An Athenæum
of Philadelphia Symposium
December 4 - 5, 1998
An Athenæum
of Philadelphia Symposium
December 4 - 5, 1998
... Mr. Barrett said that he feared that unless some such organization as the one proposed were formed all the landmarks and relics connected with Germantown's Revolutionary history would be forever lost... the preservation of the Chew place alone would be a magnificent central idea for the organization.
It is a honor for me to be with you this afternoon to present a perspective on the future of the smaller historic house museum in the next century. Much has changed since these ladies and gentleman of Germantown formed the Site & Relic Society in 1900, yet much is the same in terms of an interest in past events and lives and a renewed nostalgia for simpler times, old fashioned ways and values, which is in part a reaction against the rapid technological advancements of the past decade. Once again we are at the end of a century which has seen great prosperity and material growth, but also dislocation from changes within society. Think of the introduction of the telephone, the automobile, moving pictures, expanded electrical service and I believe you will see why many people worried that the past was slipping away not properly memorialized, and what led others, especially from prominent older families, to highlight their ancestors' accomplishments and their furnishings as a way of coping with waves of immigration and an erosion of control.
Beginning with Stenton Mansion in 1899,
James Logan's elegant country seat in Germantown which was
preserved with the Philadelphia chapter of the National Society of Colonial
Dames of America as its guardians and interpreters, the number of historic
house museums and sites in the Greater Philadelphia area has swelled to
over 175 today. Many are illustrated in Roger Moss and Tom Crane's
exceptional book; others of lesser prominence are treasured by small community
groups or organizations. These houses entered the public arena in
waves of patriotic enthusiasm or as early examples of victory over threatened
demolition. The Sesquicentennial Exhibit in Philadelphia in 1926
was not a resounding success except for its recreation of Old High Street
and for the many historic houses which were opened to large crowds of visitors.
Groups emerged such as the ladies of the Committee of 1926 who took on
the preservation and interpretation of Strawberry Mansion and still are
its overseers today. Most often, this preservation had upper class
and upper middle class women at the lead--figures such as Miss Frances
Wister of the Philadelphia Society for the Preservation of Landmarks who
in the 1930s saved her ancestral home in Germantown, Grumblethorpe and
also the notable Powel House in Philadelphia whose best interior features
were already removed to the American wings at the Metropolitan Museum in
New York and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
More houses joined the ranks in the 1950s, especially in the suburbs as development obscured the farm country and left houses like the Thomas Massey House in Delaware County to become small oases in seas of split-level homes and strip malls. With the Bicentennial fast approaching and many old family's ability or desire to privately maintain their home declining, the final wave of traditional historic houses entered the public sphere--places such as Cliveden or Wyck.
So today we find ourselves with an embarrassment of riches. As interest in history has declined, people have found new ways to experience the past, provided by Disney or made available through television, video or now the world wide web. Our sites have looked sadly upon a dwindling pool of visitors, a shrinking volunteer corps, and realized that professional preservation and management can not be achieved with a budget of $20,000 or $30,000 a year and one or two committed Board Members who pay the bills.
Seven year ago in the carriage house at Cliveden a grass roots group of historic site administrators and volunteers formed the Tri-State Coalition of Historic Places. I have had the pleasure of co-chairing that group and working with strong committees to try and address the challenges of what is an admittedly an overabundance of historical attractions all with major capital needs and fairly similar missions. Our link to the Preservation Alliance of Greater Philadelphia and their funding from major foundations such as Pew and William Penn has made this a strong organization. Questions we are now asking ourselves include how will we respond to a changing audience? How can we benefit from Philadelphia's push for heritage tourism? How can we improve our accessibility? Our amenities? Make our programming relevant? And most importantly, find innovative ways to supply the necessary income to survive and grow. Right now we are completing a set of guidelines, in a sense a tool for self-evaluation which we have termed "Best Practices for Historic Sites". I'll be candid--it was the funders who prompted us to take this long, hard look, and I believe in the next five years there will be sites that feel they can not even obtain the first level and perhaps should explore an alternate use than an historic house museum. We are trying to be realistic--many sites are all volunteer, so we are creating three levels: good, better and best. This is not an attempt to accredit, but an attempt for self-help and cooperation, providing a tool so that those who are stewards of these historic resources can review their current status and see benchmarks along the way in areas of administration, interpretation and preservation that they can work to achieve.
Today I am going to use my own house Wyck as an example of a a success story for a small independent
historic site. Wyck has come a long way in the last decade thanks
to a Board with vision and a small but strong staff. We have combined
tradition and innovation to take strategic steps forward while not going
so far out on a limb that the site or its accomplishments were placed at
risk.
Wyck was home to nine generations of a
Quaker family the Wistars and Haines from 1689 to 1973. Happily,
the family over these years sought to preserve their history and the record
of their way of life so that we have over 10,000 original family furnishings
, 100,000 letters, diaries, bills of sale, and other
manuscript items, a garden of old roses still growing in its original plan
of the 1810s and a colonial era house little altered since 1824.
In that year Reuben Haines, III, a fortunate gentleman who had retired
from business at age 23 for the pursuit of knowledge and the company of
genuine friends, undertook repairs to his old family home. Bringing
in his good friend, architect William Strickland, he soon wrote his wife
Jane who had taken the children to her family home in New York--"Thee very
well knows few if any ever begin a career of vice or commence the repair
of an old building that stop exactly at the point they intended.
It is not therefore expected I should prove myself different from all other
mortals..." Before long the house had a fashionable new interior within
an old-fashioned shell. Engineering marvels included pivoting doors
and a statuary niche over a fireplace. 
Through
the succeeding generations the family would carefully maintain the house
and its interiors. Still wealthy, they did not hesitate to add Victorian
or Arts & Crafts decoration to the parlors or reembrace the colonial
in the 1900s, but out of style pieces either found their way to the attic
or to another family home, years later returning to Wyck as the family
saw it as their museum and as they noted, a witness to a way of life.
Of course not all area sites have this
kind of collection. In fact there are few parallels in this country.
But why in 1902 when this house was featured in House & Garden magazine
did hundreds of people write for permission to tour it and architects from
around the East Coast faithfully copied its simple lines? In 1913 
Ca'spar Wistar Haines welcomed over a 1,000 people in a
single afternoon for a fete to commemorate Lafayette's visit to Wyck in
1825. Today we draw 2,500 visitors over the course of an entire
year. Descendants of old Germantown families that day wore their
ancestors' garb and danced the minuet on the lawn. Huge trestle tables
served colonial fare and for the price of a ticket, which benefited a local
charity, anyone could attend. In the 1920s bus loads of people came
on prearranged tours, especially in the fall near the time of the recreation
of the Battle of Germantown 
at
Cliveden, and the jubilant
celebration of Founder's Week--parades, pageants, concerts, of course dignitaries
and speech making, school plays, church choirs, and special shopping events
and sales. On one afternoon over 600 people attended a plant sale
at Wyck to benefit the School of Horticulture for Women founded by Jane
Bowne Haines.
This was popular entertainment. These were the celebrities--famous old family names like Chew or Wistar or Biddle or Logan. What better than to tour the private house of these illustrious descendants from America's past with them acting as guide --to really feel you were in someone's home rubbing elbows with the social elite, not just viewing a period room or stage set. These were the faces and names in the photogravure section of the Sunday newspaper.
So what has changed? How many Philadelphians today even recognize these names? Of course, who is a celebrity changed, leisure activities went in new directions and popular entertainment like television at home became affordable for so many. The post WWII suburban boom saw not only urban flight and decline in areas like Germantown, but modernism, and progress and improvement becoming the prevailing vision. The brief revival of historical focus for the Bicentennial had an infusion of public and private money put towards restoration projects, but the anticipated audience never came and the money to maintain the sites and programs never materialized.
In 1973 the Haines family created the Wyck Charitable Trust at a local bank to preserve and interpret Wyck. Several years later the Wyck Association was formed as an agent to administer the site and had the wisdom to hire a recent graduate of the Winterthur Program, Sandra Mackenzie (Lloyd) to be its first curator/administrator. In those years the annual budget was only about $60,000. Growth was underway, but for the next decade it was a struggle to stay afloat. Being independent was both a plus and a minus. The family were dedicated, but their means were limited. Cookbook sales and garden teas provided some extra income, but it was hard to make ends meet. But that slow evolution I mentioned earlier had begun--an attempt to preserve a homey feeling--the lack of stanchions and labels, paired with the smell of baking cookies from the kitchen and a very personal tour. Add then an awareness of professional standards of collections care and museum administration and Wyck began to be viewed as something different.
Emerging from the tens of thousands of
artifacts and the choices of how to present Wyck to the public was a well
defined way of interpretation that I feel was well ahead of its time.
True there was wonderful Philadelphia Queen Anne furniture and Tucker porcelain,
and a Phyfe sofa, but there were also stuffed ducks and Native American
moccasins
, and children's toys and ostrich leg
lamps sitting on a Philadelphia Federal sideboard. In other words
there was life to the house, and whimsy and surprise, as well as beauty.
Not for Wyck was the on your right you will see a such and such chair dating
from 1750, note its finely shaped cabriole leg and trifid foot tour.
Our guides could answer those questions, but this place was about people
and changing ways of life over time-comforts and anxieties. It was
a place where Audubon taught the children to draw; Bronson Alcott gave
them their lessons and they boiled elephant bones in the Wyck meadow with
Titian and Franklin Peale. Reuben Haines wrote his wife Jane in 1818:
... with what pleasure will I not welcome thee to the scene of my present interesting occupations, put under thy tender charge the garden and see thy taste displayed in every shrub, and in light festoons of every vine trace the hand that gave them grace. With what additional pleasure will I not aid thee in imparting instruction to our daughter and after the daily task has been cheerfully performed lead her forth into the garden and the field and teach her to admire the economy of vegetation in the bursting forth ... of the legumes her little hands have deposited in the earth, point out the bees as examples to stimulate her industry, and see our mantle decked with the wild flowers which she has assisted to gather.
So here was our niche--stories--telling
of past lives in the family's own words-childhood, nature, long ago dogs
that pulled the children around the property in a dog cart; a cat playing
beau peep with its kitten in the Strickland designed bookcase while the
children ate oysters and buckwheat pancakes for supper. It was real
people, real things and the real past--not an imagined and glorified image
of ancestral virtue and elegance. There were flies and chamber pots;
Chinese porcelain and iron cook wares. Boxes brought back from the
Shakers and glass whimsies from the family's Wistarburgh glassworks.
Again--not many sites have this diversity and richness of material wealth--but
I do believe most sites have stories and ways of telling them.
Another of Wyck's strengths was its family members who were involved because they cared about the place and its traditions. They recruited non-family board members with similar interests. This generated real dedication and consistency. They were in it for the long run, not just momentary prestige. But the weakness was that their enthusiastic support did not bring in great amounts of money.
In mid-1980s Wyck took its next big step and this direction led to its current success. They did not see their future in courting one or two very rich individuals but in developing their knowledge of this resource and expanding its professional administration. Under the Board chairmanship of individuals like historian Margaret Tinkcom and then Marigene Butler--Head of Conservation at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, they recruited curators and educators, architects and horticulturists, and community representatives, while maintaining a strong family involvement. Step by step grant funding took Wyck along a path to proper documentation of its site. Outside guidance like the National Trust's Comprehensive Historic Assistance Program for Historic House Museums directed by Janet Klein helped create focus. Funding enabled the completion of an historic structure's report, an historic landscape survey, a project to survey Wyck's collections needs and create systems to more safely store them within the house.
In 1990 I was hired as Wyck's first Executive Director and began what has become a most fulfilling job. With such a comprehensive resource, who could not be hooked. But there is also a thoughtfulness and an energy to this site and its people they keeps me so connected. And here I can not emphasize enough the importance for the director of a smaller historic site being fully immersed in day to day activities. Sometimes it is reality--you are the only one there when the toilet backs-up--but most often it is the only way to know your resource and effectively market it to both individual funders and the foundations. You need to know its stories, be able to give a tour--I see one of the perks of my work at Wyck being part of the education program. Development know-how alone is not enough. And as you reach for new opportunities to draw both audiences and funding to your site you must be clear about the delicate nature of your resource. Your historic house is your largest single museum object and it must be treated that way. What is reasonable risk? Can an historic site be over visited--over used? Hard questions but until you know your resource you can not answer them.
In the past eight years Wyck has seen its general operating budget move from about $90,000 to $150,000 per year. Each year that has been supplemented with funding for designated projects, for example over $450,000 for the architectural conservation of Wyck's exterior stucco and wooden trim. Each successful grant application becomes a step to the next goal--a Getty Fund grant gave Wyck national recognition. $250,000 from Pew and over $85,000 from Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission (PHMC) also attracted new local individual donors. It is true-success does beget success. And thanks to The Barra Foundation much of our architectural conservation was not only undertaken but its reports are about to be published to share our findings with the preservation and historic house community. We made strong connections to the Graduate Department of Historic Preservation at the University of Pennsylvania which provided us the talented but affordable intems to work on many aspects of the project and in turn allowed them to learn from a trend setting preservation architect and some of the top architectural conservators in the country.
Once the momentum begins, hard work can sustain it. An adage I can't emphasize enough is that Boards who like and respect each other work well together--which means they raise money well together. Wyck has just completed the first step of its Capital Campaign-- a modest phase 1 goal of $350,000 mostly designated for endowment, but it was surpassed in record time and it proved to us we could make it happen. Here feasibility studies and good board training, setting a obtainable goal and then a inspirational leader cheered everyone on to the top.
Where does Wyck's income come from--only about 15% is from endowment- the original family trust and the more recent efforts of the Wyck Board. For so many of these houses, a few hundred thousand dollars in the 1970s seemed like a nest egg that would secure their future. Instead many of these endowments are being slowly eroded and some sites regularly dip into them to keep alive.
Wyck has about 400 supporters who each year give to the Friends of Wyck and the Annual Appeal--about $30,000. This is not a high average per donor for a museum, but for an historic house it is vital and we make sure our appreciation is known with personal thanks. Admissions and shop sales are modest--we are all working hard to change that through collaborative efforts--and our Spring lecture and supper brings in about $3,000. Wyck has had a strong record of general operating funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the Philadelphia Cultural Fund and more recently PHMC. These funds help support additional part-time staff such as our curator/collections manager and horticulturist/educator. But how long can we depend on that type of funding? We do not rent the house or gardens because we do not have the appropriate support facilities and we believe that Wyck's house, collections and gardens are too historically significant and too vulnerable to be exposed to such wear and tear.
Our biggest single fund raiser each year is an event which has not only brought us wider recognition but been a recruiting ground for new supporters and board members-- the Wyck-Strickland Award which honors architects, urban planners, preservationists and landscape architects. It celebrates creativity with a sensitivity to the past and has honored individuals as diverse as Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, Philadelphia historian and curator Beatrice Garvan, and more recently architectural historian Vincent Scully and preservationist David De Long. Thanks to Julia Moore Converse and many others this event raises $30,000 for Wyck and it is consistent with our mission. It draws together architects, historians and the business community. Each recipient presents a scholarly lecture and it also provides me a platform to briefly talk about different aspects of Wyck's history or its current programs. In other words, it raises both our profile and money for our operation. We concentrate our efforts on one well defined event and enjoy the benefits throughout the year.
What of our expenses? We sometimes may come close to counting each paper clip and in a way consistent with the frugal nature of the family, think our expenses through carefully. We rely on volunteer.time to provide essential services from maintenance to conservation consulting to photography. We have recruited more business people and attorneys who provide advice and management ideas. And we look towards economy of scale. We can not afford color brochures, paid advertising, expensive signboards, so we collaborate as part of the Tri-State Coalition, Historic Germantown Preserved, Philadelphia's Historic Northwest Coalition and the Gardens Collaborative. My $250 a year dues for the latter puts Wyck in a full color brochure sent to tens of thousands of visitors to the area. A few years ago a recreation of Wyck's old rose garden was part of the Gardens Collaboratives' centerpiece exhibit at the Philadelphia Flower Show viewed by 350,000 people. Wyck will soon be prominently displayed in a color guide to the sites of Philadelphia's Historic Northwest now under production and will have new signs from the Direction Philadelphia program that only require us to spend $300 a year for their maintenance. Small investments like this can go a long way.
Many of you are sitting in the audience thinking--if this place is so successful-why does it only have 2,500 visitors per year? Well, clearly we are working hard to see that change. I have just outlined some of the ways above. But we are also being realistic. The Germantown section of Philadelphia is seven miles from where we sit today. The big goal in Philadelphia right now is just to get visitors to stay overnight, let alone move far from the Independence Hall historic district.
Germantown is an area which is too often portrayed by the media as unsafe. With hundreds of historic sites to choose from if you live locally you are more likely to visit Winterthur or even. Colonial Williamsburg then to venture into your own backyard.
But I also think you need to look at how you measure success for the small historic house museum. We can not and should not all be major attractions. The old chestnut about quality versus quantity is appropriate and we have to find our own niche and grow in it. We must be very careful on cashing-in on the latest trend, expending our resource in a way counter to our preservation missions, and letting the entertainment side of our presentation too fully overwhelm the educational.
This brings me back to the Tri-State Coalition's efforts over the years to foster self-evaluation through surveys, workshops and now the best practices standards. It calls first for a reality check. So many sites a few years back in Philadelphia eagerly anticipated thousands of visitors each year almost as soon as the new Convention Center's doors were open. How many sites could even handle one bus load of visitors at a time if they came? Which were really accessible? Which met ADA requirements? How would we answer if a visitor asked--Where do I park? Where do I eat lunch? Can I visit you on the day you say you are open and even find a guide there and a pleasant welcome? Will I hear about something that interests me and my family or will you drone on about the Persian carpets or the significance of the former owner whose contribution to history may have been a discerning eye for fine cabinetmaking and a large pocketbook rather than a lasting contribution to the community. Will I as the visitor have to work hard to extract some meaning from the tour. Will the guide ask me about my interests, welcome me cordially, make me feel part of the story not just a wall for projecting a precrafted script? When these questions can be answered than the marketing may begin.
Now for an even harder look in the mirror.
I would like to propose today three types of classification for our area's
historic house museums and these in part should help define what is appropriate
in the way they are used and interpreted. Type 1 are sites of the
highest integrity--a completeness of well documented and preserved historical
buildings, at least partial furnishings that are original to the house,
some survival of the historic landscape, and documentation whether from
family papers or local histories. Sites that come to mind are Wyck,
Cliveden, Stenton, Rockwood in Delaware. Type 2 sites have some of
these elements, but not all--for example The Highlands in Ft. Washington--a
significant example of late Georgian architecture that is unfurnished,
but has noteworthy arts & crafts era gardens and good documentation.
Or the Grange in Haverford Township-- a fascinating evolution of a gentleman's
country seat, or Maxwell Mansion in Germantown (pictured) one of only a
handful of Victorian sites in what is a very Victorian city, that are open
to the public. Again neither has extensive original furnishings.
And finally Type 3 sites may be of marginal historical importance or integrity,
or like Loudoun Mansion, have lost so much of their original fabric to
fire or change.
How each site uses their resource should spring from that definition. Whether a site remains a historic house museum or can serve a different public function may also follow. We are of course directing our way here towards the idea of increasing earned income for historic house museums, of using the site's appeal more creatively, but I think you can also hear me sound the caution bell for sites that I would grade as Type 1 when they look longingly at the income from rentals but don't consider the threat to the resource.
Wyck does not rent as I have said--how can we when there are literally thousands of family furnishings scattered throughout the house. Well what of the old rose garden--ideal for weddings--but put 50 people in it and not only are some roses going to get trampled, but as we have discovered by experience, the cacophony of Germantown Avenue on a Saturday afternoon--buses and boom boxes and animated chatter--will drown out even the most vocal minister. So instead let's cooperate. For rentals I might recommend Cliveden with its wonderful large carriage house set well back on the grounds, ideal for parties or meetings. Or the Highlands a 50 acre country retreat perfect for tents and parking with a house that is not furnished; and Appleford in Villanova, a rambling 18th century house completely remodeled in 1926. And in turn when they have a request to see a garden from the early 1800s they would refer visitors to us.
Rental income and the selling of services, and decorating workshops, and face painting for kids on a Saturday afternoon are great ways to involve a broader audience but we must be sure our historic houses don't simply become attractive back drops for these events with little connection to their history or purpose. We are not Disney World--we are not stage sets. We are the authentic product for an audience who desires it and I believe it is an expanding audience. Just look at the success of the Landmarks Society's Elder Hostel Program which grows dramatically each year.
We have enjoyed the prosperity of the last few years and it definitely has brought new income to many historic sites, but if there is a lull in the economy or we all start doing similar programming for families on Sunday afternoons this income may shrink. We need to always be thinking creatively, but the smaller sites simply can not compete on the same scale as Mt. Vernon or Monticello, or in this area Betsy Ross House or Pennsbury Manor. It all comes back to a secure financial base and I believe the historic house museums that will survive well into the 21st century must work constantly to build their endowment and a self-reliance that is not dependent on market trends. They must work collaboratively--sharing resources, providing joint programming and recognizing each other's strengths. They must make it easy and pleasant for the visitor to come to them. -
Other ingredients to my recipe for success: Having a well-defined mission and goals which are revisited regularly is critical. Next, follow the adage to thine own self be true. First you must be well documented--know your history, your strengths and weaknesses. Look for non-traditional opportunities for interpretation especially focused on family lives, women's roles, childhood and the current interests of you audience whether it is local or national. But don't jump on band wagons, contrive story lines with no basis for support, or make assumptions about your audience just because of their background. If your house was an underground railroad stop, you have a compelling story to tell. If it was owned by wealthy people of refined taste but little social consciousness don't try and talk about the abolition movement when there is no connection at all, but talk about how that family lived, and the story that may today be of more interest is their servants --where they lived, what their daily routine was like and what their relationship was with the family.
At Wyck we are able to talk about the family's activity in the Female antislavery society, their founding of the Franklin Institute, the eighth generation member who became a Mexican citizen and designed part of that country's railway system, and we can show Wedgwood china and early Philadelphia glass. But we don't overwhelm each visitor with all that information. Guides listen--they ask for the visitors' interests and try and respond accordingly. They use the family's words to spin stories around the objects to show how this Quaker family lived in their world.
Once the documentation is in place for buildings, landscape and collections create the strategic plan for the preservation, adopt a preservation policy, a collections care policy, a landscape master plan. Define a long term financial plan. Then begin the work of getting your house in order-,architectural stabilization or conservation treatment. Collections care and rehousing. Wyck's 100,000 documents are all indexed and housed in archival folders, stored at the American Philosophical Society in a secure environment where they are available to researchers. Thanks to the William Penn Foundation and IMLS, Wyck's 10,000 objects are all registered, they have been rehoused to museum standards, most are photographed, over 25% are now on our computer database. It has taken 10 years, but much of that work was done by one individual--our curator/collections manager --with a team of trained volunteers, student interns and the direction of outside consulting curators and conservators (often volunteers themselves).
While this work is in progress identify your audience. Who is visiting you now? Who might visit you if they knew about you? Read the demographic and economic studies. Who visits historic sites--age group, education and income? Again, who might be an additional or different audience if your offerings were not the traditional floor to ceiling object tours? Is your best audience your own neighborhood? If people can't come to you (distance or disabilities) or won't come to you (concern about your neighborhood) how can you get to them? Take the slide lecture on the road. Trunk shows for school students or community groups--and now the world wide web. So if Wyck concludes it can only reasonably handle 7,500 visitors a year, mostly touring in groups of 25 or less, can't we also provide a virtual tour on a web site. Someday--and we hope soon--our Wyck Papers' index, our collections catalogue, our historic house files which document each element of the house in detail, our historic landscape survey could be accessible to researchers on line. Clearly not every site can or should go this far. Also this will not be inexpensive--but we are pondering what success will mean in the next century. We can also begin to consider how we can generate income from all this information that is often provided free by museums today. The successful small house museum will work with its broader community, not just its colleagues. Philadelphia's Historic Northwest I believe is a good model. It combines local business associations from Chestnut Hill, Mt. Airy and Germantown, with historic sites, cultural attractions and gardens. It involves community leaders. Its meetings are attended by the local newspaper reporters. it has the ear and the support of local politicians. Much of the funding for projects like the new brochure and signage system has come through the auspices of people like State Senator Allyson Schwartz and City Councilwomen Donna Reed-Miller. We are all looking at each others strengths. The shops and restaurants need something distinctive to compete with huge suburban malls like King of Prussia which draw people from all over--the historic sites offer that. The house museums need somewhere for people to dine and shop--the business districts provide that. And instead of looking at the King of Prussia Mall as a threat we look at it as a resource, more actively participating in the Valley Forge Convention and Visitors Bureau. After those upscale shoppers have exhausted their wallets at Neiman Marcus or Gucci we want them to make their way to Chestnut Hill for lunch, and then visit Cliveden or Wyck for a tour unlike anything they will see in other parts of the country.
It is about links--linking the sites in cooperative ventures and publicity. Sharing resources and solutions to problems, while keeping your own identity and independence. It can be done.
Here we are nearly at the year 2000. 1 think we are already seeing the characteristic turn of the century nostalgia for the past. Disney saw it coming. Colonial Williamsburg is looking at how they can benefit from it. In 1900 it lead to the flowering of the colonial revival--a wealth of modern conveniences and technology reassuringly covered in a familiar old coat. All types of new historical societies were formed, patriotic groups launched, collecting of antiques became a great pastime, and soon with the advent of the automobile people went far afield to visit the historic and quaint old places. Association with famous people, a comforting simplicity and a sense of self-improvement were all ingredients. Perhaps the Internet is our new means of transportation, but I trust there will always be an audience to see and experience the real thing and that authenticity needs to be a strong marketing tool. I am delighted at how many people have read Roger Moss and Tom Crane's book and are now systematically working their way around to visit the actual sites--good images and prose are excellent advertisements.
I also think that we have a new opportunity
with the birth of this century to be more inclusive. In 1900 much of the historical and preservation activity was reactionary--it
was about ratifying the values of the elite and creating a security blanket
to deal with rapid change. Rather than circling the wagons let us
this time provide as much access as possible to the past with the historic
house museums in the lead.
New sites are emerging that reach out to today's interests, and groups like the Tri-State Coalition and the Preservation Alliance want to shepherd them on their way. The Peter Mott house--an underground railroad site in New Jersey that was the home of a free African-American has recently received nationally attention. The Alice Paul house will look at the suffragette movement and the role of Quaker women in the later 19th century. And history's net is increasingly moving beyond traditional historic house museums to mill sites and the industrial remnants of the area which made Philadelphia the Workshop of the World. At the other end of the spectrum large early 20th century mansions are also being eyed for preservation as the lives of their owners and the era of the Country Place in America find an audience which has been drawn to houses such as Biltmore and the Newport mansions.
Many opportunities; many challenges ahead.
But as an unparalleled regional collection of small historic house museums
we must determine our own future. So, how can we be successful in
the 21st Century---We need to discover our own strengths and stories and
be consistent with them--develop a niche and programming that is appropriate.
Reuben Haines, III of Wyck wrote in the 1820s:
What is education--it is all that makes a man's mind more active, and the ideas which enter it nobler and more beautiful is a great addition to his happiness whenever he is alone and to the pleasure which others derive from his company when he is in society. Therefore it is most useful, to learn to love and understand what is beautiful, whether in the works of God, or in those of man; whether in the flowers and fields,, and rocks and woods, and rivers, and sun and sky; or in fine buildings, or fine pictures, or fine music; and in the noble thoughts and glorious images of poetry.
This is the education which will make a people good, and wise, and happy.
All images presented herein are copyrighted and may not be reproduced without permission. More information on image rights may be obtained from the Wyck Association, 6026 Germantown Ave., Philadelphia, PA 19144.
