Author: Josh Medore | Photos courtesy of Ellers Family and the Trumbull County Historical Society
WARREN, Ohio — Lifelong Warren resident Martha Ellers had an abiding interest in history. Preserving it, researching it, celebrating it, and understanding it. It is with this in mind that a new endowment fund has been created in her name to support the Trumbull County Historical Society.
Martha Ellers wrote her college thesis on American historian Francis Parkman. She was a steady reader of historical and biographical books and an indefatigable tourist of historic sites from Presidential museums to Civil War battlefields. Her children, Andy Ellers and Elizabeth Ellers, recall a family trip to Hawaii to celebrate their parents’ 50th wedding anniversary. Rather than simply head to the beach and take in the typical tourist activities, Martha studied up on the area, visited museums and sought out ancient petroglyphs in the area.
Her love of history shaped her volunteer activities. She served as a long-time board member of the Trumbull County Historical Society and was involved with the Sutliff Museum and The Upton Association in Warren. As a leader in the regional chapter of the American Association of University Women, her prompts for student essay contests often centered on history.
“She helped bring it all to life. History to my mother was not something dead and on paper,” says Elizabeth Ellers.
Adds Andy Ellers, “I have fond memories of our family participating in the Walk on Millionaire’s Row event along Mahoning Avenue in Warren. She wanted people to remember the significance of Warren and Trumbull County.”
Before her death in May 2022 at the age of 92, Martha designated several organizations for bequests, but the siblings also wanted to honor her with a meaningful, long-term gift to the community. The Trumbull County Historical Society is now the beneficiary of the newly created Martha Ellers Endowment Fund at the Community Foundation of the Mahoning Valley. The fund will support the creation of a paid internship position at the Society, which director Meghan Reed says will help not only work through the organization’s lengthy to-do list, but also help turn it into the kind of group Martha Ellers knew it could be.
“Martha was on the Board and was part of a group that really saw the potential of the Historical Society. What I loved so much about her was she was able to capture a vision and see it through,” Reed says. “She had a vision that as a nonprofit we should be here for everyone. We’re not only here for the board or members. We’re here to be relevant and useful and provide meaningful support to the whole community.”
The details about the internship program are still being worked out, but Reed expects it to start taking applications this spring, and welcome its first participant to the Trumbull County Historical Society by summer. The work they’ll be doing will focus on two areas that were extremely important to Martha Ellers: education and the society’s collection.
“She cared very much about developing children’s education, so we’re hoping that there may be some support for creating online content or implementing some kind of programming in schools or adding field trips,” Reed says.
As a repository for the everyday things that tell the story of an area, historical societies receive troves of documents, pictures, and items that are important – but their value is only realized if they can be identified and catalogued, Andy Ellers notes.
“That value is maximized by cataloguing, quantifying and storing the artifacts in ways that allow people to reference the material. There’s a challenge between receiving those things and making them meaningful. Our mom knew that there’s a huge backlog of this work to be done,” he says.
Beyond just helping the society develop a more robust and functional collection, the creation of the internship as a paid position also benefits college students in a way that Martha would be proud of, her children and Reed say. While paid internships in museums or the broader history field are becoming more common, it’s still not the industry standard, the society’s director says.
By paying interns for their work, the Trumbull County Historical Society will be “putting our money where our mouth is,” Reed says, in working toward a more equitable and accessible history field.
“Doing this equalizes opportunity and brings a necessary level of career development for those looking at this as a long-term career path. This fund gives us the opportunity to see that vision through,” she says.
“It’s unfortunate that young people are expected to do free internships to get experience when that’s not possible for so many,” adds Elizabeth Ellers. “This program will give someone studying in this field a chance at an experience that otherwise they might not be able to get.”
As the first employee of the Trumbull County Historical Society, Reed is familiar with the benefits of having real-world experience guided by someone who cares deeply about history. When she was hired in 2015, Reed was just out of college and being tasked with helping move the organization from all-volunteer to a professionally-staffed historical society, a job that included work beyond the society’s collections like creating HR policies and bringing operations up to standards set by the American Alliance of Museums.
“I owe a lot to Martha for sharing that vision and having faith in me to make a lot of changes in the first few years. Some of those changes were difficult, but Martha’s voice was always respected,” she says. “She was a real ally when we were making hard decisions that let us grow quickly.”
With the creation of the Martha Ellers Endowment Fund, Andy Ellers and Elizabeth Ellers hope to further both the legacy of supporting local history, and the people closely connected to it. It is something Martha would have been delighted to see at the Trumbull County Historical Society.
“She’d be thrilled to walk with Reed through the society’s museum galleries to see what can now be displayed because of the work an intern had done. Likewise, she’d be gratified to see that banker’s boxes full of documents and artifacts are now catalogued and organized,” Andy Ellers says. “Beyond that, she’d be delighted to know that a student that she supported in doing this work, then used that experience to go on and run an get a job at a museum or archive.” Adds Elizabeth Ellers: “She was always interested in people. She would want to know exactly what the Historical Society’s interns went on to do.”
Andy Ellers and Elizabeth Ellers no longer live in the area; Andy Ellers lives near Seattle and Elizabeth Ellers in northern Virginia, but both look forward to visiting from time to time and hearing from Reed about the impact of the fund they have launched to honor their mother. They know the loss of their mother, and her in-person participation in local historical endeavors, can never be replaced, but hope that the Martha Ellers Endowment Fund will help continue her efforts to preserve and celebrate local history.
Want to support Want to support Martha’s vision and help the Trumbull County Historical Society make its internship program a success? Your contribution to the Martha Ellers Endowment Fund directly supports the preservation of local history in Trumbull County.