Clouds Hill Farm and House Museum

Long promised pictures of Clouds Hill Farm in Warwick, RI. I first talked about the house museum here. There are fewer than I thought I had, but, oh well.

First is a shot of the North face of the property. One of the things I found so interesting about the house is that it is made of stone. Normally a house in this style is made of wood.


This is not the entrance of the property, the east facing side is. Sited on a hill, it was difficult to catch that angle of the house. The house looks down to busy Post Road and condos now with plenty of water views, but I can only imagine how stunning the view was when the house was first built and nothing was in the way.


The property features working horse stables and has a pony as well. The property is also a prime turkey habitat. I saw numerous turkeys roaming wild throughout my afternoon there.

I got to see the house for free through Preserve Rhode Island's Thresholds: Step Inside History. Clouds Hill Farm was one of 23 properties listed. The event is being held again this year with some of the same properties as last year and many new ones as well. On May 9th from 11:00 to 3:00, 26 Rhode Island properties will have free admission. Click here to go to the event poster for a list of participating properties.

Clouds Hill is not on the list this time, but is worth the price of admission.

A Tuesday Catch Up

This week's artist is Claude Monet, an artist I consider to be an amazing Impressionist. Born in 1840, I am rather fond of him because he was the first real artist that I remember studying in school. I'll always appreciate my junior high French class for introducing me to many artists like Degas, Renoir, Manet and Cassatt. Perhaps known best for painting water lilies, he also painted people, haystacks and the Rouen Cathedral. I remember hearing about how he would move from one canvas to the next as the light on the Cathedral would change and would return to the beginning of the series the next time the lighting was right. There were more than 30 of them. I find that absolutely amazing to have that many of one subject in a series. He died in 1926. I saw some of his work in a special exhibit of Impressionist artists at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston when I was in the 10th grade. It remains one of my favorite exhibits to this day.

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I spent Thursday through Sunday in Cooperstown, New York for the Cooperstown Graduate Program's Interview Weekend. I would love to go there for Museum Studies. It is the only place I applied to. I'm crossing my fingers and wish all of those who also went the best of luck. Decisions are already in the mail and I'm anxiously awaiting to get a letter. In addition to meeting a lot of great museum oriented people, I got to go behind the scenes at the Fenimore Art Museum and the Baseball Hall of Fame and visited the Iriquois Storage Facility which also houses collections from the Farmers' Museum. I also rode the carousel at the Farmers' Museum. There really are no words to describe the weekend and everything that I got to do. So cool!!!

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I promise I will post about the now passed "pork" measures that John McCain unhappily tweeted about that first got me into twitter. I feel that it is important to still know what these things are, I know that I was introduced to a number of good cultural institutions in this way.

Also coming soon, the third post about my thesis and the ceramics that I analyzed for it.

My Other Museum Related Project- Part 2

Part 1 of this post discussed not only the basics of what I did for my thesis, but also who John Ronayne was (as he was the head of the household at the time when the ceramics were deposited). I realized that I could not let Ellen Sullivan get lost in the telling of my thesis because she is a big part of it as well. Sadly, because she is female and because of the era in which she lived, little can be traced of her through historical records. I found myself wondering who she was throughout writing my thesis and now that I am expanding upon it, I have been able to spend more time on her and her family.

Ellen Sullivan and her family were among the first wave of Irish immigrants to come to Newport. This was due to available work in the area, mostly in construction. One of the more prominent projects was building Fort Adams. Construction began around 1825.

Ellen Sullivan was born in Cork, Ireland, reportedly in the same parish as her husband John Ronayne in 1829. Based off of Census records, her family soon came to America as her siblings were listed as having been born here, one, her brother John (b. 1832), in New York and the rest in Rhode Island, suggesting an arrival to Newport date of around 1833. She was the oldest of six children, and one of three girls.

Little is known of Ellen’s father, part of this is due to the commonality of their surname. What is known is that he had died sometime between 1846 and 1850, the time between the birth of Ellen's youngest brother Michael and the 1850 Census. He does not appear on that Census and Ellen’s mother Julia is listed as the head of the household. In 1840 Census Records only indicated the name of the head of the household at which time Ellen’s father was alive. There is a possibility that his name was John, as it is the name of her eldest younger brother, but this is only a theory at this time.

In the Census records for 1870 and 1880 Ellen is listed as Keeping House. After John Ronayne died, Ellen was left with the use of two houses as well as many of the household goods and $500. She was granted a life lease by her brother-in-law David at his house, left to him by Ellen's husband John Ronayne, presumably so that nieces Kate and Mary Ronayne could have access to their new homes. Ellen died on June 12, 1895 and was buried in St. Mary's Cemetery on Warner Street in Newport.

A picture of part of John Ronayne and Ellen Sullivan's grave marker. They share a monument with John Ronayne's father Thomas.

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Part 3 will include information about the ceramics found during the excavation of the trashpit linked to Ellen Sullivan and John Ronayne.

Mixed Topic Monday

Today's entry will be a little different than my usual posts as it consists of a few topics rather than just one, partially due to being busy over the past couple of days and the desire to talk about all of the topics without turning them into separate posts and spreading them out over the next week.

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First, the artist of the week is Joan Miro. This artist has been featured at the bottom of my blog since finding him late last week. Now that Dali week is over, Miro has taken the spot at the top of my blog. Coincidentally, this morning, I discovered via twitter that there had been an exhibit at the MoMA from November to January. (I'm sorry I can't remember who tweeted this but thank you.) Feel free to follow the link to view the online portion of the exhibit at http://media.moma.org/subsites/2008/miro/flashsite/index.html. I had chosen Miro to feature this week because of the colors used in much of his work. I love color and surrealism and whimsy and Miro, who I had never heard of before (I'll admit I am very much an art novice) really fits what I like yet breaks out of my constraints into so much more. Here is a link to the blog I got the museum link from because this blog can do Miro much more justice than I can http://www.artsjournal.com/man/.

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Also from twitter courtesy of @PresNation about one of the few places in Newport I haven't gotten to visit. A sign of the times, the Touro Synagogue will no longer be giving public tours aside from the ones already booked for the summer. The Touro Synagogue is the oldest Synagogue in America and just cannot afford to pay the two tour guides who were let go last week as stated in the Providence Journal article found here: http://www.projo.com/ri/newport. Having spent almost three years in and about Newport including two summers (and being an RI native) I had only seen one actual tour group in passing and two advertised. Maybe I just never knew where to look, but I am sad that I didn't take the opportunity to go there when I could have. The article does go on to say that tours should recommence come the summer when the new museum on the property opens, the Loeb Center for Religious Freedom.

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Also a belated Happy International Women's Day! I was off celebrating my Aunt's birthday yesterday and did not post about it. I wanted to post a link to this museum that I found via twitter and am now following. Fittingly for the day and month (and year round in my opinion) is the The Women's Museum in Dallas, TX. The link to the museum is here and the link to the twitter feed is here @TheWomensMuseum. It is most certainly one of the museums that I mentioned in my previous posts about twitter- very much a place I would go to during a road trip to that area.

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In honor of the movie Watchmen, which opened up on Friday, here is the link to the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art. http://www.moccany.org/ Currently the museum has an exhibit up featuring a collection of things related to the Watchmen movie and comic. The museum is located in New York City and if you are interested in the movie, the comic or the museum in general the exhibit, The Art of Watchmen, is open now until May 2nd.

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Lastly, the Please Touch Museum which I featured in an earlier post also has a twitter page which can be found here @pleasetouch.

Isn't twitter great? Back to the usual sort of posting next time.

The Twitter Potential

I have officially joined the ranks of twitter as of yesterday afternoon. Up until a few days before that, I didn't realize that it had a web presence, I honestly thought it was just a cell phone thing. Anyhow, one of the things online that I follow faithfully is the Museum listserv and a topic started on Thursday involved John McCain's twittering about pork in the Omnibus bill (I will have a totally different post about this perhaps tomorrow evening). I actually spent time in researching if it was really John McCain tweeting or a fake one, after all there was an article a few weeks ago discussing celebrity posers, so I was skeptical. There was also the thought running in the back of my mind that during the campaign he didn't know how to use email, so how could he possibly use twitter? My research came up with the following conclusion: John McCain twitters with help. I'll accept that, but if he was using twitter, why wasn't I?

So I joined twitter as a way to expand my online presence and awareness, to be primarily used in conjunction with this blog. So there will be tweets alerting to new blog posts and some that sum up blog posts in 140 characters or less, but in a short amount of time, I realized how twitter will allow me to do much more than that.

I began following numerous museums that are using twitter to update their followers on new exhibits, different events and museum specific news. Many of these museums follow each other too. I have been introduced to museums that I didn't know of and thus I have been spending a good portion of my Saturday looking at these museums' homepages. I would love to go on a huge road trip to visit many of them.

Not only am I following museums, I am following museum professionals, museum studies students and all around museum enthusiasts, including other museum bloggers. It is a great way to meet new people, forge contacts and just stay connected to others with like interests. I find people so interesting and I like to network and learn from those who know more than I do. Above and beyond following someone's tweets, I've seen twitter used to find roommates for museum conferences, plan gatherings, and have short and succinct conversations. I am also pleased to see that there are many my age who are interested in entering the museum world for their careers.

The first step is for museums to get out there and tweet, then following like institutions. Soon others will begin to follow the newly twittering museum. I think a crucial step lies in making the statement that the museum is now on twitter, whether that announcement comes on the museum website, via an email newsletter, or even posted (albeit with small signs) around admission desks or at the museum store. I don't know if I'd think to search twitter for a single institution if I didn't know that there would be a positive result, searching for the keyword museum and rolling from there has proved successful enough. The point is though, that tweets can only reach those that are following them and these numbers are far lower than some attendance numbers, so why not reach as many people as possible?

In conclusion I love the connectedness that I get off of twitter, because it is so much easier I feel to find other people with similar interests. It is also something that is easy to do, which means that museums and other cultural institutions can cheaply utilize it, and if utilized properly I think that this is a great virtual expansion of a museum's reach. It's already starting to happen, and I only see this going further as more museums catch on and decide to tweet along with the rest of us.

Hello to anyone who found me through twitter and thanks for visiting!

Free House Museum Event in Rhode Island

I received this in my email today from Preserve Rhode Island. It is an announcement about an event across the state in which certain house museums will open their doors for free. The event is called Thresholds: Step Inside History and will be held on Saturday, May 9, 2009 from 11:00am - 3:00pm.

They first held this event last year around the same time and I happily took my mom (this is the day before Mother's Day) to Clouds Hill Victorian House Museum in Warwick, Rhode Island. I had wanted to view this house because it has such an interesting history and remained in the hands of the original owner's descendants. It was turned into a museum because the remaining descendant had no children and she wanted the property to be taken care of. The house was built in 1872 and was home (in 1931) to the first female fire chief in the world. The engine house (and fire truck!) from the volunteer fire company she formed is still on the property as are some barns with horses and ponies. Wild turkeys also roam the area. I have pictures of the house somewhere on my computer which I will post when I find them.

I am happy to see that this year the event is an hour longer than last year running from 11:00 to 3:00 instead of 12:00 to 3:00. Maybe I'll be able to get to more than one place this year (there are 23 properties participating). This year I'm torn between going to the Paine House Museum in Coventry, Rhode Island and the Old Jamestown Windmill in Jamestown, Rhode Island. They are in very different parts of the state, so I don't think that I could get to both even with the added hour.

I will post about this event again as the date gets closer, any of these properties are well worth a visit.

My Other Museum Related Project- Part 1

Today’s entry deals with the other museum related project that I have been working on. This project is a continuation of the work I have done on my senior thesis, a requirement of my major. My thesis entitled “Alive With Meaning”: Piecing Together the Material Culture of Newport’s Irish, 1848-1898, in a very simple sense deals with the ceramic material culture of an Irish immigrant family living in Newport between those years. Had I only written about that, however, it would have been a very short paper, which it wasn’t. Length wise it was 124 pages long; 45 pages of it was a written thesis the rest were a mix of photos, a glossary, analysis tables making up numerous appendices.

The ceramics that I based much of my thesis on was from a property now owned by the Newport Restoration Foundation. The ceramics were discovered when the head gardener for the NRF went to plant a tree for the tenant of the house. What he stumbled upon was actually a trash pit consisting of large ceramic sherds, clay pipes, glass, faunal remains (animal bones thrown out after a meal), and small finds (buttons, buckles, beads etc.). In the Spring of 2007, my professor was contacted to look at the site and that July he and three students, including myself, recovered the remains of the trash pit.

The Irish immigrant family that my thesis focuses on is the Ronayne family. This was concluded through dating the ceramics and by running back the chain of title (the deed history) for the house. John Ronayne came to America in 1848 where he settled in Newport by 1851. Tax records for 1854 (which were published in 1855) show that he was in the bottom 20% of taxpayers in terms of monetary wealth. He worked as a teamster delivering coal from the nearby wharf to homes and businesses. He married Ellen Sullivan sometime between 1860 and 1870, she had been in Newport since at least 1832. Over time, John Ronayne gathered up enough money to buy numerous properties in Newport which he rented to others for an additional source of income. In 1891, two years before his death, tax records show that he was among the top 26% of taxpaying entities in Newport, certainly a dramatic rise for an immigrant from the Great Famine era. He never had any children so after he and his wife died, his property was split up among his siblings, nieces and nephews.

The ceramics recovered from the backyard of the Ronayne household give insight into the way that John Ronayne and his wife lived in Newport. Stay tuned for more on my thesis tomorrow when I will (briefly) describe the ceramics and what they might mean.

Just a Few Changes

I have once again been playing around with the formatting of this blog, but as I am still happy with its colors they have remained the same.

Things I have changed:

The artist of the week- it is now at the top of the blog above the entries. Before it was at the side of the entries below the "This is Me" section and it annoyed me that the artwork was usually cut off rather than shrunk to the appropriate size.

This Day in History- a fitting addition taking the space where the the art used to go.

Blogs I Read- these are 5 of the museum/preservation/history related blogs that I read. I have enjoyed them and since it is a feed, they will automatically update if a new blog is posted. This section is also on the side of the entries located above my favorite websites (which will expand soon) and my blog archive. I think that I will start to have a Blog of Interest post maybe once a week to draw attention to other blogs that I like. This of course is added to the other things I have promised to post, such as what I would have in my own museum. I will get there, I'm still trying to figure out a happy medium in time between postings.

I have also added a blog description and expanded the "This is Me" snippet.

That's it for now!

Random Search Result: The Please Touch Museum

I stumbled upon the Please Touch Museum located in Philadelphia, PA by chance: through doing a random search for the word please. I don't even remember why I searched for it, but the Please Touch Museum was at the top of the results list. Similar to my finding the Canon Camera Museum, I stumble upon museum related things when I'm not looking for them.

The Please Touch Museum is a children's museum and if I were little, this place would be a lot of fun to go to and spend hours. This so does not look like a museum where one brings their kids for an hour or two. I don't think that I would want to leave. They also have a playhouse theater with original performances and a carousel. Age wise, I think the museum is geared towards the toddler to kindergarten age group, at least it looks that way from the pictures that the website provides.

One of the things I like about the museum website is that for every listed exhibit, there is a list of children's books that fit the theme of the exhibit. It's a great idea especially for when kids find a particular exhibit really fun, parents can then bring home some of that fun in books dealing with similar topics. I wonder if these lists are provided at the exits of these exhibits for parents to take with them. Some of the books listed are for a slightly older age group than what I would have guessed based on the pictures, so far I've seen a book recommended for up to age 8, but there is nothing wrong with that in the slightest. It is just another way to expand one's imagination and knowledge. It also gets older children (maybe older siblings) involved with what the younger kids had fun with at the museum.

I am impressed by just about everything that I see on the website, and am further impressed by the food offerings in the Please Taste Cafe. Everything listed seems healthier than one would find in any other cafeteria like atmosphere for both kids and adults, and all of the prepared foods are nut free. It is also fully wheelchair accessible. Now a days, I think that these things are so important.

If you are in the Philadelphia area, I certainly recommend checking it out if you like what you see on their website.

They also have a blog, detailing the history of some of the more popular children's toys, which can be seen at http://www.toysandplay.blogspot.com/. The most recent post chronicles the history of the Easy Bake Oven.