At the 2014 Annual Meeting, we had a great turnout for our corporate history tour, session, and luncheon!
On Wednesday, we began the Meeting with a fun field trip. Our first stop was the Wells Fargo Museum where we saw an authentic stage coach and even got to “ride” on a mock up.
This is the largest corporate history tour group I’ve seen at AASLH!
Museum Manager Megan Schaack demonstrates the real stagecoach experience – not exactly a smooth ride.
After the Wells Fargo Museum, we loaded up the bus and headed to the General Mills Riverside Technical Center for a peek into their archives. There we saw the Pillsbury Doughboy, the Jolly Green Giant, and several early versions of Betty Crocker.
General Mills Corporate Archivist Susan Wakefield (L) with the Jolly Green Giant, Intern Jessica Faucher, Poppin’ Fresh, and Application Support Analyst Christine Pearson.
On Thursday, the Corporate History Affinity Group sponsored a session about how to make your museum or archives valuable to your parent organization. Our moderator was Sarah Lund-Goldstein, owner and chief archivist of Institutionalized, and our speakers were Pat Grandy, Corporate Media and Communications Manager for the Zippo/ Case Museum, and Bruce Kitt, President of the Northwest History Centre. We were pleased to have not only corporate history people in the audience, but historic house and government museums represented as well.
Northwest History Centre President Bruce Kitt and Delta Flight Museum Director of Operations Tiffany Meng after the session.
At our luncheon later that day, Archivist Charity Lifka spoke about the growth of the Hormel Foods Corporate Archives and even gave out goodies from the Spam Museum. The Spam Museum is recently closed and will reopen in 2016, so stay tuned!
We rounded out the corporate history portion of the conference with a History Happy Hour where we were able to network with fellow corporate history geeks (and a few that weren’t).
Thanks to AASLH and to our corporate history participants for making this year’s annual meeting a big success. If you missed the conference this year, go ahead and mark next year’s on your calendar. The 2015 Annual Meeting will take place in Louisville, KY September 16-19.
