CULTURAL QUARANTINE
NationaL Canal
Museum
Easton’s Hugh Moore Park is a picturesque extension of the City of Easton where America’s golden age of canals is on full display. With more than two miles of restored Lehigh Canal, a canal boat attraction unlike any other in Pennsylvania and the rest of the Northeast, and one of the country’s largest canal heritage museums, the 520-acre park nestled between the Lehigh Canal and Lehigh River is a throwback to the years when mules pulling canal boats on narrow towpaths was a common sight in much of the United States east of the Mississippi River.
The Delaware & Lehigh National Heritage Corridor interprets this fascinating period of American history in the park through tours of the National Canal Museum and rides on the 110-passenger Josiah White II canal boat(June-October).
Our thanks to Director of Museum & Education Daphne Mayer and Historian & Archives Coordinator Martha Capwell Fox for participating in this project.
Initial Crisis
Staffing &
the Nature of Work
I oversee our seasonal staff who work with us through our field trips and our museum and canal boat operations…you know, I was very concerned about how we could support them when it became clear that we were not going to just be reopening in April. How we were going to be able to find work for them as much as possible and how we could find the money to do that as well.
Programming Shifts
Executive leadership never before paid much attention to what we were putting online for the museum. All of a sudden it’s like, “Well, why aren’t you doing this? You know, you need to be doing this right now.”
– Daphne Mayer, August 20, 2020
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We have Wayback Wednesday and blog posting and that sort of thing…And so I’m spending more time on that than I ever did before, you know, which is cool, because it is one way to share what we’ve got.
– Martha Capwell Fox, August 20, 2020
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I had already made contact with everybody we were going to borrow stuff from for the exhibit. And we, in fact, already had four pieces in-house. Now they were safely locked up in climate control, you know, etc. etc. But I just really was concerned about having custody of this stuff and not being in the building.
– Martha Capwell Fox, August 20, 2020
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Positives & Negatives
I have to admit, I mean, as much as I like working from home to a certain extent, it’s also getting to be a little old.
-Martha Capwell Fox,
January 28, 2021
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The minute the boat opened, the visitors shot up…we’ve had this illustration and it has happened too many times in the past couple of years…when something happened to the canal and we couldn’t run the boat, that without the boat, nobody comes.
-Martha Capwell Fox,
January 28, 2021
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So one of the really bright points is the collaborations that we’ve started to put in place. I’ve actually probably talked to organizations more over Zoom than I have ever in the past in person.
Daphne Meyer,
August 20, 2020
