Selecting Objects for A Fair to Remember

Guest author: Karina Burbank

This blog is part of a series of posts featuring stories from the Special Collections Research Center (SCRC) exhibit “A Fair to Remember: The History of the North Carolina State Fair.” The exhibit opens in the D.H. Hill Jr. Library’s exhibit gallery after spring break March 2024. The exhibit curator is Public History MA student Karina Burbank, and the exhibit designer is Conservation Services Manager Emily Schmidt. 

The upcoming Special Collections Research Center exhibit, A Fair to Remember, shows the history of the North Carolina State Fair, from its early days as an educational institution through today. The exhibit considers why we love the fair so much, who the fair is for, and how agricultural education is conducted through the state... all surrounded by cute photos of farm animals.

My name is Karina Burbank, and I am the graduate student curator for NC State Libraries’ Special Collections Research Center (SCRC). I am a first-year in the Public History Master’s program here at NC State, focusing on museums and historic sites. Drawing on my background in historic building preservation and my love for public-facing work, I was able to jump right in as the curator for this exhibit. Join me as I talk about the process of selecting objects for this exhibit, which you can see in person now in the D.H. Hill Jr. exhibit gallery. 

I interviewed for this position over the summer, and I got the news that they had accepted me while I was sitting in a pick-up truck outside a coffee shop in Western Virginia. In the summers, I work with a historic building preservation non-profit called HistoriCorps, and I’d be sent out to the Virginia/West Virginia border to work on a historic fire-tower. That work was what got me into public history work in the first place, and I was beyond excited to learn new ways to showcase history and connect with the broader community. 

The exhibit topic–the history of the North Carolina State Fair–had already been decided when I was hired, so the first thing I did when I reported to campus on day one was to meet the other people in SCRC and start digging into research. I’d been to the NC State Fair one time before, but I didn’t know much about the history. I found a few great secondary sources in our circulating collection and databases to get me started, and looked through Department of Agriculture websites about the State Fair. 

A main goal of the SCRC exhibit is to highlight items in our collection, so it was important to get into our archives early and see what I could find. We’re lucky to have many, many adorable photos of the State Fair throughout the decades (many of which are digitized!), so I spent a long time sifting through those. Looking through those photos early really brought the past fairs to life for me. As cute as the photos are, I wanted to have some visual variety in the cases. Some different shapes and colors of objects to draw the eye would add a lot to the exhibit. Unfortunately, the only physical objects I knew about ahead of time were the student club ribbons (displayed in the case “Put Stock in Livestock”). 

I slowly found more physical objects as my research continued. They weren’t always in collections that I expected, so I really had to just keep brainstorming and looking around, and sometimes I hit gold. I was so excited the day I realized we had former Commissioner for Agriculture Jim Graham’s collection in our holdings, especially when I saw his glorious donkey-ear fedora. Even though it wasn’t directly a State Fair artifact, I decided it was absolutely worth including just because of how stylish and visually interesting it was.

While I was researching, I kept hearing rumors about a scale model of Dorton Arena in our collection. Everytime someone mentioned it, they would add, “But, just to be clear, it’s HUGE.” I finally did get my eyes on it, and I can confirm: it’s massive! Way too big to fit in a case. But, finding some 3D objects with visual variety was important to me. So, we went to our friends in the libraries’ Makerspace, who did amazing work scanning and reproducing the model with their 3D printers. It was a huge task finding a way to scale the model down even more, and getting the 3D-printed model to support itself while it was being printed. I was so grateful to them for taking on this task!

My constant collaborator in this project was Emily Schmidt, the Conservation Services Manager within SCRC. She used her graphic design background to really bring the exhibit to life, and used her eye for detail and design to help decide how to organize our cases. We re-ordered, re-named, and re-designed our cases about a million times, and it was so helpful to come at this process as a team. Creating two little Nowicki features (the case “A Vision Lost” about his designs for a new fairground, and the case “Nowicki’s Wonder” about Dorton Arena) solved a lot of our organizational problems, and was all Emily’s idea.

We were also lucky enough to have very helpful and supportive people in other libraries grant us reproduction rights for specific stories we couldn’t tell with our own holdings. For example, most of the archival resources about the African-American-run North Carolina Industrial Association (NCIA) State Fair were held at the Rubenstein Library at Duke University. I was also completely charmed by the Hell Drivers collection at the Edgecombe Memorial Library, and they were kind enough to let us reproduce two photos. 

The “selecting objects” phase of this exhibit went on for a long time, but eventually we felt pretty confident about our selections and moved on to a design, writing, and promotion focus. But we kept our options open for a pretty long time, which was occasionally stressful but also helpful. Too many choices can be overwhelming, but I think knowing we could swap out objects let us present the best exhibit we possibly could!