On July 5, 2025, a Smithsonian Institution traveling exhibit arrived from Washington, DC, and was installed on the second floor of the Garrett County Historical Society’s (GCHS) Museum of Transportation. It was there until August 16. The exhibit’s theme was “Spark! Places of Innovation in Rural America”.
Karen White, GCHS’s curator, explained it this way: “From time to time, as in every few years, the Smithsonian Institution offers a small number of traveling exhibits.” But, how does the Smithsonian decide where the exhibit will visit?
Interested museums, such as GCHS, had to apply for a grant through their respective state’s Department of Humanities. In Maryland, the department’s self-described role is to “inspire learning and promote dialogue about our heritage, culture, and future as Marylanders”. White and others from GCHS wrote the grant and were required to reflect the Smithsonian’s theme as it applied to Garrett County. As a result of lots of hard work, GCHS’s grant application was successful, and Garrett County was the second stop for the exhibit.
That’s how and why the exhibit that took up one-half of the second floor at the Museum of County Innovation – Photo by Janet Keller Transportation when it arrived. Imagine trying to clear a 20-by-40-foot space for a series of eight-foot-tall panels, each of which focused on one of the exhibit’s guidelines.
As they say on TV,” Hold on, there’s more!” Karen White, Kathy Shaffer, and Jim Ashby designed and created an additional panel specifically showing thirteen examples of how Garrett County reflected the Smithsonian’s exhibit theme. Included for each of the thirteen was a QR Code that would take viewers to the respective online page for those businesses and locations featured on the Garrett County panel. In this way, visitors could take online information home with them to be viewed as often as they wished.
In case you missed the exhibit, check out our social media page (https://www.facebook.com/lakefrontmagazine) to catch a clip of Karen White explaining more about Deer Park Spring Water, a Garrett County innovation.
Written by Tony Lolli