Velma B. Erwin Research Room and Archives in 2015

Wednesday  |  January 6, 2016  |  09:24 AM

Velma B. Erwin Research Room and Archives in 2015
By Mandy Altimus Pond

It has been a busy year in the Velma B. Erwin Research Room. Volunteer Lois McHugh has scanned hundreds of photographs and provided assistance with permanent collection information for various exhibits throughout the year. Volunteer Mark Pitocco has digitized more than 8,000 film and glass plate negatives over the past few years. These negatives include the film negatives from the Evening Independent newspaper photography collection by Jack Worthington, and glass plate negatives by Stan Baltzly (c.1890-1920), Teeple Photography studio (1889-1900), William L. Bennett (c.1870-1910), and A.J. Miller (c.1890). These will be added to our virtual exhibit galleries in the coming year.

Intern Erica Wise from Walsh University and intern Brittney Locker worked diligently in the fall semester to make the Museum’s extensive photography and archives collections available online for history enthusiasts and researchers. Now more than 120 galleries are available online. Topics include schools, weather events, Civil War, scrapbooks, Paul Brown, Russell and Company, and downtown Massillon photographs. To view them click here.

MassMu staff added 12 videos to our YouTube channel this year, including old Museum commercials, a Rhythms Concert, a Brown Bag Lunch, and home movies from Paul Reinkendorff (1930s-1950s) and Joseph Persell (1930s-1940s). Check out the 38 available videos and stay tuned for more in the coming year. To view our YouTube channel, click here.

Many galleries, individuals, and film and TV studios have sought our photographs and objects for publication and broadcast. Below is a list of where the Massillon Museum’s artifacts appeared this year or will appear next year.

Films and Publications featuring our permanent collections in 2015:

1. NFL Films, Paul Brown: A Football Life features 20 images and 12 films from the Massillon Museum and Booster Club collections.
2. Time Warner Cable Sports Channel, Before the League (click here for trailer), TV series including Massillon Tigers and Massillon Museum, and interviews with the Tiger Booster Club and MassMu Archivist Mandy Altimus Pond.
3. Archivist Mandy Altimus Pond appeared on the Travel Channel’s Mysteries at the Museum, sharing the story of “General” Jacob Coxey who led the first protest march on Washington DC in 1894.
4. Mandy is working with Arcadia Publishing to produce a book on the history of Kendal, Ohio, which became part of Massillon in 1853, to be published 2016
5. Between Two Worlds: The Photography of Nell Dorr traveled to the Gunn Memorial Museum in Connecticut.
6. Imagining a Better World: The Artwork of Nelly Toll exhibit traveled to the Goodwin Holocause Museum and Education Center in Cherry Hill, New Jersey.
7. The first exhibit installment (2012) of Tiger Legacy traveled to Kent State University
8. The second exhibit installment (2015) of Tiger Legacy: Our Tiger Football Family was exhibited in the Museum’s main gallery.
9. Photographs from Robert Peet Skinner’s 1903 Ethiopia scrapbook will appear in the book The Strange Career of William Ellis: The Texas Slave who became a Mexican Millionaire by Karl Jacoby, published through WW Norton Press in 2016.
10. “General” Jacob Coxey photographs will appear in the book Coxey’s Crusade for Jobs by Jerry Prout, published through Northern Illinois University Press in 2016.
11. Benjamin Alexander's book Coxey's Army: Popular Protest in the Gilded Age was published by John Hopkins University Press, features photographs from the Coxey archives at the Massillon Museum.
12. Two paintings from the collection, one showing early Erie Street in Massillon, and a Civil War painting by William T. Mathews, were included in the exhibit Early Visions of Ohio, 1765-1865 at the Decorative Arts Center of Ohio, Lancaster, Ohio.
13. Tiger Legacy: Stories of Massillon Football will be published by Daylight Press in 2016.
14. Beth Odell of Moneypenny Productions used images from the Independent photograph negative collection to lecture about the 1955 tornado that hit Perry Township.
15. The Lincoln Theatre order photo reproductions to adorn their walls for their 100^th Anniversary celebration.
16. Paul Hobe, an amateur historian, looked through hundreds of Samuel Beatty documents in the Museum’s archives for research of his book Dixie Odyssey: The Trail and Tales of the Nineteenth Ohio Volunteer Regiment will be self-published in 2016.
17. Judith Malinowski of the Jackson Historical Society featured the Rohr Barn Raising image from our collection in their 200^th Anniversary quilt summer 2015.
18. Our Hurxthal Album Quilt is being researched by two quilt museums and independent researchers.
19. Walter Tyler, the great-great-grandson of Jacob Rohr, came to see the Jacob Rohr Barn Raising photograph in person on the original Theodore Teeple studio glass plate negative. He is writing a children’s book about the Rohr Barn Raising from the perspective of one of the young Rohr boys.
20. Photographs of industrial employees in the Massillon Museum’s permanent collection were reproduced for the BLUE COLLAR: Figurative Sculptures by Kyle & Kelly Phelps on exhibit at the Canton Museum of Art December 3, 2015 - March 6, 2016.