A Tour Takes Shape: December Update on Harrisburg Historical

The final week of the Fall 2023 semester is upon us, and thus our student team is putting the final touches on our contribution to the Chester Way Civil Rights Tour on the Harrisburg Historical website. If you’re new to this story, Harrisburg Historical is a Curatescape project by Messiah University, the T. Morris Chester Welcome Center at the McCormick Riverfront Library, and the Commonwealth Monument Project, with funding from the Messiah University’s Center for Public Humanities and a public humanities grant by the Council of Independent Colleges through the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. You can read more about it, and the earlier stages of the project, here.

Since uploading our first story, “Harrisburg’s Lincoln Cemetery,” to Harrisburg Historical back in October, we have added five more to the website. Three of these were written by previous student contributors Rachel Petroziello and Dominic Gomez earlier this year: “Men of God,” an account of notable African Methodist Episcopal Churches in nineteenth-century Harrisburg; “Douglass in Harrisburg,” which chronicles Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison’s visit to Harrisburg in 1847; and “Green Book Harrisburg,” the story of two Black-owned hotels. As a story editor, I helped prepare each of these writings for publication on the Harrisburg Historical by compiling metadata and working with Dr. David Pettegrew and Keli Ganey to gather supplementary photographs and videos. I also had the opportunity to write two stories of my own: “The Lincoln Street School,” which addressed education for African Americans in nineteenth-century Harrisburg; and “A Gathering at the Crossroads,” which tells the story of the Commonwealth Monument installed at the capitol complex in 2020. In addition to these six stories, we have three more that will be ready for the next round of uploads: Nik Lego’s account of resistance to racism in the early twentieth century; Elizabeth Movinsky’s discussion of the Underground Railroad in Harrisburg; and Kyle Shively’s piece on Dr. William H. C. Jones Jr. and Harrisburg’s City Beautiful movement.

Each Curatescape story combines the text contributed by these students with historic photographs. illustrations, and relevant newspaper clippings. Some even feature overview videos, curated by our audio/video developer, Keli Ganey. We draw our images from a variety of sources, including old newspaper articles, city directories, and present-day photography by our students. Old and new media help bring each location’s past together with its present, even if the space looks radically different today than it did one hundred and fifty years ago.

Through adding geographic data to each story, we’ve also begun an interactive map for Harrisburg Historical. Accessible from the website’s home page, this map displays the locations of every story we tell. Eventually, this map will show each of the stops on the Chester Way Civil Rights tour. While there is still much work to be done on this project, we hope that we have set the next group of students up for success and brought Harrisburg Historical closer to being public ready.

Alex Shehigian is a senior at Messiah University. She is majoring in public history and minoring in digital public humanities. She is also an Archives Office Assistant at the Messiah University Archives and volunteers with the Walt Whitman Birthplace Association archives. You can learn more about her here.