Summer at the Lyman Estate: Historic New England Museum Operations Internship

For 13 weeks this summer, I worked as a Museum Operations Intern with Historic New England at the Lyman Estate in Waltham, Massachusetts. In this role, I did everything from cleaning to making copies to writing Facebook posts to developing programming. This internship gave me the opportunity and the pleasure to dive into the world of museum operations, exploring the daily work of running a museum and learning about the bigger-picture planning that helps public history thrive and allows communities to learn about history.

One of my main projects this summer has been developing new interpretive materials for the third floor of the estate, where the domestic laborers would have lived in the house in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It is on the third floor that visitors learn about the lives of Massachusetts mill workers. Currently, they learn about the mill workers in an empty, white room, looking out a window to imagine what life would have looked like in the mills not too far from where the Lyman Estate stands now. I spent my time scouring the internet, looking for high resolution images of the Lyman Mills and their workers. I put together a collection of these images, wrote captions, and created a budget and plan for displaying them on the third floor. My hope was that, by displaying these images on the walls, we would give visitors a stronger sense of the labor history that is being discussed by the tour guide, providing a visual for what their lives would have been like working in the mills.

Additionally, I have been contributing content for the Lyman Estate’s Facebook page. While I am an avid social media user writing these Facebook posts gave me an interesting challenge. I used narratives from tour outlines that featured stories of laborers connected to the estate as well as Historic New England collections for images of the Lyman estate and their workers to create profiles of laborers on the estate for HNE’s social media. It was a challenge to adapt my own rhetoric to speak to a wider audience and practice public outreach in a digital format that was both engaging and accessible.

Alongside these larger projects, I’ve also learned a lot simply by observing the daily work of my supervisor, Barbara Callahan, required to keep the estate operational as both a museum and an event venue. From balancing the budget to scheduling tours to handling visitor services, it has been an eye-opening experience to see how much behind the scenes planning supports the visitor experience.

From this first hand experience, I have learned that museums are more than historic houses or a set of collections. They are living spaces where interpretation, community engagement, and operations intersect to create experiences. The preservation of history is more than just doing research or creating displays, it is about making history relevant, accessible, and collaborative. Successful public history requires flexibility and a willingness to wear many hats. You have to be a historian, an educator, and event planner, a good communicator and a problem solver all at once.