Colonial Williamsburg- Pt. 1 “For the Love of Soap”

For the past few posts I have talked about the popularity of sense in Public History, eating, smelling, touching, hearing, seeing, (and the 6^th ghosts of course). This post I am going to talk about some aspects of Colonial Williamsburg. Some sensual –some not.

Before last week I had never been to Colonial Williamsburg, as a Public History student I have read quite a bit about C.W. I had a good idea of what I was about to see there –I was wrong. It could have been the recent storms, maybe some people could not make it into work?, or the general slump C.W. has experienced since 9/11, or it was the fact that my company and I decided against buying the $40+ ticket price to have the “full experience” –I have been told that C.W. carefully hides their interpretations and performances from the non-full-ticket-paying-public now after years of accidentally giving out entertainment and education for free. It is a very good possibility all three of those are true and applicable to my experience. No matter the excuses I stand by my description of C.W.  as “like a sad Renaissance fair…”

Where are the people in costume? I asked myself. Is this not the famed Duke of Gloster Street? Is this not the magical place that Handler and Gabel knocked down a few pegs? Where are the little girls dressed like American Girl Dolls? Where are the little boys with muskets terrorizing the little Feliciti? I expected a lot more, perhaps I should have paid a lot more.

BUT-What I paid for- I generally liked.

The folk arts museum is AMAZING! More ceramics than you can shake a stick at.

First:

The entrance to the folk arts museum is through the, I use this term colloquially, Insane Asylum. The Asylum consisted of three small rooms, but they were both powerful and informative. One was an 18thc patient room, complete (and by complete I mean only consisting of) a bed/pillow, blanket and chains. There were scratch drawings on the wall and a recording of a man yelling about his royalty, while, presumably, a doctor/caretaker attempted to dissuade the ranting man. In the opposite room you saw the doctor’s apartment room (it also may have been a more recent version of a patient room, I was unsure because I was rather excited), which an actual (off the floor –this was no Ordinary) bed, a desk, and a fiddle. The last room, which spanned the length of the two, featured items from the institution along a time line which split the theories of mental care up into three or four forgettable categories. The exhibit traced the emergence of a care and rehabilitation based medicine from its early beginnings as a storehouse for the socially unfit. Very interesting and very cool. It did a fine job drawing people in with the romance (perhaps spectacle?) of a mental institution and was then able to tell a story about the evolution of mental care. Blaming the past for its apparent wrong doings is far too easy, and C.W. was able to take the drama and intrigue of human suffering that attracts guests and turn into an educational experience about the history of professional mental medicine. See? Very neat.  Mental institutions are notoriously creepy places, we can all think of an abandoned one we sought to visit or avoid in our youths. C.W. used this intrigue to tell a much different story. Though the exhibit included the haunting ratings of a patient, the inclusion of the exhibit on the evolution of care de-mystified and de-demonized the people who spent all if not most of their lives chained in the hospital. Well done C.W. well done.

Second: Out of the hospital/asylum/institution exhibit we immediately descended into the Folk Arts Museum, which lay below the recreated hospital. This place also was neat. Their ceramics gallery was simply wonderful –a beautiful collection. Though we have some training in appreciating the deeper qualities in ceramics and material culture, the exhibits were just too lovely to think about. We marauded through the exhibits on ceramics, furniture, wood signs and the like as if we were shopping for sofas for our own homes. (Both “OO”s and “AAh”s were present). We did appreciate the clear explanation of the ceramics, their defining characteristics and their unique fabrications. But we had also turned our brains off and proceeded to drool over our favorite ceramics (Cauliflower and Pineapple wares 4 evah!). 

We spent the remained of our day walking through C.W. looking for anything really. Our museum ticket included a tour of the house the Rockafellars stayed in –which was literally horrifyingly boring. Stay away ye be warned. We perused the stores, and smelled the soaps, and smelled the soaps, and smelled the soaps, and smelled the soaps, and then bought all the soaps. Though the streets of Colonial Williamsburg are sprinkled with horse shit (road apples if you like) the assortments of sweet smelling soaps and herb gardens successfully masked the order of freshly trodden previously planted poo. Authenticity! Right? If you go to C.W. and don’t complain about the shit smell you are kidding yourself, and you pretend ability to not to notice or care about it will only make you look pretentious. Inappropriately pretentious at that, are we to think you are better because you DON’T mind the shit smell, well good for you, I bet that opens a lot of door in your career.

We soon ventured into the modern side of town for early dinner at the Cheese Shop and coffee. We went into all the stores and picked up some books, patches…soap, Touristy things. Then we wondered over to C.W. to take part in our trip’s main event –the reason we drove to C.W. from Fredericksburg, you thinks its soap, but it was not.( though we did buy soap at this point in the day) Our official Colonial Williamsburg Ghost Tour “Ghosts Among Us” was slated to start at 7pm

To be continued….