New intern at Cinnamon Bay!

Greetings VI National Park Service Friends! As the newest NPS intern, Jillian, I’m very excited to finally be here in St. John. I look forward to spending the next two months gaining a wide range of knowledge about the rich Caribbean history and prehistory preserved by the park.

This internship is part of my final internship requirement as a Master’s student in Museum Studies at George Washington University, in Washington D.C. I am originally from Buffalo, N.Y. and went to SUNY Geneseo for Anthropology, with minors in Geology and Spanish. At GW, I focus my studies mostly on the management and administration of natural history museums, so working here at Cinnamon Bay in an internship that covers a breadth of subjects such as curation, collections management, volunteer coordination, education, etc., I am in a very appropriate environment to tie together everything I’ve been studying for the past two years and see all museums functions connect in a very real way.

I arrived late Saturday evening to a warm welcome from Ken, Susanna and Kourtney. On Monday, Kourtney and I began a week of working with a group of volunteers from Elder Hostel. This is a band of people with an adventurous and enthusiastic attitude about what a vacation should be; they volunteer for a week for various community projects in exotic settings around the globe. This time, their travels brought them to St. John to continue a mapping project that had begun last year and is led annually by local historic architect Anne Hersh The first day of the week was focused on clearing overgrowth from the Leinster Guardhouse ruins that were choking the pathways around and inside the ruins. On Tuesday, the group moved over to Rustenburg plantation to flag, photograph, measure and map the sugar mill ruins. Kourtney and I worked to record accurate bearings and distances between the points that the volunteers were flagging and photographing while others worked to draw profiles of wall remains.
At the end of the week, Anne left with a wealth of information with which she intends to create a map of the ruins for the National Park Service to be able to add to its records. The exploratory spirit of the Elder Hostel volunteers is what allows us to add such valuable information to our archives!

I look forward to keeping you updated on the work that we are doing here this spring as we continue to uncover and preserve the history and prehistory here on St. John and right at home in the lab in Cinnamon Bay.