Our final Internship Spotlight of the summer features a reflection written by graduate student Lochlyn Ramsey. Join us as we continue to hear from our students who recently completed internships in their field of study.

I have now spent approximately five years of my life working at and researching historic sites related to the War of 1812. However, up to this point, I most of my time has been spent focusing on the navy. I have waited for an opportunity to learn more about the army and the land battles that were fought in the region. I had that opportunity this past spring semester, when I worked as an intern at Fort Meigs Historic Site in Perrysburg. Going into the internship, I had three goals: do my job well, further expand my knowledge of the War of 1812, and to foster a connection between myself and the fort’s staff.

I started at the fort in February, which allowed me to experience the entire range of the fort’s activities. November through March is the off-season, what the staff refers to as “Winter Quarter.” During this time, the fort itself is closed to visitors but the visitor center and museum remain open. In the Winter Quarter, the interpretive staff spend their time working on maintenance projects, researching, and preparing for the next season. As my first two months at the fort fell during the Winter Quarter, I was assigned three research projects to complete.

The first of these projects was to compile several primary sources related to the morning parade drill of the U.S. Army during the War of 1812. The resulting document will be distributed to various reenactor units to inform their performance of the morning parade during events. This project served as a good introduction to the organization and structure of the army, and many of the sources that would be important to my other research.

The second project that I was assigned was to research and create an episode of the site’s podcast, The Foot of the Rapids. I have been a fan of the podcast since long before my internship, so I was excited to create my own episode. I decided to draw on my previous experience with the naval campaign of 1813 to create an episode about the joint services cooperation between the army and navy leading to the invasion of Canada in September of 1813. This project helped me better understand the relationship between the army and navy in the northwest theater. I have found that often when the historic sites I have worked at interpret that part of the war, the army and navy are treated as though they were working independently toward different objectives. In reality, they worked closely with each other and coordinated their actions to achieve the common goal of invading Canada.

My third project was to index Colonel James Mills’ Regimental Book for the 1st Regiment 3rd Detachment of the Ohio Militia. The book contains all of Mills’ orders, court martial filings, and other administrative paperwork for the regiment. This was the most challenging of my three projects. The site had a digital scan of the book, but the text was not searchable, so I re-transcribed the entire book in Microsoft Word to take advantage of Word’s built-in indexing feature. This project helped me to become more acquainted with the army’s day-to-day operations.

As the weather warmed, work at the fort transitioned from desk work to manual labor. People don’t often think of manual labor as part of a historians’ purview, but the phrase “other duties as assigned” can be found in the position descriptions of most public history jobs. Those four words carry a lot of weight. At Fort Meigs, the manual labor done by the interpretive staff consists of splitting logs for the reenactors to use as firewood, setting up various outdoor displays, and clearing brush below the gun batteries.

It would seem doing this work would have little value to a historian. It is easy to look over it as just chores to be done to prepare for the “real work” of interpretation. However, through this internship, I have found that doing these jobs fosters a deeper connection to the site, the sources, and the people who came before. I was clearing the same brush that Colonel Mills’ men were ordered to clear while on fatigue duty two hundred years ago. Just as the soldiers in the fort needed to split wood for their fires, I did too.

This connection only deepened when the fort opened for the season in April and I began to spend the day in an 1813 artilleryman’s uniform. While I spent most of my time giving tours to school groups, when the day was slow I would patrol around the inside of the fort answering visitors’ questions. Oftentimes I found myself alone, on the far end of the fort or standing inside a blockhouse or the Quartermaster’s building. People often talk about the feeling they get when visiting a historic site, a sense of awe and wonder at the events that happened there. There is a similar feeling that you get as an employee of a historic site, a feeling of significance. As you lean against your musket and look out the loopholes, you get the sense that people, both the famous ones that you’ve read about in your research and hundreds of others whose names are lost to history, have stood in the exact same spot, seen the view across the traverses, heard the same birds call, felt the same breeze blow up from the river, and scratched the same itch from the cracked leather of their neck stock.

My favorite event that I was able to participate in during my time at the fort was the After-Dark Lantern Tour. During the tour, visitors are led around to different stations to learn about what life was like at the fort at night. I was assigned the role of “Grand Facilitator” (read: gofer) which meant that I was free to roam from station to station to assist where needed. As a result, I spent a lot of time walking through the fort alone in the dark. In my experience, the aforementioned feeling of significance is heightened by night. Night events are slower, there’s fewer people, and the site feels different. The darkness hides a lot of the modern scenery, and suddenly you’re back in 1813, surrounded by the oppressive wilderness of the frontier, a foot of wood wall separating you from whatever is lurking out there. I’m not one to believe in the supernatural, but who’s to say that all the soldiers I saw milling about in the lantern light were reenactors?

While this feeling strengthens the connection between the historian and the history, it also exposes the deep chasm between the two. The anachronisms begin to become evident. Colonel Mills’ men might have been clearing the same brush, but they weren’t using a polesaw and a pickup truck. They may have been collecting firewood, but not with a pneumatic log splitter. I’m certainly not doing either job in my leather-soled brogans. When I finished with the lantern tour, I didn’t have to lay down in my muddy tent with five other soldiers, I got in my car and drove a day’s march back to my apartment to sleep in my bed. As a living historian, these anachronisms begin to build up and you start to become overwhelmed by the futility of attempting to embody the past. You begin to slide down something of a Dunning-Kruger curve, and all your knowledge of historical lifeways seems inadequate. You realize that you are not walking in the shoes of those who came before, you are just standing in their straight-lasted bootprints.

But in the end, you realize that it doesn’t really matter. Those were their experiences, not yours. To try to replicate them in full is a fool’s errand. History is not always an upward line of progress, but we occasionally make improvements, in part because of the contributions of the people of the past. All we can do is share their stories and work toward a better understanding of the past.

As my time working at Fort Meigs draws to a close, I am grateful to have had the opportunity to have had the experience of working at such an important and interesting site with some fantastic people. I feel that I was fully successful in accomplishing my goals and that I am coming out the other side as a more well-rounded and well-connected historian. I plan to stay within the War of 1812 community for a lone time, and hope that I will have to do more work with and for the fort.