Paid Summer Internship [Squirrel Island Historical Society, Squirrel Island, ME]

Attention History Lovers:  Squirrel Island Historical Society (SIHS) is offering a paid Internship for the Summer 2016

Often, when reading history, you are reading what someone else thinks about what happened in Maine.  Wouldn’t it be fun to be that person!  At the SIHS, we have almost unlimited unread materials relating to the island.  We have book after book of town and board meetings going back to 1870.   We have boxes and boxes of papers that were the private files of the men who ran the island.  And, we have 1000s of pictures covering the whole 140 year history of this early summer colony.

Part of your job would be to pick a topic, research it on your own and write in detail about your findings.  With some hard work, you could be on your way to being published like last years intern!  But, I also have to be honest and say that this research is not the only part of the job.

We need you to open and close our one room museum most days.  Saturday is our busy day, so we ask you to work then but you could substitute Sunday and maybe take a weekend off during the summer.  The SIHS space is centrally located near the ferry, so it receives a constant stream of visitors.  A major part of your responsibilities would be to meet and greet these visitors and help them appreciate the island history.  We also need you to create displays for the space and help with SIHS annual events like a Fund Raising party and guest speakers.  You can see there are two very different aspects to the job.  One is very people oriented and out facing.  The other involves real digging in primary documents.  If this kind of dual challenge matches your strengths, we hope you will read further and apply.

If you enjoy people, working with primary historical documents and being on the rugged Maine coast, we hope you will consider this opportunity.  Squirrel Island is a summer community of 100 cottages three miles off the coast at Boothbay Harbor.  A ferry serves the island about 6 times a day.  The SIHS has a small museum and research facility 200 yards from the dock.  You can read all about the internship and the island at

There is a user name and password on the site.  The user name is duck and the password is shed.  You can read the comments from previous interns on the web site.

Because the SIHS Intern position involves a lot of interactions with diverse visitors and requires proactive outreach, we have learned from experience that a college Junior or Senior is most likely to have a successful summer. At the same time, we recognize that individuals have different strengths and age is not always a perfect criterion.