Category: News

Mystic Seaport recently hosted an executive council meeting of the International Congress of Maritime Museums, an international network of maritime museums, associations, and individuals devoted to maritime preservation.

Steve White, president of Mystic Seaport, is president of the ICMM. The group held meetings and toured the museum.

Pictured, from left: Sally Archer, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, UK; Cristian del Real, Chilean National Maritime Museum, Valparaiso, Chile; Alan Edenborough, Sydney Heritage Fleet, Australia; Richard Wesley, Hong Kong Maritime Museum, Hong Kong; Kristen Greenaway, Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum, USA; Steve White, Mystic Seaport, USA; Frits Loomeijer, Maritime Museum Rotterdam, the Netherlands; Marika Hedin, Uppsala University, Sweden; David Wright, National Museum of the Royal New Zealand Navy, NZ; Hanna Hagmark-Cooper, Åland Maritime Museum Trust, Åland Islands; Matthew Tanner, SS Great Britain Trust, UK; Ursula Warnke, National Maritime Museum of Germany, Bremerhaven, Germany; and Zefeng You, Ninghai Maritime Museum, Shanghai, PR China.

Mystic Seaport joins the American Association for State and Local History and more than 100 organizations across the country in support of the importance of teaching and learning history.

As part of the initiative, we invite our visitors to post selfies at their favorite spot at Mystic Seaport with the hashtag #HistoryRelevance.

The AASLH and the 100 organizations endorse the History Relevance Value Statement, which promotes the value of history in American society.

“Mystic Seaport’s role as a maritime museum is to not just tell the stories of the past, but to provide context and perspective so those same stories are relevant to our future,” said Museum President Steve White. “In this particular moment in our nation’s cultural conversation, understanding the past is critical to knowing ourselves and to envisioning the path for a successful future.”

The Value Statement is comprised of seven distinct tenets delineating critical ways the study of history is essential to individuals, communities, and our shared future. The full Value Statement can be found at https://www.historyrelevance.com/value-statement.

History studies create a sense of awareness and identity, cultivate critical thinking and analytical skills, and lay the groundwork for empowered communities. They preserve the past and spark inspiration for the future, said the AASLH in a statement. The Value Statement is endorsed by organizations that promote and encourage a sense of awareness, identity, and interconnectivity in a multicultural world through history-driven courses of study.

A new exhibition at Mystic Seaport launching at the start of Women’s History Month chronicles both the luxurious and the hardworking life of women in the 20th century as seen through the lenses of the Rosenfeld family of photographers.

Entitled “On Land and On Sea: A Century of Women in the Rosenfeld Collection,” these 70 photographs tell the story of lives of privilege and leisure and also lives of working-class women from the turn of the last century through the 1950s. Photos that depict impeccably attired ladies onboard sleek schooners tell one story, while images of young women training to be telephone operators in New York City tell another.

The exhibition is based on the book of the same title by Margaret L. Andersen Rosenfeld, a professor of Sociology at the University of Delaware and the daughter-in-law of Stanley Rosenfeld. The book was published by Mystic Seaport in 2007.

“The Rosenfelds are best known for their stunning images of large racing yachts under sail, but they also captured images of people and everyday events as part of their commercial photography work,” said Elysa Engelman, Director of Exhibits at Mystic Seaport. “The issues represented in these photographs still resonate to the contemporary viewer and they are depicted with the Rosenfelds’ usual attention to detail and striking composition.”

The exhibition is organized around seven themes that show the different dimensions of women’s lives in the 20th century:

• Learning the Ropes
• The Daily Grind: Women and Work
• Lifelines: Women as Care Workers
• Spirit, Sports, and Spectators
• Displaying Womanhood
• In the Yard
• Women at the Wheel

Among the photographs in the exhibition, there are aviators and athletes, suffragettes on the march, baby nurses and mothers caring for their children. Each photo provides a fascinating glimpse into the social history of women as depicted in commercial photography, from young girls having fun messing about on small boats to fashion models and society matrons. Many of these photographs are on display for the first time.

The Rosenfeld Collection, acquired by Mystic Seaport in 1984, is one of the largest archives of maritime photographs in the United States. This Collection of nearly one million pieces documents the period from 1881 to 1992. The Collection is built on the inventory of the Morris Rosenfeld & Sons photographic business, which was located in New York City from 1910 until the late 1970s. The firm grew as sons David, Stanley, and William joined their father’s business. Although they became famous as yachting photographers–most notably their coverage of the America’s Cup starting in 1920–the early work of the Rosenfelds included assignments for such firms as the New York-based entities of the Bell System from the 1910s through the 1940s. This exhibition compiles selected images of women throughout the entire collection, some nautical, and some not, to tell the social history of women through the eyes of the Rosenfelds.

As part of the opening of the exhibition, Margaret Andersen Rosenfeld will be present at a book signing on Saturday, March 4, from 10 to 11 a.m. in the Thompson Exhibition Building.

Jim Anderson, owner of Time And Again clock shop in Waterford, grew up in southeastern Connecticut and lived here for many years before moving away for a time because of work. He returned in 2014, and was looking for a volunteer opportunity, when he noticed that the tower clock in the Museum’s Greenmanville Church didn’t work.

Anderson met with Paul O’Pecko, vice president of research collections and director of the G.W. Blunt White Library, and offered his expertise and his services to get the four clock faces running and the bells chiming again.

The Greenmanville Church dates to 1851, although its original location was down Greenmanville Avenue (adjacent to the Museum’s South Entrance). It was moved to its current location on the McGraw Quadrangle in 1954 after it was acquired by Mystic Seaport in 1951. The original steeple had no clocks and had been broken up in 1902. It was about 3 feet shorter than the present one, which was built by the Museum in 1954 after the building’s relocation.

The clock was built in 1857 by the Howard Clock Company of Waltham, Mass. for a New England college. It had been in storage since 1931, and not maintained. It was sent to Mystic Seaport and the steeple was modified to accommodate the four clock faces.

When the clock was installed in the church, the decision was made to showcase the mechanics as much as possible to fit in with the Museum’s mission. The movement was located in the southwest corner of the first floor, with the strike weights and pendulum in the basement, and a fairly circuitous transmission system to carry the time output from the movement to the tower located some two stories above.

It worked for several decades, looked after by the late Frank Murphy and then the late Don Treworgy, director of the Planetarium. As time went by, one face after another stopped working until only one was left. After both Murphy and Treworgy passed away, maintenance fell by the wayside. It has been completely stopped for about seven years.

O’Pecko brought together Anderson and volunteer Bill Michael, a mechanical engineer, and they worked on the project for about 15 months. Anderson estimates he put in about 120 hours.

When he first got inside the clock, Anderson said he tested the pendulum and realized right away there was not enough power to keep the pendulum swinging. Throughout the mechanisms, Anderson discovered loose screws, lots of dirt and dust, worn gears and bushings. “As we got deeper and deeper into the clock, we decided we needed to really do the whole thing so that no one will have to touch it again for many years,” Anderson said. So they took apart the whole clock and hand cleaned it section by section, every widget, every gear, every bushing, every nut and bolt.

Then they rebuilt it, making some improvements along the way to ensure smooth operation and proper synchronization moving forward. On January 12, they restarted it and it once again began telling time and chiming the hours.

The clock remains a work in progress, as adjustments continue to be needed.

In the first week, it stopped twice and after troubleshooting they decided to detach the East-side clock (facing Greenmanville Avenue) because of problems within the mechanisms. That will be fixed when the opportunity arises for the hands to be removed from the outside (which will require a cherry picker).

Even with one of the four faces not working, Anderson is justifiably proud of this restoration project. “It’s something you may only get to do once in your life,” he said, “like being able to go up inside Big Ben or something. I really enjoyed doing it, and being able to troubleshoot the whole thing and make it work. Even after months and months of this, I knew it would be something we’d be proud that we accomplished. This is my Big Ben.”

Annual maintenance of Treworgy Planetarium’s projector takes place every winter

Every few thousand miles you bring your car into the shop for a tune up. Every thousand or so hours, Mystic Seaport does the same with its Treworgy Planetarium projector. Except in the case of the Spitz A3P optical mechanical projector, the “mechanic” comes to the Museum.

John Hare, founder of Ash Enterprises, spends his career traveling the globe performing maintenance and upkeep on planetarium equipment. He estimates there are 3,000 to 4,000 planetariums in the world, and about 1,500 in the United States. Hare has been working on the Museum’s projector for eight years, visiting annually for a few days every winter to completely clean and realign the equipment.

Hare founded Ash in 1971 after he realized while working for the Michigan State University planetarium that there was a market for projector maintenance. He started his planetarium career after serving in the U.S. Navy running sonar on a destroyer escort. Discharged in 1963, he took a job with Spitz Inc., the company that manufactures many of the world’s planetarium’s projectors. After a couple of years there he moved over to work for Michigan State, and went back to college to earn a degree in telecommunications. After 10 years, he decided to go out on his own. Today, Ash has five employees and 150 regular clients, including Mystic Seaport.

The Museum’s projector is a workhorse, notes Brian J. Koehler, supervisor of the Treworgy Planetarium. “We estimate the projector works about a thousand hours a year,” Koehler says. “In the summer, we do four shows a day, seven days a week. In the winter, we do seven shows a week and have school groups on our other days.”

The projector at Treworgy Planetarium is an Optical Mechanical Projector, made by Spitz Inc., Hare’s old employer. It is an older style of planetarium projector. The newer projectors are digital, which use video. The Museum’s projector uses a Star Ball to produce the star field visitors see in the dome over their heads. The Star Ball has a xenon arc lamp inside it, which illuminates the dome through the Star Ball. The ball has more than a thousand pinprick-sized holes in it, and the xenon arc lamp pushes light through those holes to make the stars above. This type of lamp is used for brilliance and for its compact size, Hare notes. He replaced it on this visit because it had been in for two years, and as it wears out, the stars “get fuzzy.”

This type of projector “renders the real sky” for visitors, Hare explains. Digital projectors project video onto the dome. “This is a much higher resolution than a digital projector,” Hare says. “This is more realistic and accurate. The drawback is with this type, we can only represent the sky as we see it from Earth. With a digital system, you can show perspectives from anywhere. It makes sense for the Seaport to have this type, since it engages in celestial navigation education and how the stars relate to maritime endeavors. It’s old, but it’s far from obsolete. It could last another 50 years.”

Koehler says this projector was installed in 2009. “It was a conscious decision to keep with the mechanical projector,” he says, “because in our opinion, the digital projection of the sky is not accurate enough. We believe this creates a more authentic night sky. We don’t want you to feel like you are looking at a movie – we want you to feel like you are looking at the stars.”

The authentic experience is important because Mystic Seaport is a maritime history museum that offers numerous celestial navigation classes, Koehler says, as well as astronomy outreach programs to many area schools and colleges, in addition to its regular planetarium shows offered to the general public.

Hare spends his time in the planetarium carefully dismantling the projector, cleaning every ring, gear, slip and part, and then reassembling it. After that, he meticulously realigns it so that all the stars and planets and the Sun are in the correct location, for all times of day and night. He makes sure everything is properly focused and uniformly illuminated. When he’s done, “you can definitely see a difference,” Koehler says. “The stars are sharp and bright.”