Tracing Voices Through Time: a journey through VHS' archives and museum collections
By Phoebe Donn, 2025 Geiger Fellow
I’ve always liked libraries and museums, for that matter. Libraries because I love to read, and museums, well, museums are interesting ones. Museums are fascinating for the breadth of their collections and the fantastic variety of items that one might see on display. They offer the opportunity to travel to another time through a piece of clothing, a glass bottle, or a letter. These artifacts don’t tell the whole story themselves; rather, we use the objects themselves to make sense of the history we learn, to put it into perspective, and to help our imaginations comprehend lives very different from our own.
Being part of the Vermont Historical Society’s Geiger Fellowship program these past few weeks (Summer 2025) gave me the opportunity to spend far more time in those two wonderful places: a museum and a library. At the Vermont History Museum, I got to carefully view the exhibits and listen to the planning and discussion and preparation around new ones. I got to see people interacting with the exhibits and learn about the work that went into them.
The library, though, was where I felt the greatest connection to history. It’s where I felt the greatest drive to learn and find out more. Around every corner is a new gem - from an 1870s map of the town where I live, to grave records, to the minutes of meetings for societies that no longer exist. A name mentioned once in such a book of minutes might lead me to a stack of genealogical records, or a fascinating memoir. This air of possibility was and is inspiring to be around.
For my main project as a Geiger Fellow, I researched a suffrage convention that took place in 1883 in St. Johnsbury, where I go to school. I got to read the minutes of the meeting, preserved for more than 150 years. The event itself was fascinating, as I’m sure any I would have chosen would be. Speakers gathered in this small Vermont town included Lucy Stone, an abolitionist and suffragist who traveled the country giving speeches on women’s rights and Julia Ward Howe, who is far more famous now for writing the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” but at the time was a well-known suffragist and pacifist. But what was special about this topic for me was looking at a historic map and imagining both the town I see every day, and the suffragists gathering in a completely different time, right on the same ground.
In some ways, we’re connected.
Phoebe Donn was a Summer 2025 Geiger Fellow at VHS working with the Service and Outreach team. She is entering her junior year at St. Johnsbury Academy and lives in Kirby, VT.
The Geiger Fellowships are generously supported by the Harvey & Pamela Geiger Charitable Fund. Learn more about future opportunities here.
