African-American Heritage Museum of Southern New Jersey

Although I did not realize it at the time, my first public history ‘gig’ was my high school summer job giving tours of Lucy the Elephant, a national historic landmark in Margate that was built in 1881 to draw potential land buyers to what was then the sparsely populated borough of ‘South Atlantic City.’ At that point the belly of the beast resembled a small gallery displaying a range of local historical artifacts, including a horse-drawn firehose cart, which were soon removed to the just opened Margate Historical Society Museum where they stayed on exhibit until the building itself was damaged by Hurricane Sandy.