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….

St. Mary’s City

The sun sits closer to the earth at St. Mary’s City. In all my experiences there it is hot place. Hotter than hot. The kind of weather that makes me, a Floridian citizen, think “My god it is warm here.” It is not quite a swelter but the air moves when it wants to, which is to say not that often.  I imagine St. Mary’s City is not boiling during the winter, fall, and spring months, but it is now summer so molecules are moving and the air is sizzling. This is a fact of life; this is a fact of St. Mary’s City. Which I consider one of my favorite summer field trips.

St. Mary’s City is simply wonderful. And when I went a few weeks ago my experience became exponentially better….I got sit in on tours for school children. What an excellent opportunity to experience public history in action-- And because I went with the USF Ferry Farm Field School Students, my advisor and my USF/GEWA Forensic Anthropology co-workers the air was ripe for conversation. (The air was also hot, stale, and slightly musty)

For background- St. Mary’s City was Maryland’s original capitol, it was Catholic but notably religiously diverse. (and racially if you happen to read their place marker celebrating the first Black person in Maryland..yes that exists). Fast forward- Since the 1970’s St. Mary’s City has hosted many archeological field schools. There are a lot of reconstructed buildings, some of them filled with objects, settings, and other fun building accompaniments, others are wooden structures, outlines of buildings, like a stick drawing. (It creates a peculiar but not upsetting visual landscape). There are farm animals, tobacco fields, and a ship, a rather neat ship. There is also a building with an uncovered dig site in it, that is phenomenally neat, but we did not hit it this time around so I will not talk about- but trust me it’s neat.

Alright, School Tours at St. Mary’s City

We sat in the Ordinary (basically colonial motel) for three tours, each lead by a different guide. The first tour guide explained how the accommodations in the Ordinary were better than sleeping outside. You can imagine seven year old being turned off by the idea of sleeping in a “rustic” motel, on a mat on the floor with other guests. Naturally the guide capitalized on the well trodden idea that the past was a hard place to live in, and we have it just so freaking sweet now.

Now that’s what I take issue with.  Tour guides (not just one) like to play up the idea of how hard life was “back then”, but they fail to realize or teach the children that this was a good system, and it worked for many years (decades).

  Sleeping on the floor, yea that works, this was pretty nice for them. We don’t need to talk about “they did not know any better than to think sleeping on the floor was okay,” because 17^th/18^th c people knew it was okay to sleep on the floor, it was okay it was normal.

 I don’t think we need to explain the past to children in comparison, honestly we don’t need to teach them to compare themselves to others, especially when you expect them to feel superior to others. The goal here is not to have the children think “Wow I am SO much better than these colonial folks, I am so lucky.” No no no, their worked, this was the good stuff. AND people still live this way. People still share bedrolls and sleep on the floor. It is not hard to see that guides are creating a continuum in the children’s mind where they see themselves as an evolved form of Marylanders. “Early Marylanders slept on the floor with strangers I don’t, I’m better, I’m better off” or worse “I could not do this, this is impossible for anyone to handle this type of living, how odd, how quaint” (though they would prob. not say quaint). The people who grew up in the colonies knew, understood and lived within this system, this was life, this was normal this worked, it was not hard, it was normal, it was life.  There are plenty of problems with our society now that we are encouraged to ignore in favor of comparing ourselves to a past we cannot possibly fully comprehend. We are not perfect we are not the society perfected from the past’s mistakes, we are just as messed up as we can cast the past as.

Now let’s take this one step further-let’s go there. Together.

So what is meant when a dichotomy is created between the living conditions in St. Mary’s City historical recreations and 2013 school students? Well you are saying people don’t live like this now. (I say) Oh but they do! So what does this say of the people who live this way? It says they are not civilized, they are behind. Jeepers! Why do people not live like this now?  Why don’t we share beds, and space with strangers. Who else shares space with strangers, communal living….oh communism Eek! Thank God we are live in the fully evolved capitol world that is the US of A!

All sarcasm aside, the image that is portrayed in the interpretation of colonial spaces as subpar is generally false. The people who occupied these spaces did not see them as half-decent replacements for the wilderness. Ordinarys like the one in St.  Mary’s City were frequented by the people who were able to stay there, not the desperate. And it was not unpleasant, it was normal, it may have been nice. We as the comparative future should not look down upon the past in pity, they were doing just fine, they survived that is why we are here to dig up their trash, faun over their stuff, and talk crap about their living conditions.

Other things about St. Mary’s City

            Best Smelling Gift Shop! And that is not a direct comparison to the pigs I had saw before going in the gift shop. The store smelled clean and wonderful, independent from prior smells.

No one is around when you go into the recreated historical buildings. You can, as long as no one is around to tell you “no”, touch EVERYTHING! When do you get this opportunity! Touch it, smell it, trying it on. I love it. The past is sensual at St. Mary’s City.

Hugh Mercer Apothecary Shop

On Saturday June 1, 2013 I had a blast in Fredericksburg. Having spent part of last summer there I was initially afraid that I did all there is to do in FXBG. I was delightfully wrong.

After walking through a two foot wide door on Caroline Street their first sight is a huge built-in shelving unit littered with odd shaped and sized bottles of various colors, filled with who-knows-what. A docent is on hand to explain the uses of each of the bottle contents and the innovative tools that Dr. Mercer “has”. In the next room another docent waits to carefully explain the types of procedures Mercer would perform for the people of FXBG --tooth extraction, blood letting, and amputation among the list. Afterwards guests are allowed to explore the two other rooms in the home, which are less eventful but the excitement of the previous experiences carry-over magically making a power-room enthralling.

           

  The Hugh Mercer Apothecary Shop (which is a museum)will be the best $5 (cash only) you will spend at any museum.  It was so great I’m going to just list its qualities:

• ·         They encourage you smell everything in the jars –spices, roots, teas, concoctions the whole deal. I said in the last post that people like to eat the past, this museum allows them to smell it.
• ·         The costumed docents pretend they are in the 18thc without embarrassing themselves and the guests. For example: We are had conversation with the interpreter about our being from Florida, he asked if (at his time) we lived in English or Spanish land (English at the time, but the land went back and fourth a few times). Another especially fun conversation was about the relative kindness of one man for drugging  his wife and chaining her in the family cellar instead of sending her to an infirmary. How romantic right? If you love sarcasms, as I do, you will be pleased. I do not like most costumed docents, I think its corny and too showy, but HMAS did a great job. They did not force the idea that they were 18thc people on guests by teasing them about cameras or commenting on "How odd" their clothing look. I was impressed.
• 
  
• ·         It’s gruesome. They have live leeches. Hugh Mercer was a doctor so naturally the museum talks about 18^th c medical practices- leeches, bloodletting, amputation and the like. The exhibit room is complete with teeth fragments, animal bones, and intimidating medical tools- and a leech named Hugh, of course.
• ·         The museum is the perfect size to do while walking down FXBG’s row of antique shops. 

Now what I think they could do more of (but they don’t have too. You are beautiful the way you are Hugh Mercer Museum!) is talk about gender. Discussing medicine lends itself to larger discussions of sex and gender, our innards -their similarities and difference, who and how they can be soothed, abused, ticked and sucked. Hugh Mercer was doctor with remedies for many things, as the museum professes, but who delivered babies? If they wanted to get more in depth about the medical practices of the day they could talk about Mercer’s female counterparts, midwives and the like.

This museum offers guests two things they love-- interaction and gore without causing undue disgust. How do they make a vivid description of a tooth extraction or a amputation appear normal and informative without sounding like a medical textbook? There must be something in the herbs.

Check it out :http://preservationvirginia.org/visit/historic-properties/hugh-mercer-apothecary-shop

Nat'l Museum of the American Indian (D.C)

I am back in Virginia for the summer, exploring the state, its history and the state’s history with history—and working with the NPS reanalyzing the 1930’s excavation which found George Washington’s birthplace home or "Building X." More on that to come. 

For my first blog of the summer I want to look at the Nat'l Museum of the American Indian

A couple of friends and I set out from Fredericksburg with the expressed purpose of eating at the museum then taking the train back to the station and driving the 45minutes back to Fredericksburg. We heard the food was worth it. The museum itself on the other hand, we were told was less than appealing –boring, confusing, poorly executed and oddly designed –needless to say we were exited to discover and develop our own options on the museum.

First, the food was great. I had a seared salmon –from the Northwest Coast Native American’s food counter. So good!  I wonder if the African American Museum or the Women’s History Museum’s are planning this sort of feast in their projected constructions. I hope so, and I am excited to see what each comes up with. Food history and culture are very popular, no doubt due in part to the popularity of Food Network and the Travel Channel. Taking advantage of the public’s desire to connect gastricly with the past and its peoples will bring in guests “Come for the food stay for the exhibits.” Having been told that museum left much to be desired we walked it mainly to digest, but we walked it, talked it, gathered arguments and formed opinions. What more can a museum ask for?(Fat Donations from venture capitalists?..yea probably, but we gave what we could )

  Salmon! (http://nmai.si.edu/visit/washington/mitsitam-cafe/)

Now on to the exhibits, “We are still here! And we are just like you”

That is the theme we gathered from the first exhibits we saw on the lower levels. Previous understanding of the current existence of Native Americans made most of these vignettes feel patronizing. Many of the tribes presented in the exhibit featured contemporary groceries attempting to highlight that Native Americans eat and use the same foods as the white population. 

This of course leads one of think about the implication and success of turn-of-twentieth century Native American assimilation projects. (What did you learn at Carlyle?) Which was unexpected.  Almost as unexpected as the wall that claimed that anyone could be Native American no matter blood quantum. I am under the understanding the federally recognized Native Americans still have to carry blood quantum cards on their person at all times. These cards are only issued after someone proves their distinction to the federal government. So, what I want to know is what argument is the wall making? Is it saying “We define who we are, not the government” or “We are all connected, we are not different?” Both would fit. But both are complicated when you considers the  implications of being a Native American in a time when they are encouraged by the Government to rediscover their roots for finical gain and a semblance of stability, after being told for generations to “shed the blanket” in favor of acceptance into the white world.

Their Mission Statement is 

"The National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) is committed to advancing knowledge and understanding of the Native cultures of the Western Hemisphere—past, present, and future—through partnership with Native people and others. The museum works to support the continuance of culture, traditional values, and transitions in contemporary Native life."http://nmai.si.edu/about/mission/

Native American culture (past, present, and future) has been deeply effected and altered by their relationship with the federal government.

 I understand that it is a federally funded museum, but not recognizing how the government has jerked the Native Americans around for generations makes the museum confusing. This makes me worrisome for the African American Museum and the Women’s History Museum. Honestly, the Native American Museum should expose more of their relationship with the government; the food is good enough that it gives the museum a license to say whatever they want. 

Here are some books I have in mind on this trip----

 K. Tsianinia Lomawaima.They Called It Prairie Light: The Story of Chilocco Indian School. (Lincoln: U of Nebraska Press, 1994)

Mark Edwin Miller.Forgotten Tribes: Unrecognized Indians and the Federal Acknowledgment Process (Lincoln:  U of Nebraska, 2006)

(It should be noted that I have not read these books since college and since I am away from home I can't refresh my memory on them, but there are two I remember reading. I welcome further recommendations for further reading)

Some Good Things

On the museum’s top floor they have two exhibit halls I loved. The first one explores how various tribes understand the universe. Very Cool! These exhibits are noted as being created by members of the tribes they display. Which has good and bad implications, but the exhibits looked good and succeeded at keeping our attention and dissemination information—success.

The other one was about the evolution of European and Native interactions. This exhibit was a work of art –there was undeniable flow and grace to it. It was well done. I was pleased. I was especially pleased by the video at the beginning, where a (rather stereotypical modern) Native American man spoke about the subjective nature of exhibits. He explains that only the stories told in exhibit are from one side and multi-sided and broadly experienced events. So many museums fail to recognize or simply ignore the fact that they too are making arguments.

I think the museum is good, but I also think it could do more go further making stronger statements and arguments.

Souvenirs

Souvenirs

I recently joined Twitter and have been following the Smithsonian’s various twitter accounts; they post fun facts, museum news, and parts of their object collection. One collection in particular engaged me- the historical souvenirs. Now they were not the type of historical souvenirs seen in museum stores or in Marling’s George Washington Slept Here, but taken souvenirs.[1] Pieces of landmarks and historical buildings, like a piece of the Bastille. My adviser just released a trade-press book on Ferry Farm,Where the Cherry Tree Grew,and he mentions visitors to the site taking parts of the tree believed for a time to be the tree young George Washington barked.[2]  I remembered going with my father to Frank Lloyd Wright buildings in Chicago and doing rubbings. And as a child my 4^th grade teacher brought the whole class little rocks back from Ireland.  This got me thinking about my own work and readings looking at what communities’ ownership of select parts of the past do, how they function for them.  Books like Rosezwieg and Thelen’s Presents of the Past and Glassbergs’ Sense of History and American Historical Pageantry- all which deal with American’s interaction and desire to connect themselves with history.[3] Taking souvenirs from sites is defiantly apart of this, and it challenges ,in a way, Steve Conn’s Do Museum’s Still Need Objects.[4] It challenges the idea that objects are no longer desired or needed, but it also speaks to the idea that individual people are imbued with a self-righteous understanding of themselves as collectors of their own museums- which certainly speaks to museum’s loss of prestige Conn explores in  Museums in American Intellectual Life.[5]

            Another thing it made me think of was Tim O’Brian’s The Things They Carried- the way he describes the things the soldiers carried with them, symbolically and physically, and the importance and weight that the object held personally for them.[6] Though I have not read this book in many years, I feel a like a second look would reveal some interesting thoughts or discussion points on object study and personal relationships with the past, personal and larger.

            Once while driving around my old home town with an old friend, I realized I had never touched the stop sign that I passed by each time I left my parent’s house, and walked past each day to and from high school. I was taken aback that I had never touched, this recognizable symbol, this place marker I had interacted with for years. After our little adventure I did go back and touch that sign-if you are interested it felt like a metal sign, not a big surprise. This very well could be a quirk of mine, but I like to think that there is something fundamentally important about touching, and in a related way owning (being able to touch at will) recognizable, or meaningful objects. Are we not tactile creatures? There is an important part of many (probably not all people) that needs to touch things, to examine them for authenticity. This leads me to think back to Jay Cook’s The Arts of Deception, which looks at the Barnum Museums in New York and American’s desire to examine and understand what was real and what was fake.[7] Taking pieces of objects from historical places proves its authenticity and provides evidence of the owner/finders relation to the site.

            Next thought, how does taking from a historical site or marker (grave stone ect.) effect or counter act the desire to keep things historically “accurate”? There is certainly a clear distinction between a selfish act and preservation for the greater good.  How closely related is the want to preserve things and the loud objection to taking? Did preservation get popular after people started making a fuss over taking souvenirs?

I don't really have a conclusion for this, as if I ever do, but I've got some thoughts swimming around.

Here is a photo the Smithsonian posted on Twitter- Its a bit of Plymouth Rock, a rather large bit.

---

[1]  Karal Ann Marling, George Washington Slept Here: Colonial Revivals and American Culture, 1876-1986 ( Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988)

[2] Phil Levy, Where the Cherry Tree Grew: The Story of Ferry Farm, George Washington’s Boyhood Home (New York: St. Martin’s Press,2013)

[3] Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen, The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). David Glassberg, American Historical Pageantry (London and Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1990),. David Glassberg, Sense of History: The Place of the Past in American Life , 2001

[4] Steve Conn, Do Museums Still Need Objects(University of Pennsylvania Press: Philadelphia, 2010)

[5] Steven Conn. Museums and American Intellectual Life, 1876-1926 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000)

[6] Tim O’Brian, The Things They Carried (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1990)

[7] Jay Cook, The Arts of Deception: Playing with Fraud in the Age of Barnum (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 2001)