Fort Ticonderoga Announces New Digital Exhibition “A Patriotic Service: Sarah Pell’s Enduring Legacy”
Fort Ticonderoga recently launched a new online digital exhibition entitled “A Patriotic Service: Sarah Pell’s Enduring Legacy.” The digital exhibition is an exciting and important addition to the museum’s Center for Digital History. The exhibit focuses on museum co-founder Sarah Gibbs Thompson Pell. Using recently cataloged museum artifacts, integrated with our Online Collections Database, visitors […]
Opening the China Closet
With the vast majority of the silver in the Pavilion Collection cataloged, photographed, and rehoused, it was time to move on to a different category of objects: ceramics. By far the largest category, ceramics accounts for over 3,000 of the 8,000 objects in the collection. To prepare for such a monumental task, we began by […]
Unpacking Memories
Last week marked the beginning of the second push to catalog silver in the Pavilion Collection. While physical distancing altered our approach from a team of five down to two, we have been able to make significant progress in just a few days. Wearing masks and working across the room in the offsite storage facility […]
What Makes A Set?
While the walls, floor, and lights in the Entrance Hall of the Pavilion went through a number of changes during its time as a summer home, a core group of furniture remained. The Napoleon set, a suite of French Empire style furniture consisting of two sofas, three armchairs, and four side chairs with green satin […]
Let There Be Light
The Pavilion restoration crossed a significant milestone over the last few weeks: the reinstallation of the hyphen windows. Up until this point, most of the restoration took place behind the façade: repairing foundations, raising floor and ceiling beams back into place, repairing walls, upgrading utilities, and refinishing rooms. The Pavilion, overlooking Lake Champlain, will […]
Gathering Around the Table
From the clambake in 1908 that led to the first restoration of the Pavilion and founding of the Fort Ticonderoga Museum to weddings in the King’s Garden, many memories of the Pavilion revolve around food. We plan to continue this tradition into the future by incorporating a large catering kitchen into the adaptive reuse and […]
Growing Forward
Restoring the Pavilion goes beyond the building itself. Utilities installed in 1909 need to be updated, the drainage and grade around the foundations need to be addressed, and the collection of fine, decorative, and folk art from the Pell family need to be processed. Given the necessity for physical distancing and restricting access to the […]
Putting Theory into Practice
Ready access to institutional documentation during cataloging is a topic that comes up frequently because it truly can’t be stressed enough. Our peers of decades past made notes that go beyond how an object came into the collection and a short physical description. Knowing about loose parts, repairs, and where to find identifying marks inform […]
Getting Creative: Physically Distanced Cataloging
Many of the Pavilion blog posts mention ongoing efforts to catalog the collection but have not gone into detail about the process itself. Cataloging includes many steps: assigning each object a unique ID number (PAV numbers), attaching the object ID number to the object in a permanent but reversible way, capturing a standardized series of […]
From Further Afield
Compiling, organizing, and digitizing institutional records is often a tedious process, especially when the museum has been around for more than a century. However, all of that hard work has never been more useful. Cataloging the Pavilion Collection marches on using digitized versions of all eighteen inventories and record photographs of objects taken by Elizabeth […]