Brian Whetstone Bio
Executive Summary
In recent years, public historians, historic preservationists, and the staff of heritage organizations such as historical societies, house museums, and national parks have prioritized telling more diverse stories to the visiting public. Following the rise of Black Lives Matter, many heritage organizations have embraced telling such stories in an effort to diversify their audiences and address their site’s role in historical systems of slavery and exploitation. The growth of specialty tours about the historical experiences of enslaved Black people in the United Statesmarks one such interpretive output encountered by visitors to American museums.[1] These efforts are commendable, but many public history and preservation organizations overlook the diverse stories associated with their own institutional histories–that is, they fail to incorporate their own history as an institution into the narratives visitors encounter. The historical labor of tenants at many public history sites constitutes one area in which institutions can excavate the role of Black and working-class women in the work of historic preservation. But for many sites, these stories have been erased by earlier administrators. Already, museums and heritage organizations shy away from interpreting their own administrative or institutional past to the average visitor.[2] A dearth of resources to manage, care for, and make available for research the institutional archives of small and mid-size public history organizations hampers efforts to integrate this interpretation into the visitor experience. Without adequate institutional resources, public historians lose valuable opportunities to connect the preservation work of Black Americans to the broader public history workplace.[3]
Slavery, Servitude, and Public History
The intersections between Black freedom, domestic service, and the current landscape of public history, preservation, and heritage organizations come into clear focus at house museums. Researchers in the 1990s estimated there were upwards of 15,000 house museums in the United States, making these institutions some of the most ubiquitous heritage sites in the nation. So too do house museums constitute the earliest historic preservation projects undertaken by private organizations like the Mount Vernon Ladies Association (MVLA) or the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation who oversaw the restoration of Mount Vernon and Monticello, respectively.[4] At these and other house museums, enslaved and free Black domestic workers constituted a core group of laborers and tenants who aided in these sites’ transition from private homes to public historic sites. As the first generation of “frontline” interpreters, these individuals played instrumental roles in the early historic preservation movement while at the same time securing greater autonomy, dignity, and curatorial authority over their labor and bodies. House museums thus hold untapped value for interpreting the intersections between Black heritage and historic preservation.
In the wake of emancipation, many formerly enslaved Black men and women chose to leave plantations and the sites of their enslavement. But a significant number chose to stay. As scholars like John Michael Vlach and Thavolia Glymph observe, Black men and women expressed an “intense connection to their former places of servitude.”[5]These men and women formed kinship networks and place attachments; expressed and enacted a sense of ownership over these spaces through their everyday labors; and understood most intimately the material care necessary to maintain the plantation household. Asserting this sense of ownership helped define the meaning of freedom for these men and women, especially as many assumed new roles as domestic servants and negotiated their labor with their former enslavers.[6] The rise of heritage tourism in the southern United States, fueled by Lost Cause mythology and Confederate nostalgia, meant that many Black women working as domestic servants obtained new roles as frontline interpreters as northern and southern tourists alike flocked to former plantations.[7]
Whether the Black people white tourists encountered at these sites had been enslaved or not, white visitors assumed they presented an authentic link to the antebellum past. At Middleton Place, one of many plantations-turned-tourist-sites on the Ashley River outside Charleston, visitors were “swept into the past” by Ansel Horbeck, the formerly enslaved “gatekeeper who has in like manner welcomed generations of guests that once came dashing in coach and four to visit the ‘great house.’”[8] Just up the river at Magnolia Gardens, the historic gardens and estate opened to tourists by the Drayton family in 1870, Black men and women provided a connection to the past to white tourists. Most of the Black men and women at Magnolia Gardens who acted as tour guides had “spent their lives on the plantation, as did their parents, grand-parents, and great-grand parents before them,” marveled one white visitor.[9] Certainly, white tourists framed these encounters through the racist and nostalgic lens of the “Old South” in which enslaved men and women lived in benevolent harmony with their enslavers. But Black people deftly understood these interactions as a performance and navigated whether to accept or refuse to play the part expected by visitors. For example, one Black woman white tourists encountered at Magnolia Gardens refused to offer her thoughts on emancipation until she received a nickel for her efforts and the group identified themselves as northerners or southerners.[10]
In staying on as frontline workers following the Civil War, formerly enslaved men and women underscored their intellectual and curatorial value to the heritage and tourist enterprise in the southern United States. Black guides at Magnolia Gardens “know every flowering nook and blossoming cranny” reflected one visitor in 1931, and without this material knowledge white visitors and administrators literally would have been lost.[11] When northern children’s book author Frances Duncan visited Magnolia Gardens in 1907, she found herself “under the wing” of one Black guide until she slipped away into a “darkly inviting alley.” Lost among the winding paths of azaleas and “draperies of moss,” Duncan was only able to rejoin the group after the Black guide returned Duncan to their “safe convoy.”[12] Other Black women, such as Alice Sims and Jane Johnson, directly contributed to the preservation of heritage sites. Sims and Johnson, enslaved by the Davis family at their large plantation house, Melrose, in Natchez, Mississippi, continued to live at Melrose and serve as caretakers following the Civil War. When George and Ethel Kelly purchased the property in 1900, Sims and Johnson helped guide the restoration of the house and grounds for its opening to the public during house tours conducted throughout Natchez. The tours, inaugurated by women in the Natchez Garden Club in 1932, sought to peddle a nostalgic image of the “Old South.” Sims and Johnson were integral to the preservation of these sites and their interpretation during tours: Sims and Johnson walked the grounds of Melrose with Ethel Kelly, recounting to her their memories of the home’s formal gardens from before the Civil War, which Kelly then used to restore the estate’s paths, roads, and gardens.[13]
Other formerly enslaved women at southern plantations played similar roles, including Sarah Johnson at Mount Vernon. Enslaved by descendants of George Washington, Johnson continued to labor at the site after its acquisition by the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association (MVLA) in 1853. When the MVLA’s officers struggled to determine the authenticity of their planned restoration for the house, they frequently turned to Johnson. In 1896, for example, MVLA superintendent Harrison Dodge enlisted Johnson to determine whether a supporting beam in Mount Vernon’s hallway was exposed or covered by a decorative arch. “Sarah says she remembers perfectly” that the support was a “straight oak timber,” Dodge reported, and her memories established the basis for the hallway’s restoration.[14] Sarah Johnson, Alice Sims, and Jane Johnson ultimately reveal how formerly enslaved people—and especially women—exercised their material knowledge of the plantation household acquired under slavery and domestic service in ways that facilitated the preservation and restoration of these sites into the twentieth century.
In the north, white domestic servants were similarly integral to the preservation and interpretation of historic sites. Sites administered by the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities (SPNEA)—an early preservation organization founded by wealthy Bostonian William Sumner Appleton, Jr. in 1910—benefitted from the labor of domestic servants. To finance the acquisition and subsequent preservation of historic homes, Appleton recruited white women as SPNEA’s tenants who in turn operated colonial revival-style tea rooms out of the historic houses while showing them to the public as historic house museums. The operation of tea rooms and the public display of these homes was only possible with the assistance of domestic servants. Maids and housekeepers tended to the housekeeping needs of these tenants while simultaneously cooking meals, waiting tables, and attending to visitors of the tea rooms. At a moment when domestic servants in the northeast pressed to reduce workloads and move away from live-in status, operating tea rooms required many domestic servants to continue living under the roofs of their employers.[15] Tenants in the Cooper-Austin house in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as well as tenants in the Abraham Browne house in Watertown, Massachusetts, set aside space in attic and garret spaces for live-in domestic servants.[16]
These domestic servants not only provided valuable labor in the operation of tea rooms but undertook additional interpretive labor as frontline staff. Visitors to many of SPNEA’s properties encountered maids or housekeepers who they expected to act as frontline interpreters in the absence of SPNEA’s tenants. Visitors to the Cooper-Austin house relayed to Appleton in 1915 that a “maid appeared and let us in” to show them the house, rather than the home’s tenant.[17] Another visitor to the Abraham Browne house in 1925 reported of a similar tour through the seventeenth-century dwelling led by a maid while the tenant was indisposed.[18] Later visitors to the Browne also encountered housekeeper Susie Burnham who showed the house while working for Edwin Hipkiss, a curator at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston who regularly left the interpretation and the administration of the house to Burnham between 1926 and 1934.[19] Maids and visitors often clashed, however, when the work of interpretation interfered with the expectations of employers. At the Browne house, one group of visitors arrived before visiting hours and relayed that the maid they encountered was “surly and seemed greatly put out that we had called.” Indeed, the visitors had interrupted the maid’s morning routine and delayed necessary housework. “We need our mornings for housework and preparations for the tea room,” explained tenant Celestia Lapham to Appleton in 1925, “and it is a bit upsetting to have the machinery brought to a standstill.”[20] From the perspective of maids, the work of public interpretation often added to the labors of housework.
Southern and northern historic sites alike share stories of women like Alice Sims, Jane Johnson, Sarah Johnson, and Susie Burnham, but later administrators have largely erased or elided the significance of their labors to the early historic preservation movement. By the 1930s, many historic site administrators sought tenants and frontline staff that could communicate respectability, rather than authenticity. The divergent experiences of Isabelle Tilley and Mary Wonson reveal the undercurrents that gradually displaced Black and working-class women from the work of historic preservation. Enslaved in Virginia as a child, Tilley traveled via packet ship to Portsmouth, New Hampshire in the 1850s after she was emancipated. Promised “that she would be sent to school to learn how to read and write,” Tilley’s traveling companion and guide instead sent her “up the hill” to do laundry for white families. Only 12 years old, Tilley was later hired as a live-in domestic servant for the Jackson family who still lived in their ancestral family home first built in 1664.[21] When SPNEA acquired the Jackson house from Nathaniel Jackson in 1924, Tilley was still living on the property in a rundown cottage and doing laundry for the Jackson family and their neighbors. Nathaniel Jackson warned Appleton that Tilley was “about as shiftless as the usual run of Negroes” and Appleton subsequently treated Tilley as little more than a source of income to sustain the Jackson house’s ongoing preservation.[22] By the 1930s, Tilley was paying eight dollars a month in rent while Appleton actively sought a more respectable “white and American” custodian for the Jackson house.[23] Even as Tilley’s monthly rent and domestic labor continued to sustain the daily administration of the Jackson house, Tilley’s labor was largely disaggregated from the public-facing interpretation visitors encountered.
In contrast, Mary Wonson’s experience as the first tour guide and “custodian” at Beauport revealed the increasing emphasis administrators placed on respectability and whiteness in their frontline staff. Wonson had worked as a domestic servant and housekeeper at Beauport—the lavish seaside home of interior decorator Henry Sleeper in Gloucester, Massachusetts—since 1919. Wonson had stayed on as head housekeeper when the McCann family purchased Beauport in 1934 and continued on as the first guide and custodian when SPNEA acquired the house in 1942. To Appleton, Wonson “seemed to me to be the kind of treasure that servants used to be in the old days but are far from being always nowadays.”[24] By the early 1940s Wonson was something of an anachronism when most domestic laborers were not white and rarely continued to live in the same homes as their employers. Like formerly enslaved women such as Sarah Johnson, Wonson had an intimate material knowledge of the care required to maintain and interpret Beauport’s vast collection of early Americana and architectural salvage first assembled by Sleeper in the early twentieth century. But Wonson’s race enabled her to continue as an interpretive guide until her death in 1955. Wonson was replaced by Elizabeth and William Blanford, a white couple from Kentucky; Elizabeth assumed the more respectable role of “hostess,” rather than “custodian” at that time.[25]
The transition to the more respectable role of “hostess” at Beauport was underway at many historic sites even in Wonson’s lifetime. Beginning in the 1930s, but accelerating after World War II, many site administrators worked to displace domestic servants entirely from the public interpretation of historic sites and instead prioritized hiring white, respectable couples. In the words of Louise DuPont Crowinshield, a fellow antiquarian and contemporary of Appleton, the ideal hostess was someone of “gentle birth and reduced circumstances” while her husband provided for their family.[26] Renting to couples maximized the labor available to employers while enacting a respectable, gendered division of labor at historic sites. The Philadelphia Society for the Preservation of Landmarks (PSPL), for example, structured this arrangement into the leases they negotiated with their new tenants. A typical lease required that the “wife Lessee agrees to act as hostess to visitors to the house between ten A.M. and five P.M. on weekdays” while the husband would take care of the furnace, put out the trash, and clean the garden.[27] Museum administrators expected husbands to continue working while wives “would be the one in charge.”[28] At Beauport, SPNEA president Bertram K. Little told prospective tenants that “we would expect” a husband to “continue his independent job but would want you to live as a family” while working as a hostess.[29] These priorities in renting and staffing historic sites with white couples meant that many Black and working-class women found themselves displaced from the work of public history and historic preservation by the postwar era.
Even as domestic servants faded from public view, housekeeping and cleaning remained an important material consideration in a site’s administration. As William and Elizabeth Blanford discovered upon becoming the new tenants at Beauport, Mary Wonson’s death did not erase the need for someone to continue to do “heavy cleaning” in service of keeping the house presentable to visitors.[30] Keeping Beauport clean “has always been a problem,” reflected SPNEA president Bertram K. Little in 1957, “but of course more especially since Mrs. Wonson’s death.”[31] Mary’s labor was not only necessary but remained highly specialized and skilled. As Tom Wonson, Mary’s son, relayed to SPNEA administrators after her death, “There is so much to do in opening up an estate like” Beauport.[32] Tom “figured the job was a little too much. There is so much to be done,” and he did not even know “where to start first.”[33] Ultimately, the job of “heavy cleaning” fell to the Blanfords, who Little paid an additional 200 dollars annually for this work.
Domestic service and the “problem” of keeping historic sites clean defined a significant portion of what it meant to do public history over the twentieth century. The New Jersey Division of Historic Sites’ midcentury expectations for tenants at historic buildings scattered across the Garden State is instructive. State administrators required female tenants to undertake the “housekeeping of the property,” perform “assigned clerical work,” and act as curator in the “handling of the museum collection in the building.”[34] “Housekeeping” at these sites entailed more than light cleaning. Women living at New Jersey Division of Historic Sites properties were regularly expected to “perform housekeeping chores necessary to maintain the house” including “dusting, mopping, and heavy cleaning such as scrubbing and washing windows as well as some work on the grounds,” in addition to arranging “exhibit items for display and see[ing] to their preservation and protection.”[35] This blurring of lines between domestic and curatorial work revealed how the strictures of domestic service were interwoven with the development of curatorial and interpretive practices at historic sites.
Beginning in the 1970s, many historic sites restructured their relationship to renting and tenant labor. At this time, tensions between tenants working as frontline staff and site administrators over curatorial and interpretive authority encouraged many administrators to erect more concrete boundaries between tenants and the work of public history and historic preservation. By living and working beneath one roof, many tenants felt a sense of ownership and authority over museum spaces and collections. At many museums, these feelings enabled tenants to use or interpret objects as they would their own belongings. For example, Richard and Ruth Hatch, tenants of the Heritage Foundation in Deerfield, Massachusetts, interchanged museum collections with their own ancestral family objects regularly. At the Heritage Foundation—the outgrowth of Henry Flynt’s efforts to purchase and interpret eighteenth-century houses in Deerfield—the use of collections by museum tenants was common. To decorate their apartment, Ruth removed several pieces of early-nineteenth century English pearlware, including a teacup, saucer, sugar bowl, and creamer, from museum display cases and arranged them on “an attractive shelf” in her living room.[36] Richard and Ruth in turn placed “certain objects including my old family cradle, set of three-legged fireplace skillets and pots, and some dated handmade linen covering a part of the 18th century” on public display.[37]
Changing professional standards of care in the 1970s increasingly disaggregated tenants from exercising this kind of authority over museum collections. The professionalization of public history emphasized the hiring of staff with professional degrees in material culture, museum studies, and historic preservation—professional backgrounds that many tenants did not share. The academic training and backgrounds of this new cohort of history workers eschewed the informal preservation and maintenance practices of their predecessors in favor of professional methods that prioritized authentic interpretative, display, and curatorial practices based upon sound historical evidence and research. Integrating this specialized knowledge into museum administration was only possible by hiring professionals like a “trained conservator” whose “special knowledge” of museum collections would “avoid senseless and irreversible damage.”[38]Ultimately, these changes meant that many tenants were irrevocably severed from frontline interpretive labor at many historic sites.[39]
These shifting priorities were reflected in new administrators who came to view the interpretive and curatorial labor of tenants as professional liabilities. In 1971, just one year after founder Henry Flynt’s death, Heritage Foundation trustees rebranded the foundation as Historic Deerfield, Inc. A new executive director, Donald Friary, took over the operations of the foundation in 1975. Friary oversaw Historic Deerfield’s transformation into a professional museum that erected concrete boundaries between tenants and the care and interpretation of museum collections. The work of tenants was gradually absorbed over the 1970s by a new training program for tour guides that hired outside the traditional pool of white couples; a new Architectural Conservator, William A. Flynt, who held an advanced degree in architectural history from the University of Vermont; and additional curatorial staff such as Philip Zea, a graduate of the Winterthur Program in Early American Culture. As a result of these changes, Historic Deerfield’s rental apartments operated solely as a source of income for the organization, a byproduct of this new generation of administrators’ efforts to structure “rental deals on a more businesslike basis” rather than the informal housing and labor practices that once predominated.[40] These changes ensured that the work of tenants retreated from public view at the frontlines to the back rooms of many public history organizations. In this way, many tenants shared the fate of formerly enslaved and domestic workers’ experiences before them.
Towards a Solution: Labor, Letting Go, and Transforming Institutional Values
To excavate the stories of Black women, domestic servants, and tenants in the creation and preservation of house museums, institutions do not need to reinvent the wheel. Frameworks for expanding research about under-appreciated early organizational efforts involving “outsider” preservationists already exist. Andrea Roberts’ Out(Sider) Preservation Initiative is on such example. Housed at University of Virginia, Out(Sider) Preservation Initiative builds upon Roberts’ work highlighting the Texas Freedom Colonies settled by Black people in the wake of emancipation and descendants’ efforts to preserve these spaces in the present day. This research effectively provides alternative origin stories for the historic preservation movement while situating the work of historic preservation in the broader Black freedom struggle.[41] Another initiative that may serve as a model includes the New York Preservation Archive Project (NYPAP). The NYPAP’s founders believed “insufficient effort was being devoted to saving preservation’s own history,” and created the non-profit NYPAP in 1998 to collect oral histories and the archives of smaller preservation organizations.[42]Beginning in 2022, Historic New England (the present-day iteration of SPNEA) inaugurated their “Recovering New England Voices” program to promote scholarship and interpretation of the organization’s own institutional history. Scholars have, to date, highlighted the role of enslaved labor, domestic servants, and LGBTQ history at Historic New England’s properties, including women such as Isabelle Tilley. These efforts reveal the ongoing work involved in shifting institutional values towards telling alternative origin stories of the preservation movement and development of public history practices in the United States.[43]
The archival resources to conduct these investigations exist, but significant obstacles prevent researchers, staff, or scholars from sufficient access. The work of cataloging and organizing institutional records often takes a backseat to more pressing institutional concerns at many museums and historic sites. Until the mid-twentieth century, cataloging, arranging, and organizing institutional archives and collections enjoyed wide respectability among a mostly white male workforce of archivists and administrators. Beginning in the 1960s, however, the museum field absorbed a growing workforce of professional women at the same time that emerging digital technologies in archives processing changed the nature of cataloging and collections work. Over the next few decades, new technologies to digitize museum databases and collections quickly outpaced the available staff and resources of many smaller public history organizations. Today, potential sources of funding rarely prioritize the work of cataloging and processing institutional archives and remain highly competitive among institutions of all sizes. As a result, the organization and preservation of institutional archives remain unpopular or unclear priorities in the eyes of funders and administrators.[44]
To increase access to institutional archives, many sites may need to let go of their collections altogether. Rather than let collections languish, institutions can structure new partnerships with local archives and libraries—such as the NYPAP, when available—that may have better capacity to store, organize, and make accessible institutional records. For example, the Porter-Phelps-Huntington Foundation (PPH) in Hadley, Massachusetts has facilitated a collaborative partnership between university archives to house papers associated with PPH. A small house museum with only one full-time staff member, PPH first approached Amherst College in the 1980s to house the growing collection of archival material that stretched from the eighteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, when the home transitioned into a public historic site. As the collection continued to grow, the papers were relocated from Amherst College to the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2021. By letting go, PPH has been able to make their institutional archives accessible to a wider number of researchers who have generated new information about the museum’s institutional history.[45]
Still, letting go will not be easy for every institution. The collecting policies of larger university archives and special collections do not always align with public history institutions looking to offload their collections. Small institutions hoping to build a relationship with a larger archival institution may struggle to justify their collection’s relationship to the collecting policies of that institution. PPH could approach the University of Massachusetts Amherst because members of the Porter, Phelps, and Huntington families’ long tradition of social activism–a major collecting focus of the University of Massachusetts–was documented in the family’s papers. Archival holdings related to PPH’s institutional history as a museum were less directly connected to these collecting policies. Ultimately, house museums will need to develop creative ways to justify their institutional archives’ connections to the collecting priorities of better-resourced archives by connecting to the broader histories of non-profit organizations, public history, architectural history, and museum studies in the United States.
Larger archives are not immune to the staffing and funding challenges of smaller local history organizations. Staff at these institutions are likewise stretched thin. In recent years, public historians have shed light on the labor conditions of the public history workplace more broadly, namely the so-called “passion tax” whereby many museum workers accept lower pay in exchange for work they enjoy or an institution for whose mission they are passionate.[46]As a result, many museum workers and archivists are not only underpaid, but often overworked in workplaces where their passion for history is leveraged for unsustainable workloads. The resulting disorganization and understaffing of archives is not merely a question of disinterest on the part of administrators, but one tied to the labor conditions that structure the public history workplace. Ultimately, these conditions have combined in ways that make it increasingly difficult to interpret or research the Black heritage affiliated with public history and historic preservation sites in the United States.
Beyond letting go of institutional archives altogether, sites can continue to transform their institutional cultures around alternative uses for archival collections. The National Park Service (NPS) models this approach through the use and distribution of administrative histories. Since the 1950s, the NPS has prioritized the research and writing of administrative histories for parks, historic sites, and national monuments to inform management decisions in the longer context of their respective institutional histories. Drawing from park archives and related archival repositories, these administrative histories require the NPS to prioritize the organization, management, and accessibility of institutional archives to NPS and external researchers.[47] This approach can be replicated outside of the NPS, as the Historic Charleston Foundation (HCF) illustrated when historian Robert Weyeneth worked to research and publish the HCF’s administrative history in 2000.[48] More recently, Seth Bruggeman illustrated the appeal of administrative histories to academic and public historians with his 2022 study of Boston National Historical Park’s Freedom Trail.[49] While prioritizing the research and writing of administrative histories will not solve the resource scarcity facing smaller public history organizations, it can assist in opening up archives to researchers and scholars while supporting interpretive and management decisions at historic sites.
These kinds of changes will not happen overnight. Historic New England’s Recovering New England Voices program took years of dedicated hard work from internal institutional research staff applying pressure to trustees and administrators. Shifts in institutional values will take time, but sites can take steps in the short term to begin acknowledging the ways their labor practices were borne from the context of late-nineteenth-century domestic service. Ultimately, these efforts can open archival resources in ways that expand the capacity of institutions to interpret and share Black heritage with visitors and scholars.
Directions for Future Research
To continue developing solutions for smaller organizations to excavate the role of Black and working-class women in the history of historic preservation, future areas of exploration include:
- Deeper analysis of staffing and funding at archives and other research institutions. As state above, archive and research institutions of all sizes suffer from the problems of underfunding and limited resources to support staff. While some archives, such as the University of Massachusetts Amherst Special Collections, have the available resources to accept collections affiliated with a local history organization like PPH, many archives simply do not have the staff time and resources to solicit and accept new collections, much less process them and make them available to researchers in a timely manner.
- The push for diversity and representation of historically marginalized communities in museum narratives. While many institutions continue to push for greater diversity and inclusion in the narratives visitors encounter, it is unclear how or whether this trend will continue. Future research might explore ways that this trend could be sustained through political and funding climates hostile to diversity and inclusion.
- A “status report” for tenants today. To date, there has been no systematic survey undertaken to explore the scope and scale of renting and leasing at public history sites in the present day. While historical research has yielded this practice was commonplace, statistical information on renting and the provision of housing within the field of public history would yield additional information about the current rental landscape in the field. Along these lines, the gathering of this data should assess the race and power dynamics of early rental arrangements by gathering information on the race, income, and job duties of tenants, in addition to the monthly rent and financial contribution of renting to regular administration at these sites.
[1] On this phenomenon see Ana Lucia Araujo, Museums and Atlantic Slavery (New York, NY: Routledge, 2021); Amy E. Potter, Remembering Enslavement: Reassembling the Southern Plantation Museum (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2022).
[2] For a discussion of the significance of institutional histories that address the professional development of public history practice more broadly see Denise D. Meringolo, Museums, Monuments, and National Parks: Towards a New Genealogy of Public History (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012); Seth C. Bruggeman, Lost on the Freedom Trail: The National Park Service and Urban Renewal in Postwar Boston (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2022); John H. Sprinkle, Jr., Crafting Preservation Criteria: The National Register of Historic Places and American Historic Preservation (New York, NY: Routledge, 2014).
[3] These resource disparities are especially evident at historic house museums, see Marian Godfrey and Barbara Silberman, “What To Do With These Old Houses,” Pew Charitable Trust Magazine, (Spring 2008), https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/reports/2008/04/30/what-to-do-with-these-old-houses-spring-2008-trust-magazine-briefing, accessed September 17, 2024; Franklin D. Vagnone and Deborah E. Ryan, Anarchist’s Guide to Historic House Museums (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2015); on archival underfunding more broadly see “Issue Brief: Adequate Funding of Government Archives and Archival Programs,” Society of American Archivists, November 20, 2014, accessed September 17, 2024, https://www2.archivists.org/statements/issue-brief-adequate-funding-of-government-archives-and-archival-programs; Eira Tansey, “A Green New Deal for Archives” (Alexandria, VA: Council on Library and Information Resources, 2023).
[4] The last comprehensive survey of house museums was conducted in 2000, see Patricia Chambers Walker and Thomas Graham, Directory of Historic House Museums in the United States (Cincinnati, OH: American Association for State and Local History, 2000); on an overview of the role of house museums in the broader historic preservation movement see Patricia West, Domesticating History: The Political Origins of America’s House Museums (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1999).
[5] John Michael Vlach, Back of the Big House: The Architecture of Plantation Slavery (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), ix.
[6] Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 111-112; Leslie Schwalm, A Hard Fight for We: Women’s Transition from Slavery to Freedom in South Carolina (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 188-190.
[7] David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); Nina Silber, The Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South, 1865-1900 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1993); Rebecca Cawood McIntyre, Souvenirs of the Old South: Northern Tourism and Southern Mythology (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2011).
[8] E.T.H. Shaffer, “The Ashley River and Its Gardens,” The National Geographic Magazine 49, no. 5 (May 1926), 529.
[9] Fred Denton Moon, “Refused Magnolia Gardens,” February 15, 1931.
[10] Gilbert Haven, “Feather the Second, From Charleston,” Zion’s Herald, May 2, 1878; on the Old South mythology in these encounters see Micki McElya, Clinging to Mammy: The Faithful Slave in Twentieth-Century America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); Karen L. Cox, Dixie’s Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2003).
[11] Moon, “Refused Magnolia Gardens,” February 15, 1931.
[12] Frances Duncan, “Magnolia Gardens: A Visit to Charleston’s Fairy-Land,” The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine 74, no. 52 (May-October, 1907), 514-519; Fred Denton Moon, “Refused Magnolia Gardens,” February 15, 1931.
[13] “Melrose Servants’ Barn Natchez National Historical Park: Historic Structure Report,” (Atlanta, GA: National Park Service, 2020), 11; Paul Hardin Kapp, Heritage and Hoop Skirts: How Natchez Created the Old South (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2022).
[14] Harrison Howell Dodge to Upton Herbert, April 18, 1896, Superintendent’s Letter Books, Diaries, and Monthly Reports, Mount Vernon Library; Scott E. Casper, Sarah Johnson’s Mount Vernon: The Forgotten History of an American Shrine (New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 2008), 113, 159-166.
[15] Jan Whitaker, “Catering to Romantic Hunger: Roadside Tearooms, 1909-1930,” Journal of American Culture 15, no. 4 (1992): 17-25; Phyllis Palmer, Domesticity and Dirt: Housewives and Domestic Servants in the United States, 1920-1945 (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989); Vanessa H. May, Unprotected Labor: Household Workers, Politics, and Middle-Class Reform in New York, 1870-1940 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2011).
[16] “To Let: The Cooper-Austin House,” Advertisement, circa 1915, Cooper-Austin Scrapbook; J.H. Unsworth Co. to William Sumner Appleton, October 24, 1934, Browne House Administration and Maintenance Files, William Sumner Appleton Papers, Historic New England, Haverhill, MA.
[17] Hollis E. Johnson to William Sumner Appleton, May 21, 1915, Cooper-Austin Scrapbook, William Sumner Appleton Papers, Historic New England, Haverhill, MA.
[18] Rollin Bourse to William Sumner Appleton, September 1, 1925, Browne House Administration and Maintenance Files, William Sumner Appleton Papers, Historic New England, Haverhill, MA.
[19] Edwin Hipkiss to William Sumner Appleton, November 17, 1928, Browne House Administration and Maintenance Files, William Sumner Appleton Papers, Historic New England, Haverhill, MA.
[20] Celestia Lapham to William Sumner Appleton, August 27, 1925, Browne House Administration and Maintenance Files, William Sumner Appleton Papers, Historic New England, Haverhill, MA.
[21] “My Grandmother’s Story, My Father’s Mother, Nana, Mrs. Isabelle Tilley,” Writings of Agnus (Tilley) Wheaton, July 13, 2023, Historic New England Archives, Haverhill, MA.
[22] Nathaniel Jackson to William Sumner Appleton, May 24, 1924, Jackson House Administration and Maintenance Files, William Sumner Appleton Papers, Historic New England, Haverhill, MA.
[23] William Sumner Appleton to E.M. Bemis, September 3, 1937, Jackson House Administration and Maintenance Files, William Sumner Appleton Papers, Historic New England, Haverhill, MA.
[24] William Sumner Appleton to Robert J. Larner, January 23, 1943, Beauport Acquisition File, William Sumner Appleton Papers, Historic New England, Haverhill, MA.
[25] Elizabeth Blanford to Bertram K. Little, September 9, 1956, Beauport Administration and Maintenance Files, William Sumner Appleton Papers, Historic New England, Haverhill, MA; Linda Shoemaker, “Fifty Years of Household Service at Beauport, 1907-1957,” Research Report (April 2003), Historic New England, Haverhill, MA.
[26] Louise DuPont Crowninshield to Newton B. Drury, March 27, 1942, Cooperative Agreement for Custodian of Derby House, Box 4, folder 12, Salem Maritime National Historic Site Resource Management Records, Salem, MA.
[27] Lease between the Philadelphia Society for the Preservation of Landmarks and Frank A. and Marjorie W. Tebo, 1948, curator’s file, Powel House Building Records, Philadelphia Society for the Preservation of Landmarks Papers, Temple University Urban Archive.
[28] Allister F. MacDougall to Catherine Sargent Huntington, 1975, Catherine Sargent Huntington Papers, University of Massachusetts Amherst Special Collections and University Archives, Amherst, MA.
[29] Bertram K. Little to Irene Zager, August 14, 1956, Beauport Administration and Maintenance Files, Historic New England, Haverhill, MA.
[30] Bertram K. Little to Elizabeth Blanford, February 1957, Beauport Administration and Maintenance Files, Historic New England, Haverhill, MA.
[31] Bertram K. Little to Elizabeth Blanford, February 21, 1957, Beauport Administration and Maintenance Files, Historic New England, Haverhill, MA.
[32] Tom Wonson to Bertram K. Little, April 30, 1956, Beauport Administration and Maintenance Files, Historic New England, Haverhill, MA.
[33] Tom Wonson to Bertram K. Little, April 1956, Beauport Administration and Maintenance Files, Historic New England, Haverhill, MA.
[34] C.P. Wilber to W.L. Seubert, December 11, 1950, New Jersey Division of Historic Sites records, New Jersey State Archives, Trenton, NJ.
[35] New Jersey Division of Historic Sites Personnel Record for Vivian Boughner, Lillian G. Boeck, Emma I. Cocker, Norma D. Farrell, Marjorie Hammell, Mary T. Hewitt, Bessie Hoffman, Emma Hotkamp, Eleanor Ray, and Myrtle Stewart, circa 1960, New Jersey Division of Historic Sites records, New Jersey State Archives, Trenton, NJ.
[36] Henry Flynt to Richard Hatch, December 12, 1952, Ashley House Records, Historic Deerfield Archives, Deerfield, MA.
[37] Richard Hatch to Henry Flynt, June 24, 1952, Ashley House Records, Historic Deerfield Archives, Deerfield, MA.
[38] Butcher-Younghans, Historic House Museums: A Practical Handbook for Their Care, Preservation, and Management, 103; 126.
[39] Robert Kelley, “Public History: Its Origins, Nature, and Prospects,” The Public Historian 1, no. 1 (Autumn 1978), 16-28; Denise Meringolo, Museums, Monuments, and National Parks: Toward a New Genealogy of Public History (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012), xvi-xx; Donna Ann Harris, New Solutions for House Museums: Ensuring the Long-Term Preservation of America’s Historic Houses (Lanham, MD: Alta-Mira Press, 2008.
[40] Stillinger, Historic Deerfield: A Portrait of Early America, 58-68; John S. Banta to James Kilbreth, June 28, 1974, Deerfield Academy Property Rentals Records, Historic Deerfield Archives, Deerfield, MA.
[41] Sneha Patel, “Mellon Foundation Awards 3 Million to UVA to Launch the Outsider Preservation Initiative,” Press Release, University of Virginia School of Architecture, December 18, 2023, accessed September 9, 2024, https://www.arch.virginia.edu/news/mellon-foundation-awards-3-million-to-uva-to-launch-outsider-preservation-initiative.
[42] New York Preservation Archive Project, “About Us: Our History,” accessed September 17, 2024, https://www.nypap.org/about-us/our-history/.
[43] “”Recovering New England’s Voices’ to tell the full story of the region,” Historic New England, December 14, 2022, accessed August 14, 2024, https://www.historicnewengland.org/recovering-new-englands-voices-to-tell-the-full-story-of-the-region/.
[44] On the changing nature of archival and cataloging work, see Hannah Turner, Cataloguing Culture: Legacies of Colonialism in Museum Documentation (Vancouver, BC: UBC Press, 2020), 133-135; Amy M. Tyson, The Wages of History: Emotional Labor on Public History’s Front Lines (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2013), 52-54; on labor practices at public history sites see Richard Handler and Eric Gable, The New History in an Old Museum: Creating the Past at Colonial Williamsburg (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997).
[45] “Porter-Phelps-Huntington Family Papers,” finding aid, Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst, accessed August 9, 2024, http://findingaids.library.umass.edu/ead/mums1148; for a brief overview of how these collections have been used by researchers since their move to the University of Massachusetts Amherst campus see Madeline Zelazo, “New Voices in Old Rooms,” Bookmark (2022), 16-19; the collections helped update and expand National Register of Historic Places documentation that incorporated the site’s history as a museum, see Marla Miller and Brian Whetstone, “Forty Acres and Its Skirts” National Register of Historic Places inventory form, 2023.
[46] Elizabeth Blasius, “The Passion Tax is History,” Mas Context, October 28, 2023.
[47] Joan M. Zenzen, “Why Administrative Histories Matter,” The Public Historian 38, no. 4 (November 2016): 236-263; Mike Caldwell, “The Fort Stanwix Administrative History: A Superintendent’s Perspective,” The Public Historian 31, no. 2 (May 2009): 66-70.
[48] Robert R. Weyeneth, Historic Preservation for a Living City: Historic Charleston Foundation, 1947-1997 (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2000).
[49] Bruggeman, Lost on the Freedom Trail: The National Park Service and Urban Renewal in Postwar Boston.
Archival Collections
William Sumner Appleton Papers and Historic New England Research Files, Historic New England, Haverhill, MA.
Heritage Foundation Administrative Archives, Deerfield, MA.
Salem Maritime National Historic Site Resource Management Records, Salem, MA.
Papers of the Philadelphia Society for the Preservation of Landmarks, Temple University Urban Archive, Philadelphia, PA.
New Jersey Division of Historic Sites Papers, New Jersey State Archives, Trenton, MA.
Mount Vernon Superintendent’s Letter Books, Diaries, and Monthly Reports, Mount Vernon, VA.
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