Historical Chesnuts

This page took a long time to come to fruition. It started in Fall 2024 as a collaborative group project in HIST 542: Museum Education, to interpret an object in the Fashion Archives & Museum’s collection. Two classmates and I were assigned a pair of dresses formerly belonging to Maria Tyson (pronounced like “Mariah”), a “Quaker” (member of the Society of Friends) in Gettysburg during the Civil War. In our research, my group found that the Meeting in Aspers, PA to which Tyson and her husband belonged is still active. Their secretary put us in touch with one of Maria’s descendants, who was kind enough to invite us to her home to peruse the (well organized!) family archives.

Always read your course syllabi carefully. We three scholars thought that we were creating a web page exhibit, when the end product was actually a live presentation. Fortunately we discovered our mistake early, but as we had already promised our host a digital exhibit, our professor allowed us to create one. Based on the group’s research, I crafted the page in Spring and Summer 2025, with final edits by FA&M Director Dr. Bohleke. As for the rest, I will let the exhibit speak for itself!

One last thing that I’m rather proud of–the header image of a 3″ ordnance rifle on Gettysburg battlefield is my own work. The key to getting a great photograph is to take about a dozen photographs from different angles and then select the best one.