time to research millinery as well. There is a top hat in the collection that has a millinery company stamp from London, but an odd artifact accompanies it - not a milliner's block but some sort of rigid container for the hat with cotton wadding in the brim. I look forward to continuing my investigation of the artifacts.