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Kitty Calash

~ Confessions of a Known Bonnet-Wearer

Kitty Calash

Tag Archives: historic houses

Living Deliberately

08 Tuesday May 2018

Posted by kittycalash in Living History, personal, Philosophy, Reenacting

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

domestic life, historic houses, interpretation, living history, personal, philosophy

WCD: The Original

A friend of mine recently wrote about replicating the domestic life of the past (specifically the 18th century) and how much meaning that had for her.

Being so deeply embedded in the rhythms of life there, it became my home in a very real sense that has never left me.

I read that quickly, and what I read was that the place she had spent so much time was home to her because the place never left her– she carried its rhythms and seasons within her. Perhaps that isn’t quite what she meant, but that’s the risk of writing: the reader reads what they need to.

It made me think of home, and of living deliberately, and of a very bad year I had a long time ago, before I even imagined doing living history, when I thought I would spend my life making new things, like cities and buildings. (This makes me think of an album I listened to at the time, More Songs About Buildings and Food, which seemed all the more important because I’d gone to RISD, too.

Food, in a Building, in Rhode Island

The year I turned 25 was particularly bad not because a man broke my heart, though that didn’t help, and not because I had a miscarriage, though that was the catalyst that led to the man breaking my heart, but because the miscarriage shattered my sense of purpose and self. Somehow, everything that I had ever wanted to be — a sculptor, an architect, a writer– was gone, and I didn’t know what to do or how to be. (Read The Year of Magical Thinking if you want a well-written take on this kind of loss.) I didn’t know what to do next, but the man who eventually broke my heart gave me a book to help me figure it out: Chop Wood, Carry Water

Chopping wood.

Two years ago, I wrote a piece called Zen and the Art of Living History, in which I extolled the virtue of the everyday: Embrace the everyday, bring everyone back into history. Since then, I’ve thought more about how history and historic house museums can be a catalyst for change, how domestic sites can create “homes for history,” where we can have the difficult conversations that must be had to make the change I think we need as a nation, and as humans. These changes are happening, slowly, in museums and at historic sites, but even at the personal level, there’s meaning and change to be had through the business of “doing history.”

I suspect that among the reasons people really enjoy immersive, civilian (non-musket) events is because the work brings them into the rhythms of the natural world in a way that industrial life precludes or even prohibits. Consciously or not, interpreting the domestic life of the past forces us into mindfulness, into being as much as or more than doing. That’s the point of “chop wood, carry water:” to live deliberately. To cook without a clock, with only the color of the coals and the smell of the food to guide you; to notice the changing light because, as it fades, you must act to create light; to find the flaws and shifts in a floor as you scrub it, because there’s no machine between you, just your hands and a brush or a mop: all these tasks force you to be in the moment, noticing your environment, noticing yourself. You. A corporeal presence in a material world. How does that feel, moment to moment? Physically, emotionally: the challenge of living in the past is to live an unmediated life.

To go back to basics the way we do with civilian or domestic-site based living history brings us back to our base: we face our physical needs and the challenge of meeting them. We face emotional tests that help us imagine how people in the past endured– I often wonder how everyday people coped with “melancholia,” grief, and disappointment– and help us endure. It brings us home to ourselves, to our individual histories and our shared histories, and that’s what really matters. The connection to the everyday that we experience in a place in time puts us in a continuum with the people of the past, and gives us a place to be, a thing to do, a meaning. And that is what every one of us needs.

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Civil War and Uncivilized War

07 Tuesday Jun 2016

Posted by kittycalash in Events, History, Living History, Reenacting, Research

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

18th century, common people, first person interpretation, historic houses, interpretation, Monmouth NJ, New Jersey, Revolutionary War

The Hunting Party- New Jersey. oil on canvas ca 1750. MMA 1979.299

The Hunting Party- New Jersey. oil on canvas ca 1750. MMA 1979.299

Slightly turbulent and busy days chez Calash have resulted in a lack of postings, but work proceeds: Genesee and then New Jersey lie ahead, with some extra-interesting interpretation at Monmouth in late June. For a time, I despaired of figuring out what to do to occupy the time and interpret what was essentially a civil war in Monmouth County. The Craig House, while interesting, is no longer a working farm, so we couldn’t farm a not-farm. Then there’s the tedious issue of the not-home not-farming Craigs: on the day of the battle, John Craig is with the Continental Army and Ann Craig has taken off with wagons of chattel, two slaves, and her child. This began to seem a lot like interpreting the John Brown House without John Brown: they are more present by their absence.

Full Sail off Sandy Hook- Entrance to New York Harbor. watercolor and gouache by Pavel Petrovich Svinin, MMA 42.95.2

Full Sail off Sandy Hook- Entrance to New York Harbor. watercolor and gouache by Pavel Petrovich Svinin, MMA 42.95.2

What to do? Read more, of course, and talk and talk and talk with Drunk Tailor, who discovered the Association for Retaliation (yes, exactly what it sounds like: vigilanteism) and the Pine Robbers. Much satisfaction there, and finally I listened when he said, “Why can’t we all be refugees?”

Sometimes, you just have to give in to reality. The “London trade” flourished between New York and New Jersey, Sandy Hook providing ready access to the city and Staten Island, where so many Loyalists fled the radical Whigs of New Jersey. Male slaves ran away to join the British army, and the most fearsome and feared in New Jersey was Colonel Tye. The Retaliators promised “a man for a man” for every depredation Whigs suffered, while a similarly-chartered Loyalist association promised the same in return. Chaos reigned and people of all kinds fled the civil war and the uncivilized war. It promises to be an interesting weekend.

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Experiencing Eastfield Village

20 Sunday Sep 2015

Posted by kittycalash in 1830s, Events, Living History, Reenacting

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

10th Massachusetts, 1830s, authenticity, common people, domestic life, Eastfield Village, Federal style, historic houses, historic interiors, interpretation, women's history, women's work

The Young Mr on site.

The Young Mr on site.

Mr Hiwell, the Young Mr and I ventured out to Nassau, New York this weekend to be part of Founders Day Celebration at Eastfield Village. The gents were part of the 1833 militia muster, while I traveled out intending to interpret tailoring with Mr JS, and to provide meals for the militia.

It’s an interesting assemblage of buildings, and we were pretty curious about what the site and the experience would be like. While OSV and Genesee are also assembled villages, they’re museums, with different missions and guidelines; they’re also larger, with electricity and flush toilets for visitors and volunteers alike. That means they’re lovely, but not nearly as immersive as the pitch-dark privy experience.

The back of the Benjamin Culver house, or, our dining room for dinner.

The back of the Benjamin Culver house, or, our dining room for dinner.

Wear all the patterns possible, please.

Wear all the patterns possible, please.

There was a lot to consider at Eastfield, but I’m tired from driving back and will stick to the simple things for now.

I was incredibly fortunate to have a bed—indeed, the entire 1787 Benjamin Culver house—to myself for sleeping. Friday night, after changing into period clothes, we went up to the Yellow Tavern to eat our supper (pasties brought from home, with hard cider for Mr JS and myself). The candle lit taproom was cozy, and I understand from Mr JS that the sleeping quarters upstairs were even cozier.

We cooked our meals in the Yellow Tavern kitchen, and ate sometimes in the taproom, and sometimes standing in the kitchen, except for dinner, which was served picnic style on the grass behind the Culver House. (Saturday supper was provided by Eastfield Village and prepared by Neil DiMarino with able help; that deserves a post all its own.)

Cozy is as cozy does.

Cozy is as cozy does.

Much of time was spent on women’s work, interpreting daily tasks to a stream of visitors travelling through the house from front door to back, and sometimes upstream. The scullery—for want of a better word—had a soapstone sink which drained through the wall, which made dish washing pretty plush, and provided entertainment for all who cared to witness it. No chickens were present, but from washing dishes at Coggeshall Farm, chickens would have enjoyed the ground beneath that window drain.

The view from the scullery: not bad, really.

The view from the scullery: not bad, really.

There are always curious questions, from “Is this a house?” in a tone of wonderment, to “Where did you get the water?”

Gentle reader: these stumped me, briefly, until I was able to gather my wits enough to reply, “Yes, it’s a house, built in 1787,” and to assure the visitor that people had, in fact, managed to live in it. The water question was somewhat more perplexing.

I started with, “Well, I got this from the hose, but they would have had a well,” when the visitor stopped me. “No, I mean, how did you get it hot?”

The kettle had been over the fire in what would be the kitchen room where Mr JS and I were set up to sew, and the fire was still producing heat, albeit from coals. Then I realized she had not been among the clump of people watching me remove the kettle from the crane so that I could pour hot water into my basins. I pointed to the kettle, and said, “Over the fire.”

Fire hot.

Fire hot.

It’s hard: there’s so much we take from granted in our own daily 21st-century lives, let alone what we become accustomed to when we inhabit the past. Interpreting between the two worlds, things can be lost in translation.

I’m always curious about what I’ll learn when I travel to a different century, and I think what I learned, again, was that I find it hard to find a way to interpret women’s lives and work in the past that does not reinforce stereotypes of “life was hard” and “roles were constrained.” Enough! I tried explaining the greater freedom some women enjoyed in the early Federal era, in contrast to the pre-Revolution and post- Great Awakening eras, but that wasn’t entirely successful, and would you believe that story from a woman washing dishes?

What I may really have learned is that I’ve done enough time in the kitchen and the scullery; I’d rather be the tavern keeper than the cook or scullery maid. Women were in business, and while never on the scale of partnerships like Brown & Francis, women as merchants, tavern keepers, landlords, and, yes, tailoresses, are underrepresented. It’s easier to talk down the scale than it is to talk up the scale from the washbasin to the shop or tavern, so it’s time to leave the wash basins aside for a bit.

Done with dishes for now, thank you.

Done with dishes for now, thank you.

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The Museum of Crap

24 Monday Nov 2014

Posted by kittycalash in Collecting, Museums, personal, Research, Uncategorized

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

anarchist guide to historic house museums, antiques, collecting, exhibits, historic house museums, historic houses, interpretation, museum collections, Museums

After an intense three days spent thinking about museums, we went to the antique mall on Sunday. It did not disappoint, being stuffed with a variety of material goods.

image

We had not gone past the first round of booths when it occurred to me that what I was walking past a series of touchable period rooms or installations, a kind of non-judged science fair of historical displays, each one trying to convince me to literally buy its message.

This came home when I saw the booth on the left, arranged much the way a period room in a museum is arranged, with the desk suggesting that someone has just walked away from it.

I’d seen this at a house in Boston, and I’ve seen it at home: it’s not enough. At least at antique mall, you can touch everything. At the museum, unless that desk and room are jam-packed*, we are not going far enough.

image

In this vignette, you can step into a dinette and sit at the table. Feel the linens, touch the dishes (I’d avoid the glittery cupcakes, myself) and pretend you are home.

This kind of interactivity is reserved for children’s museums, with varying degrees of success, often oversimplified based on an assumption that children need streamlined displays to “get” the exhibit message. Sometimes I feel a similar lack of sophistication in the presentations at the Museum of Crap, a lack of deep consideration– it is, after all, just a booth at a mall.

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There are also the booths that really capture the deathly “Sunday dinner with the stiff relatives” feeling of some historic house museums and bad summer vacation memories, or perhaps for you it’s “tense Thanksgiving dinner with the in-laws,” or even “happy birthday tea with auntie,” and it’s a pleasant memory.

Antique malls clearly offer an array of display techniques, just as an major (large) museum with a variety of galleries.

Martha Stewart Living taught us about sorting things by color back in the 1990s, and it also taught us about the power of similarity: grouping like with like can create powerful visual displays and be quite attractive. Here’s the Gallery of Green. There was even an faux spongeware cat figurine, with a green sponge glaze. Details matter: difference stands out: that’s why the teddy bears pop in this booth.

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Perhaps you prefer the natural history museum, or a medical museum? There are doll morgues for you folks. This proved quite popular with women of a certain age, thankfully still a little older than I.

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There are displays for (almost) every taste. Couples go through these emporia, often at a similar pace (Mr S and I usually split up, and come together only occasionally to compare and share reactions) but not necessarily in unison.

 

Here’s an entire case that might come to life in an episode of Futurama, but it’s full of stuff for nostalgic guys: G.I. Joe in Crash Team suit, Planet of the Apes figures, Captain Kirk, and the Indian Scout Rifle and Bandolier. Cars, trucks, a flying circus: here’s a man’s past for him to admire without the responsibility of keeping it up. These are social experiences, where people wander through and talk about their objects, the things they owned, or coveted, the memories they have, the future they imagine.

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We’re consumers: our lives are all about stuff these days (having it, getting it, curating it, getting rid of it– even minimalists are about stuff) and whether you think that’s sad or not, it’s true. We express ourselves through things. Antique malls give us access to the things of the past in immediate, tangible ways. We can talk, remember, and play in these compendia in ways that we cannot in museums.

There are some unlikely display techniques. This is not an arrangement I would have come up with, but I enjoy it. It caught my attention. I can imagine that I know some folks who would have come up with this display, and had they done so in a museum under my purview, I would have undone it. Maybe that wouldn’t be right. It certainly stopped me and Mr S, and we both made certain the other saw it.

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The carriage, while heavy, had an amazingly smooth suspension system unlike any pram I’ve ever pushed at home or elsewhere. I couldn’t tell you what Mary and Jesus and a plush Persian cat were doing in a pram, but I do recognize the care with which they have been arranged, and the whiteness of the display, which speaks perhaps to the universal innocence of this trio. Someone chose this, deliberately. This isn’t art, or hipsterism, this is as genuine as the doo-wop songs on the 1950s radio station chosen by the antique mall.

It’s all so sincere: the nostalgia, the Everly Brothers crooning through the ceiling speakers in the converted mill, the soft, smoothing touches of consumers handling the goods. As sincere as we are in museums, we’re missing something by keeping all of our collections out of reach, and by cloistering all of our galleries in silence.

I’m a huge fan of silence, but what would happen if we did play music in galleries? Would removing the silence allow people to talk more, between their companions and even strangers? I get the marketing spin of doo-wop soundtrack, and I get how wrong it would sound in Nathan Hale’s homestead…but wouldn’t it be interesting to try it now and then? Exile on Main Street resounding in the halls of the period mansion is how the staff sometimes experience it, and we love the places where we work. Why not show the public how we see the houses sometimes, instead of insisting on a false, and silent, objectivity?

*Exceptions made for displays of minimalist architects’s homes, with documentation. What would Corbu’s house musuem look like?

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Preservation or Petrification?

22 Saturday Nov 2014

Posted by kittycalash in History, Living History, Museums, Philosophy

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

anarchist guide to historic house museums, historic house museums, Historic House Trust of New York, historic houses, historic interiors, interpretation, living history, museum practice, Museums

For almost ten years, I’ve been working on the re-interpretation and re-presentation of the HHM that is part of my employer’s stable of properties. We’ve had mixed results: guides who refuse to look me in the face, guides who quit because a piano got moved, guides who hissed “hedonism!” at the site of a lounging mannequin, and guides who were made incredibly sad by the representation of a sick (dying) child.

James, recovering from a party the night before

James, recovering from a party the night before, angered some guides (2007)

Me, I consider all those things successes.
The people who had to deal directly with that fall out, maybe not so much.

Change is hard and scary, and every one has a different tolerance for risk. As you have probably guessed, mine’s fairly high. I blog, I go out into the world in some pretty funny clothes, and inhabit characters I am not. I expect to fail regularly: it’s a reliable way of learning.

Change is hard to maintain, it’s hard to continually evolve and push an interpretation forward. It takes time, focus, and money; it takes cross-disciplinary collaboration and communication between curators, educators, and docents or guides.

Taking risks in spaces full of very expensive furniture is particularly daunting, but especially rewarding when you see how a house looks, inhabited and, to a degree, used.

Alice receives the mantua maker's letter

They’re sitting in real, accessioned chairs. (2014)

The job of museums is to preserve, but we sometimes seem determined to petrify, to freeze a perfect moment in amber, to freeze our visitors with fear of touching, photographing, asking, and to freeze and understanding, all in a fluid world.

If we reject the beautiful and untouchable past to embrace the messy human past, we can juxtapose the fine mahogany-furnished rooms of the merchant elite with the work to create those rooms and make the picture more whole by including slaves, servants, workmen and tradesmen.

More of us would have been working than lounging

More of us would have been working than lounging (2006)

Most of us would not have lived the way the merchants did: to a degree, our historic house visits are backwardly aspirational, as we wish for nostalgia that is more false than most nostalgia.

I am not advocating favoring the smelly past, or descriptions of unpleasantness, over exultations about carvings and upholstery—except that I am—because I see these pendulum swings as a part of the process of creating more complete and honest representations and recreations of the past, in museums, at historic sites, and in living history presentations.

It’s past time for me to work again on re-imagining the house under my care: I acknowledge that. Synthesizing what I learn in living history with the work I do in museums, and vice-versa, will improve and enhance the public experience of history inside and out.

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