Engineering-minded Waltham High graduate makes his mark at Gore Place

Gore Place summer intern Jake Villalta left a lasting impact by helping to modernize the historic estate’s operations in his last summer before starting college. 

The 50-acre country estate in Waltham has hosted summer internships for many years. Director of interpretation Thom Roach said summer internships enable young people to contribute to the site based on their interests. 

For the past two summers, Gore Place has placed two interns each summer through the Waltham Partnership for Youth, a youth development organization based at Waltham High School. The organization aims to mitigate systemic inequities by giving Waltham youth opportunities with partner organizations. 

“As a young person, it’s a really great time to explore, try different fields and see what you’re interested in,” said Medjin Lucien, WPY’s Career Exploration and  Training Program manager who runs the summer internship program. 

Villalta, a Waltham High School graduate, was the second intern in this partnership. Villalta participated in two other internships through WPY. He worked at an electrochemical company in Waltham as well as in the volunteer office at Newton-Wellesley Hospital. 

Going into this past summer, Villalta said he noticed engineering options were limited but he saw Gore Place listed as an option. 

“I’ve always had a passion for history and the like, so I decided, why not?” Villalta said. 

After two rounds of interviews, Villalta got the placement.

‘What did they do all day?’

Gore Place has been inhabited for at least four centuries. Roach said its most notable inhabitants were Christopher and Rebecca Gore. 

“Even though this property was here long before them and it was owned by people long after them, in their time period, they developed into what you see today with the beautiful mansion, the carriage houses, the barns and the farm,” Roach said. 

Villalta said he was thrilled to learn the offices were inside the mansion, completed in 1806 by the Gores.

“It started with me trying to gain as much knowledge as possible,” Villalta said. 

Villalta said he loved the range of tasks he was given, from collecting eggs at the farm to administrative work in the office. 

Early on, Roach gave Villalta a tour around the mansion. 

“Immediately, when I gave him a tour of the house, he had a great question,” Roach said. “He said, ‘What did they do all day?’ What a great question for a historian to ask.”

In 1935, the Gore Place Society was founded to save the historic estate. Roach said in the last 20 years there has been a push within the estate to incorporate more community programming, including a sheepshearing festival and puppet shows. The estate continues to operate as a museum, working farm and community resource.

“We are a destination for the people in the community,” Roach said. 

The Roombooks

The estate utilizes roombooks to document and identify objects in each room across the more than 20 rooms in the mansion.  

Roach said the historic site is responsible for maintaining, cataloging and storing the objects. He said they try to switch out the objects and rotate them through periodically. The roombooks describe each object as a guide for those who showed the house to people. 

Some of the furniture belonged to the Gores, while other items were owned by other residents, and some were donated to the collection. In recent years, they moved many objects around the rooms. It became difficult to update them with all the changes, as they would have printed new pages to put in the binders. He said once some of the changes were set in place, it appeared practical to overhaul the roombooks. 

Roach tasked Villalta with updating the digital version of the roombooks  and printing out new pages. A few days later, Roach said, Villalta came to him with an idea of how to take the project further. 

“I like breaking things down into systems,” Villalta said. 

Villalta created a spreadsheet and wrote some code. Within a couple of weeks, he created a system to automatically update the roombooks when an object was moved from room to room. 

“For an intern to come in and have a real impact on the process by which a museum manages its displayed collection is a real achievement,” Roach said.

Roach said he emphasized Villalta’s contribution in his speech at the WPY closing ceremony hosted at Gore Place in August and honored interns in the program across various organizations. Both Villalta and Roach were asked to speak from the intern and partner organization perspectives. 

Three weeks ago, Villalta started his first semester at UMass Amherst studying industrial engineering. 

“I didn’t expect to be able to implement an engineering mindset in a museum setting, but I realized through Gore Place that regardless of where you are, you can have a set of skills and use those somewhere to make a meaningful impact,” he said “something that will hopefully outlast you a little longer.”