The Adventures of a Novice Historian

Prior to going back to school in 2014 I was kind of lost, I did not know what I wanted to do with my life. I developed a love for history, when I was about twelve. It began when I watched a National Geographic documentary about Egyptian history, and it just snowballed from there. When I was 13, my mother pulled me out of public school and began to home-school me which is when my passion was allowed to flourish. Every time I went somewhere historic with my family, I had to know everything I could before our visit and when people came to see us I had to play tour guide. At the time it never occurred to me that I could apply both my passion for history and my need to tell people what I knew together.  When I started at UNCA, I could not have imagined I would have had an opportunity to put those two things together. So, when I began my internship at Vance over the summer, I didn't know what to expect. Which is understandable given that I had never done anything like it before.  ...

Because Lauren is going to Boston tomorrow and I'm going to Charleston with my family on the 9th, I worked an extra day at Vance this week. And after three straight days of nothing but torrential rain, the sun finally came out! Today was planting day, YAY! When I went in this morning I did not know that I would be planting, so I was really not dressed for it. I wore my dark blue day dress and my Mary-Janes. I did not let that stop me though. So with determination, I took off my shoes, tied up my hair and got to work! Because I was unprepared for planting I didn't have my gardening gloves, cutters, or trowel with me, which meant I had to improvise. Lauren found me an old pair of artifact gloves, and I found a ladle and a knife in the kitchen. With these tools in hand and the bigger tools in the tool shed next to the garden I had everything I needed to work. The first thing I did was assess what plants Kimberly had been able to buy at Reems Creek Nursery earlier in the we...