FRANKLIN, Kan. — Some museum work is currently being done by a couple of Pittsburg State art majors at the Miners Hall Museum in Franklin.
Senior Katie Wells and junior Rosemary Stapleton are interning there once a week. They are combining their interests in visual storytelling and curatorial studies while researching the daily life of miners from the southeast Kansas area.
More on the Miners Hall Museum:
- One Southeast Kansas museum is breathing new life into a piece of the past
- $2M grant to boost Kansas Tourism benefits Franklin Miners Hall Museum
- Miners Hall Museum hosts “Preserving the Past – Coal Camps and Company Houses” exhibit
- Area museum teaches how trains helped build Kansas
Wells is focusing on the lives of the women, while Stapleton is focusing more on the unions.
“It’s really interesting to look back and see how these strikes that were ultimately for the betterment of the workers that were really you know running the country because they produced all the fuel. How they were really looked down on and kind of smeared a lot,” said Stapleton.
“I think that the research of this is so important because so much of this entire community and so much of southeast Kansas was built from coal miners and from the immigrants that came here for better lives. Pittsburg State University started off as a teachers college that trained people that graduated from the coal mining high schools to become teachers for other coal mining towns,” said Wells.
Both students are tasked with doing a 10-page paper and a class presentation on the research they’ve done.
