Madison County Historian

 Joseph Evans, '06, worked with Madison County Historian Sarah Davies in the summer of 2006 to prepare an exhibit for the county’s bicentennial celebration. The exhibit features noted cultures, personalities, industries, movements, and other historical events of Madison County represented in thirteen panels of photographs. Joe assembled the photographs from various county collections, including those from the Madison County Historical Society, Canastota’s Canal Town Museum, Earlville’s Quincy Square Museum, and Munnsville’s Fryer Memorial Museum. He also helped to begin the process of organizing the historian’s archives. HIs report is below:

As a student fellow with the Upstate Institute, I worked with Sarah Davies, the Madison County Historian in preparing an exhibit featuring noted cultures, personalities, industries, movements, and other historical events of Madison County as part of the county’s bicentennial celebration.  The exhibit consists of thirteen panels of photographs which Sarah and I assembled from collections from all over the county, including the Madison County Historical Society, Canastota’s Canal Town Museum, Earlville’s Quincy Square Museum, and Munnsville’s Fryer Memorial Museum, to name a few.  The Exhibition Alliance of Hamilton is designing and producing the exhibit.  Another project I worked on was writing summaries for museums that will be on the Bicentennial History Trail, which is debuting in the fall.  The trail will correspond to a map of the county that shows where each museum is and a summary of their features and collections.  The final project this summer was beginning to organize the historian’s archives.  Although this project will take several months to complete, I learned what the duties of a county historian are and what records the county historian is required to keep.  This internship taught me the many ways which to gather local information, and what organizations I should contact in order to gain access to primary source materials when doing research.

The Bicentennial History Trail will debut September 23^rd and 24^th with bus tours featuring the museums and the Bicentennial county exhibit will be publicly displayed for the first time in early October.