This week we hear from Isabella Silva who interned with Madeline, processing the Milton Historical Photographs Collection. Isabella connected with one of the subjects in the photographs collection and reminisces in the following blog.
As I’m flipping through a collection of snapshots given to us in plastic tins that surely came from a deceased family member’s attic, I catch sight of her again. A young woman in a black-and-white photograph with even shorter hair and an even shorter dress; my face lights up with recognition.
“It’s Delma!” I tell my co-intern, Madeline. By this point, Madeline knows all about my personal obsession with Milton, Vermont’s very own 1920s flapper. Delma looks like she should be at the back of a speakeasy in New York City, sipping an illegal martini, but instead she’s here, smiling at me through a pair of rouged lips as she smokes cigarettes by the beach with her girlfriends.
My task as an intern at the Milton Historical Society was to help Milton’s dedicated volunteers with their herculean task of sorting and accessioning their extensive photograph collection that dates all the way back to the Victorian origins of photography. Delma Manley Martin (to me, at least) became something of a main character in the archive. Not only are photographs of her plentiful (more photos of her exist in Milton’s archives than of the Society’s famed founder, Ruth Ryan, who was a young woman around the same time as Martin), but it’s Delma’s personality that seems to leap off the image more than any other figure. Her vivaciousness, her eye for fashion, her love for her fiancé, Clifford Martin, and her love for her friends are warmly evident in every picture that I have seen of her (and as I have said, there are many).
I selected this internship because I had previously worked at the Patrick Leahy Archives at the University of Vermont, where I am currently pursuing my master’s in history. I had a positive experience there learning about the way that archives are put together and operate, and I wanted to further my understanding of how this inestimable public resource operates. As all good students of history know, the archives are sacred to the practice of history; it is its very life force. Though it is easy to think of history and its ephemera as representative of a complete story, the truth is that it actually represents the stories that have yet to be told. That is why I wanted to work with the archives again, to tell the stories of those who can no longer tell them themselves.
Delma Manley Martin died in 1993. She and Clifford lived in Milton all their lives and raised two children there. They now rest under the green valleys of Arrowhead Mountain in Milton Village Cemetery. I will never meet Delma Martin, but in many ways I have. I believe that documents are given meaning when they are preserved, and I feel honored that I have helped to preserve Delma’s vibrant spirit. Delma took photographs of herself, her friends, and family because these were moments she wanted to remember. Now I, and I am sure many others, get to remember her too.
The Milton Historical Society is open May through October on Saturdays, 10 am to 2 pm. Learn more: https://www.miltonvthistory.org/
