Two Federal Grants for the National Canal Museum in Easton, Pennsylvania

From a Park Service article published when the grants were awarded. The exhibition, research and inventory it describes were then still ahead.

The Delaware & Lehigh National Heritage Corridor (D&L) won two sizeable grants that fall, each from a different federal agency — the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute of Museum and Library Services. Both went to one of the D&L's signature programs, the National Canal Museum.

The museum

The museum stands in Hugh Moore Park in Easton, Pennsylvania, beside the D&L Canal — the route that once carried coal and iron from Wilkes-Barre to Philadelphia. Its subject is the region's transportation and industrial heritage, which the article calls nationally significant. It also shows visitors how the canal worked, with mules towing a boat along the water.

The two grants pay for different projects, but both push in the same direction: making the collections, the curating and the coming programmes more accessible and more diverse.

The NEH grant: more people's stories

The National Endowment for the Humanities award supports bringing a wider range of stories into the museum's exhibitions, programmes and communications. Its first product was to be the following year's special exhibition, Beyond Rosie and Rivets: Industrial Women in the D&L Corridor.

It also lets the museum research the part African Americans played in the corridor, above all on the anthracite canals and the industries around them.

The award was one of 305 Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grants, made to help cultural institutions recover from the economic damage of the pandemic.

The IMLS grant: knowing what the museum holds

The second award came from the Institute of Museum and Library Services through Museums for America, the institute's largest competitive grant programme. Museums for America funds projects that help museums serve the public with good, inclusive learning, and goes to institutions that act as anchors for their communities and that preserve their collections and open them to people.

The canal museum will use it to make its collections easier to reach and to carry out a complete inventory over three years. An Inventory Coordinator was to be hired to run the work alongside the staff and bring order to an archive packed tightly into a 2,800-square-foot storage building.

What the museum hopes to find

Daphne Mayer, the D&L's Museum and Education Director, said the museum was honoured that federal funders had recognised its work on the region's industrial and transportation history. Through the grants, she said, the museum hoped to uncover and share the overlooked stories of the many kinds of people who helped start the American Industrial Revolution in what is now the D&L Corridor.

Visiting

The museum's exhibitions and programmes are listed on its website. For those who cannot visit, the D&L's Museum from Home offers virtual visits and learning material for children, and the D&L website covers the D&L Trail, the region's heritage and current events.

Words on this page from people and organisations outside the federal government are paraphrased; rewritten in hubnx's own words.

Sources

• National Park Service, Two Federal Grants Help the National Canal Museum Share the Untold Stories of the D&L Canal. The article's photographs are credited to the D&L, the museum's collection and Smithsonian Magazine, and are not reproduced here.