Florence Griswold Museum | Engaging Places

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 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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