Return of the Intern

Hello everyone,

I’m baaaaack! I’ve been an intern here with the Olmsted Center for almost a year now,and after a short hiatus, I’m back for a second round! I spent the interim doing some pretty fun things. I volunteered at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, UT, started working part-time as a guide at the Otis House Museum here in Downtown Boston, and did a lot of volunteer work.

 

After the time away, coming back to the Olmsted Center has felt a bit like this…

For those of you who are new to the Designing the Park blog, I wrote an introductory blog post about my background and path to the Olmsted Center back in June of last year. Check it out if you want to learn more about me. There’s a picture of a man playing a bagpipe. You’ll find out why.

For my first internship term, I worked on a Cultural Landscape Inventory (CLI) of the Pamet Cranberry Bog on Cape Cod National Seashore and then shifted gears to complete Cultural Resource Stewardship Assessments (CRSAs) for Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia and Minute Man NHP in Concord, MA. All of those projects are very close to completion.

For my second term with the Olmsted Center, I’ll continue to focus on completing CRSAs for other parks in the Northeast region. The next park up will be Eisenhower National Historic Site, which preserves President Dwight Eisenhower’s home adjacent to the Gettysburg battlefield in Pennsylvania. Then we’ll move on to Fort Stanwix National Monument, a reconstructed pre-Revolutionary War fort in Rome, NY, and Women’s Rights National Historical Park, in Seneca Falls, NY. I’m extremely excited to be able to visit those parks and work with their staff in order to get to know the parks and the state of their cultural resources better.

Perhaps what I’m most excited for, however, is the big orientation trip that kicks off new internships at the Olmsted Center every year. Last year, we went to Cape Cod and spent a week there with other interns from parks across the region, surveying the Pamet Cranberry Bog and Baker-Biddle sites, meeting park staff, hiking sand dunes, swimming in kettle ponds, exploring Modern houses, and getting to know one another better.

This year, we’ll be travelling to Acadia National Park in Maine! I’ve never been to Acadia and can’t wait to experience it for the first time. Aside from that, I’m looking forward to meeting the new interns, improving my mapping skills, getting more experience writing different types of cultural resource reports, and learning as much as I can.

Next week, we welcome some of the new Olmsted Center interns. Stay tuned for their first blog posts soon!

Cheers,

Clare