Category Archives: Historic preservation

What Six Historic House Museums Taught Me About Place

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Whenever I travel, I try to visit historic sites that interpret women’s history. This summer, while traveling through New England, I had the opportunity to visit six historic house museums associated with remarkable women: the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, the Emily Dickinson Museum, Louisa May Alcott’s Orchard House, the House of the Seven Gables, Historic Deerfield’s Frary House, and the Florence Griswold Museum.

Years of visiting historic sites have led me to pay as much attention to how museums interpret history as to the history itself. I rarely experience these tours simply as a visitor. I find myself paying attention to the choices guides make, the stories they emphasize, the evidence they use, and the ways they connect people to place. Each museum approached interpretation differently, reflecting its own mission, history, and collections.

The Dickinson Homestead in Amherst, Massachusetts.

The Emily Dickinson Homestead was one of the strongest examples. Rather than treating the house as the place where Dickinson happened to live, the guide used each room to explore her intellectual life. Her poetry, education, family relationships, and creative choices were woven together through the spaces of the house. By the end of the tour, I wanted to read more Emily Dickinson—not because I felt I should, but because the interpretation had made me curious about the remarkable mind behind the poems.

Louisa May Alcott’s Orchard House took a similarly thoughtful approach while reaching a different conclusion. Instead of focusing exclusively on Louisa, the tour revealed an entire household alive with writing, theater, art, education, reform, and conversation. The house demonstrated that Little Women did not emerge from the imagination of an isolated writer but from the creative life of an extraordinary family. The rooms themselves became evidence of that larger story.

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The Florence Griswold Museum: When a Boarding House Changed American Art

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The Florence Griswold House in Old Lyme, Connecticut, home of the Lyme Art Colony.

The Florence Griswold Museum in Old Lyme, Connecticut, begins with a story that was common in its time but it leads somewhere entirely unexpected. By the late nineteenth century, Florence Griswold found herself in circumstances shared by many unmarried women of her generation. Her family’s wealth had disappeared, her parents and siblings were gone, and she inherited a large house that had once reflected her family’s prosperity but had become an expensive burden. Like many unmarried women of the middle and upper classes with limited economic opportunities, she turned to one of the few socially acceptable occupations available: taking in boarders. 

Today, the boarding-house period is often a forgotten chapter in the history of historic houses. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, boarding houses were an important part of many women’s economic lives. Taking in boarders was considered an extension of managing a household, making it one of the few socially acceptable ways women could generate income while remaining within the domestic sphere.

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The Frary House at Historic Deerfield: The Women Who Preserved the Places We Visit

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The Frary House (left), part of the building that also includes the Bernard Tavern, Historic Deerfield, Massachusetts.

When we visit a historic house museum, we usually come to learn about the people who once lived there. But how often do we learn about the people who saved the house? The Frary House in Historic Deerfield, Massachusetts, tells the overlooked story of the women who preserved the places we visit.

Built about 1750, the Frary House could easily have been interpreted as another colonial home. Instead, Historic Deerfield tells a different story. The house is furnished as the Colonial Revival home of C. Alice Baker after she restored it in the 1890s, shifting visitors’ attention to a later chapter in the building’s history. That interpretive choice immediately caught my attention because it suggests that a historic house’s most significant story is not always its earliest one.

Baker purchased the Frary House in 1890 after learning that it was in danger of collapse. She later explained that she bought it “to rescue the home and to make a home for her mother.” At a time when Old Deerfield was struggling economically, her decision preserved more than a single building. It became part of a much larger effort that would help shape the future of the village.

The guide described Baker as one of America’s earliest female preservationists—a woman who owned property independently, invested in railroads, taught school, researched local history, collected antiques, and published books at a time when women are seldom remembered for participating so fully in public and economic life. Whether every claim of being “the first” can withstand historical scrutiny almost becomes beside the point. What matters is that Baker represents a much larger story that historic sites rarely tell.

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The House of the Seven Gables: More Than a Historic House Museum

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The House of the Seven Gables, Salem, Massachusetts.

What is a historic house museum supposed to do? Preserve an important building? Tell the story of the people who once lived there? Re-create a particular moment in history? Most historic house museums are organized around one primary purpose with the house serving as the central artifact through which that story is told.

The House of the Seven Gables in Salem, Massachusetts challenges that assumption. By the time I finished my visit, I realized that the woman who transformed the house into a museum had imagined something much larger. Caroline Emmerton, a Progressive Era reformer and preservationist, transformed a celebrated historic house into an institution that combined preservation, literary tourism, education, and social reform. More than a century later, that integrated vision still defines the site.

In 1668, Salem sea captain and merchant John Turner and his wife, Elizabeth, built the house that would become known as the House of the Seven Gables. Three generations of the Turner family lived there before the property passed to the Ingersoll family in 1782. One of its later residents, Susanna Ingersoll, welcomed frequent visits from her cousin, Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose experiences at the house inspired the setting and title of his 1851 novel The House of the Seven Gables. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the Turner-Ingersoll Mansion was already famous as both a remarkable survivor of colonial Salem and the home most closely associated with Hawthorne’s classic novel.

By the early twentieth century, however, the property’s future was uncertain. When the Turner-Ingersoll Mansion came up for sale, Emmerton purchased it in 1908. She was already deeply involved in the Progressive Era settlement house movement and saw an opportunity to accomplish far more than preserving a historic building. Working with architect Joseph Everett Chandler, she restored the house to what they believed reflected its seventeenth-century appearance while simultaneously establishing the House of the Seven Gables Settlement Association. Rather than operating the house simply as a museum, she used its popularity to support a settlement house which offered educational and social programs for Salem’s immigrant community.

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Clearer Rules, Better Results: An Updated Photography Policy at Bayou Bend

When I examined museum photography policies in my recent post, “Can I Take a Picture?,” I included a sign I photographed at Bayou Bend Collection and Gardens during a November 2024 visit. Jennifer Hammond, Bayou Bend’s Head of Learning and Interpretation, subsequently contacted me to explain that the museum had replaced much of that signage since my visit and that its photography policy has continued to evolve.

The new signs do not appear to have been prompted by my post. Instead, they offer a useful follow-up: museum policies and visitor communications should not be static and permanent.

Bayou Bend’s revised entrance signs are clearer and more welcoming. “Personal photographs are encouraged,” the photography sign begins, before outlining restrictions on commercial shoots, equipment, drones, climbing, and other potentially disruptive activities (I ‘m sure there’s a story behind the policy that visitors must keep their clothes on!). A separate sign prepares visitors for the historic house, explaining limits on group size, bag storage, barriers, fragile objects, and food and drink.

The revised approach has also produced an unexpected benefit. Hammond noted that quinceañera groups have become staff favorites and that the photographs they share have generated more effective publicity for Bayou Bend than some of its paid advertising. The experience suggests that a carefully managed photography policy can support visitation and visibility without turning the museum into an uncontrolled photo venue.

Bayou Bend’s experience suggests that museums should review whether their photography rules address demonstrable risks or simply preserve inherited restrictions. Clear conditions can protect collections, landscapes, and visitors while allowing uses that may also increase the institution’s public visibility.

Models, Mementos, and Maddening Stairs: Final Notes from Swiss Museums

Model of a Bronze Age village at the Bern History Museum.

After writing about art museums and history museums in Switzerland, I still had a set of smaller observations that did not quite fit into either post. They are not really small, however. They shaped the visitor experience again and again.

After visiting more than fifty museums and historic sites across Switzerland, I found that some of the most revealing differences appeared not in the major exhibitions, but in the supporting details: models and miniatures, museum stores, souvenirs, and stairs.

These features affect how visitors understand buildings, remember their visits, and physically move through museum spaces. They also reveal how museums think about access, retail, interpretation, and audience needs.

An exhibition at Chillon Castle shows how the unrestored murals would appear in the medieval period.

Models and Miniatures

Swiss museums and historic sites make frequent and effective use of models and miniatures. At their best, these are not decorative add-ons or simplified versions for children. They are interpretive tools that help visitors understand things that are otherwise difficult to see.

At Chillon Castle, a miniature showed how a room would have looked in the medieval period because the murals have faded over time. That is exactly the kind of interpretive problem a model can solve. The historic fabric is still present, but time has made it difficult to perceive. A miniature allows visitors to imagine the original visual effect without repainting, over-restoring, or asking visitors to make sense of nearly invisible evidence on their own.

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Walking Through Two Eras at the Harriet Beecher Stowe House

The Harriet Beecher Stowe House in Cincinnati, Ohio, following completion of its 2 Era Restoration. The project interprets both the Beecher family residence and the later Edgemont Inn period, revealing the building’s evolving role in the community across generations.

When I visited the Harriet Beecher Stowe House in Cincinnati, Ohio this February, I expected to learn more about Harriet Beecher Stowe’s years in the city and how her experiences there influenced the writing of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. What I did not expect was to come away thinking as much about the building itself as the woman who once lived there.

The Harriet Beecher Stowe House recently completed what it calls a two-era restoration, interpreting both the Beecher family period (1840) and the later Edgemont Inn period (1940). At first, I wondered whether trying to tell two stories in one house might feel confusing. Instead, I found it to be one of the project’s greatest strengths.

The tour begins with Harriet Beecher Stowe, her family, and the Cincinnati she encountered in the 1830s and 1840s. Visitors learn about Lane Seminary, debates over slavery, the city’s free Black community, and the experiences that shaped Stowe’s understanding of freedom and injustice. These stories unfold in rooms restored to the Beecher era, allowing visitors to imagine the world she experienced as a young wife, mother, and writer living in Cincinnati.

What impressed me most, however, was how the restoration itself became part of the interpretation.

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Bold Ideas, Thin Evidence: Reading the Jenrette Report with Caution and Curiosity

The Jenrette Foundation’s State of American Historic Preservation Education (September 2025) lands like a wake-up call for our field. At more than 25 pages, it’s not just a summary of trends in preservation education—it’s a challenge to rethink what we mean by “historic preservation” altogether. Although the report focuses on universities and training programs, its insights are strikingly relevant for leaders at historic sites and house museums.

At its core, the report argues that historic preservation is due for a rebranding—not a new slogan, but a new mindset. “Preservation isn’t about old buildings,” the authors write, “it’s about shared futures.” That’s a phrase that will resonate with anyone who’s struggled to convince visitors, funders, or policymakers that historic sites matter. For years, preservationists have known that saving a place is just the start; what matters is how that place connects to people, stories, and community life. The Jenrette report gives that idea institutional weight, calling for preservation to be seen as a civic, cultural, and economic force—an engine for workforce development, sustainability, and belonging.

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Warning: Objects in Museums May Be More Complicated Than They Appear

Today, the White House issued an executive order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History”, which aims to reshape the presentation of history within federal institutions—particularly the Smithsonian. The directive calls for the removal of “divisive or anti-American ideology,” restoration of monuments that have been “improperly removed,” and new restrictions on federally funded exhibits that “degrade shared American values.” While some may see this as a return to patriotic education, as a historian and museum professional, I see troubling implications for our field.

The Illusion of a Single Truth

At the heart of the order is the assertion that a “true” version of American history must be restored. But history is not a static set of facts—it is a discipline grounded in evidence, interpretation, and debate. Historical understanding evolves as new sources emerge, as questions shift, and as voices long excluded are brought into the conversation. There is no single, timeless narrative to return to—only a continuing effort to make sense of the past as honestly and inclusively as possible.

Independence Under Threat

The Smithsonian Institution, like many of our most trusted public history institutions, relies on scholarly rigor and curatorial independence. By assigning Vice President JD Vance a role in overseeing content and linking congressional appropriations to ideological compliance, this executive order politicizes museum interpretation and undercuts professional standards. When history is shaped by political power instead of evidence, public trust erodes.

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Preserving History or Playing Politics? Marco Rubio Takes Over National Archives

In a significant reshuffling of federal leadership, President Donald Trump has appointed Secretary of State Marco Rubio as the acting Archivist of the United States. This move follows the abrupt dismissal of Colleen Shogan, the former head of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), earlier this month. The decision has raised concerns about the potential politicization of an agency traditionally known for its nonpartisan role in preserving the nation’s historical records.

The National Archives has recently been at the center of political tensions, particularly concerning its involvement in the Justice Department’s investigation into President Trump’s handling of classified documents post-presidency. The agency’s referral led to an FBI search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, culminating in a federal indictment that was later dismissed. In the wake of these events, several senior staff members at NARA have resigned or been terminated, further intensifying debates about the agency’s future direction and independence.

To delve deeper into these developments, the podcast 1A hosted a discussion today titled “The National Archives and the Trump Administration.” The episode explores the implications of Secretary Rubio’s appointment, the recent upheavals within NARA, and what these changes mean for the preservation of America’s historical records. Listeners can access the episode on WAMU’s website.

As the situation continues to evolve, stakeholders and observers alike are closely monitoring how these leadership changes will impact the National Archives’ mission to safeguard the nation’s documentary heritage.

Sources

Gerstein, Josh and Kyle Cheney, “Trump Fires National Archives Chief,” Politico,(February 7, 2025).

 Swenson, Ali and Gary Fields, “The National Archives Is Nonpartisan but Has Found Itself Targeted by Trump,” Associated Press (February 26, 2025).