WCU History Students Preserve the Past, Build Futures Through Elwyn Partnership 
New Memorial Fund Will Support Paid Internships as Students Gain Hands-On Experience Preserving the Nonprofit’s Historical Collections
For nearly a decade, West Chester University (WCU) history students have stepped out of the classroom and into the archives of Elwyn, a Delaware County nonprofit that has served people with intellectual and developmental disabilities since 1852. Now, a new memorial fund will pay future interns as they help preserve the organization’s nearly 175-year history.
Established at Elwyn by the family of the late Dr. Elliott W. Simon, the fund will compensate students working in the archives, with priority given to interns from WCU’s Department of History taking the HIS 450 internship.
The partnership began when Simon, Elwyn’s former executive director of research and health services, set out to preserve records that researchers across the country hope to access. He teamed up with Dr. Brent Ruswick, professor of history at WCU, who began sending interns to organize a massive amount of unsorted material into usable archives. Simon later secured funding for a dedicated archival space and a professional archivist. The archives formally opened last year and were named in his honor, and WCU interns continue the work today under archivist Caitlin Angelone.
Learning History by Doing It
“There is this beautiful moment where students go from experiencing history as something they receive in a class in the form of stories from a teacher, to something they do out in the field,” Ruswick said.
Sheridan Wells ’25 interned at Elwyn in spring 2024. Wells cataloged hundreds of copper printing plates and prints, created a finding aid for researchers, and helped pack the collection for its move to a new archival space. Now in the final year of a master’s program in history at Colorado State University, where Wells also works in museum education, Wells draws on skills from the internship in graduate research.
“One of the things I took with me from my internship is a passion for making information accessible to researchers and the general public,” Wells said. “Democracy runs on freely available information about the present as well as the past, and archivists make that happen.”
For Chloe Balcer ’26, the internship led to a career. After serving as program coordinator at Historic Yellow Springs, Balcer recently became assistant archivist at Chester County Archives.
“My time at Elwyn helped me understand how important it is to preserve the stories of people who might otherwise be overlooked, and to ensure their experiences are remembered,” Balcer said.
Current history student Cristina Tecce worked alongside Angelone to learn document preservation and management, organization, and library coding systems.
“Coming from Dr. Ruswick’s HIS 393 class, the internship was a valuable outlet for applying knowledge learned in school and interacting with it in real life,” Tecce said. “Overall, it unlocked a serious interest of mine that I would have never had the opportunity otherwise to explore.”
Recovering Overlooked Stories
For Ruswick, a historian of science and medicine whose research includes disability studies and the history of poverty, the archives hold stories worth saving. He and Simon studied the records of Pennsylvania Training School residents from the 1880s, tracing their lives before, during, and after their time at the school.
“They weren’t famous, they didn’t alter the fate of nations, but their struggles and hopes and dreams tell us about the world they lived in, and can tell us something about our world too,” Ruswick said.
Ruswick said the new fund reflects the joy and meaning he and Simon found in their research, their friendship, and their work with student interns.
“It represents that this massive work is an ongoing project, one that Elwyn, the Simon family, and WCU’s History department are committed to seeing through to the end,” he said.
For more information about WCU’s Department of History, visit www.wcupa.edu/arts-humanities/history