Faces of ORL: Preserving Central Florida’s History
Meet the Team at Orange County Regional History Center
THE FACES OF
PRESERVING CENTRAL FLORIDA’S HISTORY
Seated L to R: Scottie Campbell, Chief Marketing & Communications Officer ◾ Adaeze Nwigwe, HERstory: Women’s History Intern ◾ Jeremy Hileman, Assistant Curator
Standing L to R: Hilary Marx, Board President ◾ Kendra Hazen, Assistant Curator of Education
Travis Puterbaugh, Curator of Collections ◾ Pam Schwartz, Executive Director
Orange County Regional History Center
The mission of the Orange County Regional History Center clearly explains their task at hand: preserving and sharing Central Florida’s continually unfolding story. The museum’s current special exhibition illustrates how immediate history can be; Figurehead: Music and Mayhem in Orlando’s Underground chronicles the city’s vibrant music scene between 1985 and 2001. Originally slated to be on display for a year, the exhibition has been extended by popular demand and has received the prestigious Award of Excellence from the American Association for State and Local History, among other accolades.
The genesis of the Figurehead exhibition can be traced to 2016 and illustrates how connecting people and places is integral to preserving history. In the aftermath of the Pulse nightclub massacre, the History Center conducted an oral history with a concert promoter, Jim Faherty, who had produced shows in the space before it became Pulse. Through the process, Faherty decided to donate hundreds of concert posters and other memorabilia to the museum. During that period, the History Center stepped up to the challenge of collecting and preserving items left at the Pulse site to honor the victims and those impacted. Today, its staff are consulted on such preservation methods by other communities that have experienced similar traumas, both recent and historical.
The museum received the coveted National Medal for Museum and Library Services in 2019 and is an affiliate of the Smithsonian Institution, but this is not a team to rest on their laurels. The History Center has ambitious hopes of expanding the footprint of their historic courthouse home in downtown Orlando to share even more history, and also maintains an offsite 14,000-square-foot archival facility housing Central Florida’s past – from a mastodon tooth to Billy Manes’s socks.
CONTACT INFORMATION:
65 E. Central Boulevard, Orlando, FL 32801 | 407-836-8500 | thehistorycenter.org
