Pennsylvania Museum Extenstion Project Beginings

Visual education represented a new and exciting frontier then, in much the same way that digital education does today. The problem was securing the “proper materials” and getting them into classrooms. “The commercial concerns are not disposed to devote themselves to the preparation of high grade pictures,” one educator complained. Access to existing sources of visual material—the rich collections amassed by public museums and libraries—was also restricted by geography. School children in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia could turn to grand public institutions such as the Carnegie Museum of Art and the Free Library of Philadelphia. For most school districts in the vast swath of Pennsylvania, field trips to faraway museums were not an option. To its credit, the Pennsylvania Department of Public Instruction, forerunner of the Pennsylvania Department of Education, tried to make visual resources available to all. The department had made the State Museum’s vast collection of lantern slides available for loan to public schools across the Commonwealth as early as 1907. 


That experience may have been instrumental in bringing the program to Pennsylvania. In 1935, WPA officials tapped fifty-eight-year-old Martha Cox Colt of Harrisburg, an artist and educator, who had been affiliated with the Harrisburg School of Art and the Central Pennsylvania Art School, to launch Pennsylvania’s program. It would be the first statewide program in the country, and as such, others would be watching closely. Colt was given a small staff and office space on North Cameron Street, several blocks from the State Capitol, and put to work under the administrative oversight of the state’s Division of Women’s and Professional Projects. The Pennsylvania Department of Public Instruction became the program’s official statewide sponsor. Over the following five years, until the sponsorship was transferred to the Pennsylvania State College (now University) in 1940, state education department officials played critical roles in determining the project’s direction and scope of work. 

WPA > STATE (Harrisburg, PA) > small districts