Woodlawn | Engaging Places

*This small selection of historic sites operated by The National Society of The Colonial Dames reveals the enormous diversity of house museums and historic sites in the United States.*

In 2007, I helped organize the Forum on Historic Site Stewardship in the 21st Century, which resulted in an influential issue of Forum Journal that laid out the major challenges and opportunities, including the need for financial sustainability, a willingness to change in response to the needs of the community, and a balance between the needs of buildings, landscapes, collections, and the visiting public. It also recognized that museum standards may not be the best practices for historic sites and that the profession “must develop new measures, beyond attendance, that document the quality of visitor engagement at sites and the extent of community outreach beyond the bounds of historic sites.”

So what has happened in the 16 years that followed? We’ll find out this week as the American Association for State and Local History hosts a virtual summit on the Sustainability, Relevance, and the Future of Historic House Museums on July 11-12. Sessions will address measuring the impact of house museums, broadening interpretation, care of buildings and landscapes, and the evolution of mission statements.

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Laurie Ossman and Max van Balgooy meeting serendipitously in San Francisco in 2011.

Laurie Ossman has recently departed as director of Woodlawn and Pope-Leighey House, a National Trust Historic Site in Virginia, to advance her interest in re-imagining historic sites for today’s audiences through project-based endeavors and writing. Her innovative work to reinterpret and reprogram the site has been featured by the American Association of Museums and the Washington Post, including the path-breaking Arcadia partnership with the Neighborhood Restaurant Group. During her tenure, she also completed two major books with Rizzoli–a survey of Great Houses of the South and a study of the architectural firm of Carrere and Hastings (selected as the Washington Post‘s photo book of 2011)–which will be focus of several lectures in the coming month at Vizcaya, The Flagler, and the Sulgrave Club. Laurie received her PhD. in architectural history from the University of Virginia and was previously responsible for the collections and scholarship at such nationally renowned historic sites as Vizcaya Museum and Gardens and Ca’ d’Zan at the Ringling Museum of Art. She can now be reached at LaurieOssman@Comcast.net.

Susan Hellman has been promoted to Acting Director of Woodlawn and Pope-Leighey House and can be reached at Susan_Hellman@nthp.org. Woodlawn and Pope-Leighey House are owned and operated by the National Trust for Historic Preservation and is one of 23 National Trust Historic Sites.