Stephen Oetken

Greenbelt Museum

My internship was with the Greenbelt Museum, a small museum in Greenbelt, Maryland; their mission statement describes them as “a community museum that provides gateways to the New Deal history and living legacy of Greenbelt, Maryland. The Greenbelt Museum inspires residents, students and visitors to explore this planned cooperative community.” The Museum operates a historic home at 10-B Crescent Road and an exhibit space in the historic community center, and provides walking tours of the community and the historic house. The Museum interprets the New Deal era history of the community, focusing on the period when Greenbelt was owned by the Federal government, 1937 – 1952.
My internship encompassed one major project and several smaller ones. The large project involved researching and developing a new historic community walking tour. The deliverable package included a walking tour logistics guide, site sheets for each site on the tour, three tour routes, and an audio component accessible from the Museum’s website (www.greenbeltmuseum.org.) The majority of my time was spent on researching the historic sites, developing a template for the site sheets, and writing the site sheets, to be used as reference and training material for the volunteer docents.