As Museum Manager, one of the core parts of my job is to develop the collections and exhibits at Fairlawn, the SS Meteor, and the Old Firehouse & Police Museum. For the first couple of years of my career at the museums, collections and exhibits had to take a back seat while we were short staffed. I had to take on a lot more of the administrative and general operating job duties while we were without a Museum Director. That all changed in 2026 when, for the first time since 2023, the administrative team at SHP was fully staffed! That meant I finally could dive into collections development and exhibit creation with much more focus.
At SHP, our buildings are part of the museum experience, so there isn’t as much space for traditional museum exhibits. But there have been opportunities at each museum for me to begin to explore temporary and permanent exhibit development. Some of you may have seen the Fourth of July exhibit at Fairlawn this past summer. Or maybe you saw the new K-9 Unit exhibit at the Old Firehouse & Police Museum. Or maybe you even saw my small exhibit on the 50th anniversary of the sinking of the SS Edmund Fitzgerald last year. Regardless, exhibit design has become a larger part of my daily duties in the past year or so, and I am loving every minute of it.
K-9 Unit Exhibit Panel debuted at the Old Firehouse & Police Museum, designed by Jordan Stish, 2025.
I am currently working on my newest exhibit project at Fairlawn Mansion, a holiday exhibit detailing how Christmas decorating trends have changed throughout the decades. To complete this project, I spent a lot of time doing research. For this exhibit, research looked like searching through historic newspaper clippings from Superior’s newspaper, The Evening Telegram, contacting the Library of Congress and the National Archives to obtain historic photos, conducting oral history interviews with folks to learn about their memories of holiday decorating from previous decades, and sourcing the artifacts needed to supplement our collection and display. Overall, the research process took about two months.
Headline article from The Evening Telegram on Monday, December 18, 1899
After my research was complete, I began the design phase (my personal favorite). I worked on turning my research into a visually appealing exhibit that wasn’t too wordy. In the museum world, too much text in an exhibit is not ideal. Instead, museum professionals are encouraged to rely more heavily on images and objects to tell the story. Luckily for me, my exhibit is all about decorations, so the visual theme was easy to achieve. Once my signage and panels were complete, it was time to begin installation. The exhibit is located in the Ballroom at Fairlawn Mansion. I sealed off this room from the tour route and got to work building display stands, installing signage, and staging artifacts.
Corner piece of the Christmas Village display in the exhibit.
The exhibit will have nine Christmas trees, a Christmas village, intricate Christmas train set, audio/visual materials, interactive features, and even a family photo op station to take a photo in a traditional Victorian era Christmas scene. The exhibit itself will open on December 2nd to the general public, but museum membership holders will get to see it first during Members Only Night on November 29th.
Part of the Symbols of Christmas section of the exhibit.
Overall, it has been such a blessing to be able to dedicate more of my time to exhibit development. I earned my graduate degree in Public History, and it has been incredible to use my degree in a meaningful way and put my formal training to good use. I hope to see you all at Fairlawn this holiday season, and it would mean the absolute world to me if you visited my new exhibit in December.
Jordan Stish, Museum Manager
