It may seem odd to think about a pending zombie apocalypse from a museum educator’s perspective, but it can be a fun and useful exercise for a variety of purposes. We can use the cheeky pop culture trend to make some otherwise dry topics (such as disaster and emergency management planning) a little more fun and lively. Medical health professionals, like those at the Centers for Disease Control, use a hypothetical zombie apocalypse to model infectious disease outbreaks. The Pentagon has also used a fictional zombie apocalypse scenario as a planning and training tool. This has allowed the U.S. government to use zombies as a theoretical risk to plan defense strategies without offending any actual, real-life friends or foes that might take even a pretend elimination personally.

This poster from the Centers for Disease Control promotes a tongue-in-cheek awareness for zombie apocalypse preparation.
CDC - Office of Public Health Preparedness and Response. Preparedness 101 - Zombie Posters. http://www.cdc.gov/phpr/zombies.htm. March 2016.

How do we take these great ideas and turn them into our own living history zombie survival boot camp? One example can be our approach to water. Most survival books and websites recommend stocking up on a minimum of a gallon of drinking water per person per day. Just like the old proverb about teaching a man to fish, teaching people to find, filter, and purify their own water will help them survive longer than storing water alone. The State Historical Society of North Dakota has a SEND trunk available specifically about water resources. I have written about the SEND program before here and here. Another program I'll be teaching this spring will be one of the new Museum Lab classes for school-aged children. One class in March will focus on teaching kids how to make a water filter action system out of various materials. If it goes over well, there may be more sessions offered this fall. We can use programs like SEND and Museum Lab to teach both history and survival skills through museum programs.

Since humans can only survive for three to five days without water, it has always been critical for people to be able to find this resource. Throughout time people have learned how to watch for clues that will lead them to water, such as watching for the direction birds fly or places insects swarm. Humans learned how to follow animal trails to good sources of drinking water. We have learned to find vegetation that is high in water content and have learned how to collect and store water. People have even figured out how to find water underground and how to remove salt from ocean water. We also had to learn how to filter and purify water to remove the sediment and bacteria that can make us sick, or even kill us. Water is a resource that we have learned to manage to keep it clean and make sure there is enough for everybody. As we read about water availability and quality in other parts of the country, the relevance to our daily lives becomes obvious. What a great way to connect kids to both science and history in one fun topic.

Visitors often ask what my favorite thing about the Former Governors’ Mansion State Historic Site is, and my answer usually draws a look of confusion from them. They’re expecting me to say something grand, like the staircase or the massive pocket doors. My answer is something small, but not insignificant--nails.

I love nails! Nails can tell you so much about when something was built. When I see a square cut iron nail sticking out of a piece of trim, I don’t say, “I need to pound that back in.” I get excited because that nail just verified that the trim was installed before 1895.

Square cut nail in an exterior door frame that has pushed out over time from seasonal contraction and expansion. Many layers of paint can be identified, with just a hint of the original 1884 brick red color showing. This nail was pounded in more than 130 years ago.

When the mansion was built in 1884, the steel wire nail we know so well today was in its technological infancy, with only about 10% of all nails produced being small steel wire nails. By the early 1890s the steel wire nail had begun to replace the square cut iron nail. By 1895 mass produced stocks of cut nails had been depleted, making it rare to find buildings constructed with them.

Steel wire nail protruding from an early, but not original trim piece in the parlor of the mansion. The manufacturing tool marks on this nail indicate that it could have been pounded in any time after World War II.

Knowing this little piece of history, I can look at a nail sticking out of a board--be it interior trim, framing wood or siding on the mansion-- and roughly determine when it was installed. Combine that with the type of finishes, thickness of the wood and written/oral histories, and we can nail down approximate dates on mansion remodels.

A great example is the mansion attic playroom’s built-in toy boxes. Oral history suggests that Governor Langer had the attic finished into a playroom in the 1930s for his children. Examination of the toy boxes shows they were built with steel wire nails, and the wood was modern dimension lumber, which became the standard around 1900. These two clues seem to corroborate the 1930s construction date for the toy boxes. But while examining the toy boxes to find out what kind of nails were used, a third clue was found; the signature of Governor White’s young son Edwin.

Edwin White’s childhood signature.

Governor White was in office from 1901 to 1905, which was a perfect time frame for the use of steel wire nails and modern dimension lumber to be combined in the construction of the toy boxes. Good bet that the toy boxes were built during Governor White’s occupancy of the mansion rather than Governor Langer’s!

Next time you are walking through a historic building, trying to puzzle out when something was remodeled, go find some nails. For something so simple, they can tell you a lot.

Susan is an architectural historian who loves old houses, barns and schools. She reviews projects that might impact cultural resources and researches earthen construction.

Welcome to A&HP’s initial processing lab, sieve sorter in foreground. For more information please see blog.statemuseum.nd.gov/blog/easy-question

Archaeologists and architectural historians use initial processing labs or wet labs, containing sieves, to discover tiny bits of evidence that measure big changes in technology. We included one of these rooms in the recent expansion at the Heritage Center. It is used to sort and process artifacts in the Archaeology and Historic Preservation Division (A&HP). The sieve stack (also known as a size-grader) and sorting trays help scientists sort soil, artifacts, and organic material. Researchers are usually searching for objects or fragments of objects that someone made or modified at some time in the past.

In northern plains archaeology, detailed procedures set out in 1989 by Dr. Stanley Ahler outline how to quickly make sense out of hundreds of bags of cultural material by sorting and weighing according to size grades. Viewed as an especially useful way to analyze lithic debitage (the flakes of stone that are removed from a cobble or preform when someone makes a stone tool), archaeologists statistically analyze hundreds or thousands of flakes that have been sorted by size. By doing so, researchers can gain new insights into methods of stone tool production over thousands of years.

Clean ordinary sand under magnification.

Architectural historians and masons also use such labs, equipped with sieves, microscopes, and Munsell color charts. They need the same tools to determine the best match for repairs or repointing between stones and bricks. These researchers try to match the mortar being used for restoration to the historic mortar. To match the sand in a mortar sample taken from an old brick or stone wall, you must first remove the binding element by digesting it in acid. If the original masons used a lime-based mortar, the lime will bubble away, leaving clean and rather attractive sands behind, as seen under the microscope. If the original mortar used a Portland cement, the acid digestion process will probably leave some hard chunks of cement with the sand.

Although Portland cements were known earlier, this technological change from lime mortars to Portland cement became widespread in the 1930s. Use of Portland cement was a fundamental change in building technology. Much of the art and science of lime-based mortars was nearly lost when mixes became far more standardized using Portland. Careful analysis of historic lime-based mortars and maintaining libraries of those recipes allows for nearly exact replicas in mortar when applied next to historic mortar.

Here both new bricks and new mortar needed to match the originals on the left and right of the photo. The architectural historians decided to match both as they were originally made rather than try to match the currently worn brick through artificial antiquing. The mortar will weather out in a rainy season to wash away the fines and leave the sand more exposed. Photos by S. Quinnell

So the same laboratory equipment is used in different applications to discover more about our pasts. In northern plains archaeology the wet lab allows analysis of many minute pieces from our ancient past, from Paleoindian big game hunters through the days of military forts. Similarly, mortar analysis performed with this same equipment can be used to understand changes in building mortar technologies from the earliest stone and brick buildings to the structures of the recent past.

A mission is an important thing for a museum. It provides a focus and a compass for how we interact with the public, what we put in our exhibits, and what we collect. It defines what we do and gives us a purpose for why we do it. Largely an invention of the 1960s and 1970s, missions emerged in museums at a time when the US bicentennial stoked a great deal of interest in history and the field became more evenly professionalized. Our mission is as follows:

To identify, preserve, interpret, and promote the heritage of North Dakota and its people.

Without that focus, many museums of the early 20th century functioned as a “cabinet of curiosities” of sorts. They often displayed items that visitors wouldn’t normally see in everyday life, sometimes peppered in amongst artifacts more familiar to the viewer. They showcased items from foreign lands, often picked up as souvenirs during travel, or at times, highlighted the unusual and bizarre.

The Liberty Memorial Building on the capitol grounds housed the State Museum from 1924 until the current Heritage Center was completed in 1981. Here you can see one of the displays, which contains covered wagons and steamships, forms of transportation not unusual for North Dakota, juxtaposed with a model of a Spanish galleon and other foreign ships.

This isn’t intended as criticism of the past. What we collected says a great deal about what we valued as a society and speaks to the curiosity that is inherent in human nature. In a time before the internet and trans-Atlantic flight, a visit to the museum was a way that you could physically see pieces of a faraway land or event that may otherwise have been inaccessible. And really, that is one of the ways we still serve the public today.

While the State Historical Society has generally focused its collecting on North Dakota, we still have some artifacts that were collected long ago that are very random. I’d like to highlight some of those items for you. Once the process is complete, an artifact has enough information recorded so that it and its story are easily accessible to staff, visitors, and researchers.

The Historical Society holds a set of Babylonian cuneiform tablets dated to 2350 BC. This tablet was acquired in June 1924 and is reportedly, “A list of cattle and sheep delivered to a shepherd for herding. Found at Drehem [Iraq], a suburb of Nippur where there was a receiving station for the temple of Bel.” While having no connection to North Dakota history, it was collected to allow people to see a piece of ancient civilization that they might otherwise only read about.

This is a chunk of granite taken from the Washington Monument in Washington, D.C., when one of the bricks was replaced with stone from North Dakota. On the surface, it is just a rock. If you saw it in your driveway, would you attribute any significance to it? Instead, it is imbued with significance due to the location it came from.

Known as the deer locked in death, these unfortunate deer were found impaled by their antlers near Belfield, North Dakota. They were mounted and displayed at the North Dakota exhibit at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, in 1901. Definitely an example of the bizarre, they could also be seen at the Liberty Memorial Building for many years.

Seeing these items makes me think about what we value today and how our views have shifted in the century since the Historical Society first began collecting. What are your valued possessions? What do they say about you?

Here in the Archives, we get a lot of questions asking how researchers can access information. Specifically, we get a lot of requests for digital files, preferably accessible on the internet, searchable by keyword, easy to use, easy to find.

We live in an age of easily accessible research, so it is what is expected. It is not, however, something we are able to do at this time. We don’t have the staff, the time, the funding, or the storage space to host such massive collections online.

A lot of our information is readily and easily accessed, though the majority of our collections are not digitized, online or searchable by keyword. Many researchers get ideas of what they need when looking at an index of collections on our website. You do have to be present to access most of our collections, or at the least, pay a minimal fee for a search, borrow a reel of microfilm through our Interlibrary Loan program, or some other similar research.

Yet this is nothing compared to what researchers encountered in the past. Digging in can be tough at times; daunting, even. Research can be challenging, and it can be rewarding—but it can also be arduous.

The State Historical Society of North Dakota has roots going back to the late 1800s.[i] For many years, it existed as a shadow of what was to come within other buildings on the capitol grounds. The Archives didn’t exist as a separate division within the society until 1971 and did not have a specific location where the public could easily access the collections. The move of this agency into a new building, its current home, offered opportunities to disseminate history in many different ways, including a public access area into the State Archives (our Orin G. Libby Memorial Reading Room).

On February 2, 1981, Jim Davis, current head of reference, opened the Reading Room of the State Archives for the first time. In doing so, he ushered North Dakotans into a new world of research possibilities.

Jim tells me many stories of how things were done differently in these early days, as he has been around this agency longer than I have been alive—as I kindly point out to him. Even if he didn’t tell me these things, the composition of the building itself would. For example, we have a startling lack of accessible outlets in our public research room. When the building was built in the 1970s and 1980s, people did not bring computers and cameras and phones in with them. They may not have even had all of these items at their homes. Outlets weren’t as much of a necessity then. Things have changed.

Case in point: In 1985, a state law was enacted that naturalization records had to be transferred from the counties to the State Archives. After they arrived here, if someone requested a copy, staff would have to go up into the stacks area, find the person in the index (if there was one), bring down the book, and copy it on our copier. These books were large and heavy, and you had to be careful not to tear the book in trying to get the correct spot copied.

When I started working here as an intern in 2006, the names were indexed alphabetically, and the books all microfilmed. This means that when I started here, I could locate a name in our alphabetical paper index, find the roll, and make a microfilm copy on one of these old (but much loved) clunkers of a machine and print out a page.

Today, I can go onto our website, link to the Institute of Regional Studies, search a name partially by typing in part of their name (great for those that often get misspelled), find the roll, pull it up, put it into one of our new microfilm scanners, and save it as a pdf or print out a page. I might even be able to find some article about the naturalization or some other life event of the individual by typing their name into Chronicling America through the Library of Congress and searching randomly through the available years/locations of newspapers. I might type their name into our searchable webpage and find an oral history or photograph collection linked to their name.

Or even look back at Wendi’s recent blog post, “Our Collections, Coming to a Computer Near You,” about how we are working to link different collections in the building. How cool is that? The concept is that we will be able to search everything in this building with a few keystrokes. Everything! (Insert evil laugh here.)

Of course, there are some trade-offs to this great excitement. It still won’t be as easy as typing a string of query words into a toolbar and accessing every document online. It is easy to admit that some of the burden of research has lifted…although still not everything is searchable, not everything is indexed, and we get more to add to our collections every day.

Isaac Newton is attributed with the quote: “If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants.”

I could point out that I found the exact wording of this quote by typing in “quote standing shoulders” and searching Google—but let’s cut to the point. We are all standing on the shoulders of those pioneers of the past, just as they stood on the shoulder of their predecessors. Just think of where we will be in the future.

What happens to the objects in a museum’s collections if it closes? What happens to a private collection if the owner passes away, no longer wants to keep it, or no longer has the ability to care for it? The objects/collections within these examples are sometimes called orphaned collections. The size of these collections can vary from a small handful of specimens to upwards of thousands or even millions of specimens.

Before a museum agrees to add an orphaned collection into an existing collection, it is important to make sure the incoming objects fit within the mission of the collection. For example, the ND State Fossil Collection would not accept a large collection of baseball cards, no matter how valuable they may be. Baseball cards simply do not fit within the mission of the State Fossil Collection, but might be more appropriate if donated to a collection of historic objects. However, accepting a large collection of fossils from a relatively unknown locality in Bowman County, ND, is well within the mission. It is also important to decide whether this museum is the best home for the collection, as well as whether the museum has the capacity and know-how to care for the objects properly.

In 2015 the ND State Fossil Collection incorporated two large, orphaned collections. Both collections were comprised of fossil specimens collected within or very near to North Dakota, and both will shed light on faunas or individual species (or both) that are poorly represented or unknown from our state.

One collection is comprised of thousands of specimens of the dinosaur Edmontosaurus (small elephant size) collected from a single locality in the Hell Creek Formation along the very northern portion of South Dakota.

A small portion of our recently acquired collection of Edmontosaurus fossils. One pallet holds between 5 and 10 specimens in a roughly 4 ft. by 4 ft. area.

The site was comprised of multiple individuals of this one species of dinosaur, likely killed in a single cataclysmic event such as a flood or landslide. Virtually every bone in this dinosaur’s skeleton is represented in this collection, and the preservation of the bone is exquisite. Becky Barnes mentions working on/with this locality in her blog post.

The second collection is a large accumulation ( > 5,000 specimens) of mostly small animals (mouse size) from the Eocene epoch (35-55 million years ago) in Bowman County, ND.

A small portion of our recently acquired collection of Eocene fossils. One drawer (shown) holds between 350 and 450 specimens in a roughly 2 ft. by 3 ft. area.

This collection, also from a single locality, is by far the most diverse Eocene locality known in North Dakota and one of the best from this age in the world. A few papers have already been published on this locality giving detailed information about the small reptiles and a few groups of small mammals. However, there is much more to be done including work on bats, rabbits, dogs, horses, and deer to name only a few.

Both of these collections were tremendous additions to the North Dakota State Fossil Collection. We are working diligently to share the new discoveries within. Please stay tuned...