NEW WILMINGTON, Pa. – Westminster College history students spent the fall semester helping shape a new heritage tourism destination in western Pennsylvania.
Westminster was one of 13 Appalachian colleges and universities across seven states selected to participate in the Appalachian Collegiate Research Initiative this fall.
Supported by an ACRI grant, the initiative gave students the opportunity to earn credit while conducting field research and designing economic development solutions for their communities.
At Westminster, that mission was carried out by students in the Historical Methods course. Nine sophomore students partnered with the Beaver County Industrial Museum to support the development of the museum as a heritage tourism site.
The museum, 801 Plumb St., Darlington, Pa., is home to thousands of photographs, slides and artifacts from companies and industries of the 19th and 20th centuries. Darlington is just north of state Route 51, a few miles east of East Palestine, Ohio.
The ACRI grant was awarded to Patricia Clark, associate professor of history at Westminster, who saw it as a bridge between academic training and real-world impact.
“I thought the grant would be a good way to help our history students gain real-world public history experience as well as helping our regional community,” she said.
Her project, “Industrious Communities: The Cultural and Industrial Heritage of Beaver County,” partnered with the museum to lay groundwork for developing the museum as a tourism site. The museum’s mission, Clark explained, resonates far beyond county lines.
“Industry has been vital to the development of this area of Appalachia, and the ways in which deindustrialization has affected the region’s culture and society are echoed in other parts of the world,” she said.
The nine students carried out the work. Split into two teams – collection management and marketing/social media – they were hands-on in the daily operations of the museum. One group accessioned and cataloged artifacts to help build the museum’s database, while the other developed strategies to promote the museum’s visibility.
Christopher Maloberti, a history major from Cranberry Township, Pa., served on the collection management side, where students handled accessioning and database organization.
“Our part was to look over the archives that were given to the museum and sort it and log it into an Excel spreadsheet for the purpose of helping to organize the library,” he said.
Maloberti described one memorable discovery he found in the archives – a miniature prototype toy of the Atomic Annie artillery piece, a Cold War-era cannon designed to fire nuclear shells.
The work was eye-opening for Maloberti, who said the experience taught him how historians process and preserve physical records.
“I got to learn how historians in museums and libraries sort through and process archives and records,” he said, noting that the collaboration strengthened his interest in archival research as a career.
The class made multiple trips to the museum, gathering information not only for the ACRI project but also for their own research papers. Each student produced an individual project focused on labor or industrial history drawing directly from museum resources.
Like Clark, Maloberti sees value that reaches beyond the classroom.
“Preserving industrial history matters because it helps people of this generation understand their culture and how far we’ve come,” he said. “It’s also important to understand how things like buildings, steel and glass are created and the importance of workers’ rights and laws.”
The project culminated in Washington, D.C., where Clark and eight of her students presented their work at the Appalachian Collegiate Research Initiative Symposium on Dec. 5-6. They were joined by David Horst Lehman, assistant professor of history, and three of his students from the spring 2025 public history practicum course who helped write the original grant proposal that secured the funding.
Pictured at top: The Beaver County Industrial Museum in Darlington, Pa.