Posts Tagged by ellice engdahl
If you’ve ever been to Holiday Nights in Greenfield Village, you know what a massive event it is, with performances, shopping, dining, bonfires, Santa and his reindeer, and even fireworks. What you might not know is that every year we add hundreds of artifacts, including toys, silverware, and china, from our vast collections to the houses to lend some authentic Christmastime cheer. We’ve recently digitized a few of the toys you’ll see during Holiday Nights this year, including this set of puzzle blocks on display at Susquehanna Plantation. If you’re visiting us this year, you can also keep your eyes peeled for this toy horse, toy lamb, and toy stork at Smiths Creek Depot. If you can’t get enough toys, our collections website currently features nearly 500.
toys and games, events, Greenfield Village, Christmas, Holiday Nights, holidays, by Ellice Engdahl, digital collections
With the holiday season firmly upon us, many people’s thoughts are turning to presents, and what present is more classic than a doll? This week’s collections object is a doll handmade from a woolen sock sometime in the first half of the 20th century. Though it may look a bit less friendly now, with its painted-on face having mostly faded away, it was no doubt a child’s beloved possession. Visit our collections site to find more than 140 dolls and related items, including more than 20 just-added dolls of bisque, cloth, papier mache, and wood, as well as dolls that walk and talk.
Ellice Engdahl is Digital Collections & Content Manager at The Henry Ford.
childhood, digital collections, by Ellice Engdahl, toys and games
Friends Henry Ford, Harvey Firestone, Thomas Edison, and John Burroughs went on camping trips together for a number of years, calling themselves the Vagabonds. Their trips were quite luxurious, by camping standards, involving a sizable caravan of staff and equipment. Why eat off tinware, for example, when one could use china instead? The Henry Ford’s collection includes a selection of the early 20th century Tudor Rose china that these august figures used on their wilderness trips, including the bouillon cup shown here. View photos and artifacts related to the Vagabonds on our collections website.
Thomas Edison, 20th century, 1920s, 1910s, Vagabonds, John Burroughs, Henry Ford, furnishings, Firestone family, digital collections, camping, by Ellice Engdahl
The Henry Ford Museum has hundreds of pieces of silver and pewter on display. We’ve recently been making upgrades to the cases and labels in this exhibit, and as this work has progressed, we’ve also taken the opportunity to clean, conserve, photograph, and update our documentation for this material. We currently have about 50 of these beautiful objects available for you to peruse on our digital collections site—everything from this early 18th century tankard to a complex mid-19th century compote—and we will be adding more over the coming months.
Ellice Engdahl is Digital Collections & Content Manager at The Henry Ford.
The Digital Collections of The Henry Ford: 20,000 Items and Growing
October 24, 2013, was a Thursday like any other Thursday in the offices of The Henry Ford—until 5:48 PM rolled around. At 5:48 PM precisely (not that we were counting), we completed digitization of our 20,000th collections item! There was much rejoicing and taking of celebratory screenshots of our collections management system.
Having seen this goal on the horizon, we had already discussed which item should be the auspicious 20,000th. We settled on something both significant and (we felt) celebratory: a photograph of the first industrial robot, Unimate, serving a drink to George Devol, its creator.
We also arranged to have cake, celebrating the many staff in the institution who work on digitization in large and small ways.
And, we commemorated some of the notable digitization projects we’d worked on over the past few years with stickers created from our digital collections images.
Long-time photographer Rudy Ruzicska proudly showed off his stickers to Henry Ford.
There is a good reason we made such a big deal out of this milestone. Even though digitization is a relatively new process for The Henry Ford (and for many other museums and archives), the potential of getting our collections online is enormous.
Case in point, only about 9% of all the material we’ve digitized thus far is items currently located in public areas in the Museum or in Greenfield Village. About 60% of our digitized content is located in our archival stacks, previously accessible only through a visit to the Research Library in the Benson Ford Research Center. About half a percent of our digitized collections are items currently on loan to another institution, ranging from a few miles away (this Hudson, for example, is currently on loan to the Ypsilanti Automotive Heritage Collection) to halfway across the world (as witness this Rolls-Royce hood ornament, currently located in China). The remaining 30% or so of the collections items we’ve digitized are neither on public display nor accessible through the Research Library—they are items the public (and even many of our staff and volunteers!) would never otherwise get to see.
This is where the digital world offers a whole new way for our visitors to learn the stories behind our collections—not just by paying us a visit in person, but by making a virtual visit to the treasure trove of documents, photographs, and objects that we hold in trust for current and future generations.
We hope you enjoy viewing all of our growing digital collections. If you have a suggestion for what we should digitize next, or have thoughts on how we can make these digital collections more useful and meaningful, please let us know in the comments below!
Ellice Engdahl, Digital Collections & Content Manager at The Henry Ford, is already counting down to our next digital collection milestone.
digitization, #Behind The Scenes @ The Henry Ford, by Ellice Engdahl, digital collections
The admiration Henry Ford held for his friend Thomas Edison has deeply shaped Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village, as evidenced today through the cornerstone in the Museum and through more than a half-dozen buildings related to Edison’s life and work in Greenfield Village. We’ve just digitized a number of photos of Edison to bring the total number of our Edison-related collections objects online to nearly 250, with a few more coming soon. Visit our collections site to see this photo of Edison in his West Orange lab in 1920, as well other recently added photos of the inveterate tinkerer analyzing things such as dictating machines, telegraph keys, and even an electric streetcar.
Ellice Engdahl is Digital Collections & Content Manager at The Henry Ford.
Additional Readings:
- Edison at Work
- First Known Portrait of Thomas Alva Edison, circa 1851
- Thomas Edison Goes Hollywood
- Thomas Edison
archives, digital collections, by Ellice Engdahl, Thomas Edison, photographs
You might have seen a news story making the rounds earlier this year involving analysis of some of the patent medicines in The Henry Ford’s collections by the Chemistry & Biochemistry Department at University of Detroit Mercy in conjunction with conservation staff from The Henry Ford. We’ve just digitized a sampling of the medicines that were analyzed, including “Dr. Sawens Magic Nervine Pills,” with a few more coming soon. See a variety of the medicines and related trade cards on our collections site. Be sure to click the second tab on the medicines’ records to see the analysis that was done!
19th century, patent medicines, healthcare, digital collections, by Ellice Engdahl
You may be familiar with the many clocks featured in the Clockwork exhibit in Henry Ford Museum. However, The Henry Ford also has hundreds of clocks in storage, and scores more displayed in different places on the Museum floor and in Greenfield Village. We’ve just digitized about 20 timepieces, including this mid-19th century example, which can be seen in Smiths Creek Depot. View more than 60 clocks and other related objects on our digital collection site.
Ellice Engdahl is Digital Collections and Content Manager at The Henry Ford.
In the last third of the 19th century, an unprecedented variety of consumer goods and services flooded the American market. Advertisers, armed with new methods of color printing, bombarded potential customers with trade cards. Americans enjoyed and often saved the vibrant little advertisements. We’ve just finished digitizing over 800 trade cards from The Henry Ford’s collection, including this example promoting a theatrical event. Visit our collections site to read the back, which promises “a Gorgeous Pagent [sic], Bewildering to the Mind and Dazzling to the Senses.”
Ellice Engdahl is Digital Collections & Content Manager at The Henry Ford. Thanks to this week's co-author, Saige Jedele, Associate Curator at The Henry Ford.
digital collections, by Ellice Engdahl, by Saige Jedele, advertising
Over time, people have marked the deaths of their loved ones in many ways. One popular method in the 18th and 19th centuries was the wearing of mourning jewelry, which often incorporated the hair of the deceased. We’ve just added close to 50 more stunning examples of mourning jewelry and other memorial items to our digital collections, including the mourning brooch depicted here, a ring dating to 1716, and a doll’s coffin.
Ellice Engdahl is Digital Collections and Content Manager at The Henry Ford.
19th century, 18th century, jewelry, digital collections, by Ellice Engdahl
