A Newsworthy Update

During a previous entry, I wrote about how the Touro Synagogue had to stop giving tours because of economic troubles.

Today, it was announced that tours would resume at Touro Synagogue with the help of volunteers. That story can be found here off of the (NBC) turn to 10 website.

Take home message of the story (other than Yay!): VOLUNTEER.

National Council on Public History Conference- Part 1

Last Thursday and Friday, I attended the National Council on Public History Conference at the Biltmore in Providence, RI. For me it was great because I live only 1/2 hour away and could take the bus, which was doubly great because I get the bus for free because I am a student who goes to a school that worked a deal out with RIPTA for free statewide bus rides. So on Thursday I took the bus to Kennedy Plaza, which is literally across the street from the Biltmore. Unfortunately I missed the bus back home that I wanted to take and had to wait an hour for the next one in the drizzle, but it all worked out. I think beyond that stressful experience, the only lowlight of the conference was the weather. It rained, a lot. During one of the conference sessions, I could hear thunder and watch lightning. When it wasn't raining, it was drizzly and very foggy. I felt bad for those who went on tours and for those who wanted to explore the city.

Beyond that I think the conference was a resounding success, elsewhere* it has been reported that 603 people registered, the most so far for NCPH. It was great for me, a student, to mingle with others (including many other students, which speaks loudly for the future of public history). I also got to see the latest in public history related books and sit in on sessions showing the future of public history. There was so much offered that it made deciding on what to see difficult, but at I learned in an attempt to go to one session which was full, there was something else that I could go to without worrying if I would have an interest in it.

I had very much been looking forward to Session 8, called "Remembering Slavery," dealing with how different sites portray the history of slavery and how audience views of that history has changed over time. I took a class on the African American Diaspora my first semester at Salve Regina (technically my junior year after transferring) and found it fascinating. However, even with my arriving quite early for the session, which I figured would be crowded, there was no room and people were already sitting in the doorway. Disappointedly, I walked to Session 9, "Commemorating Times of Change: Innovative Approaches to Public History at the Presidential Libraries of Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan".

I've never given Presidential Libraries much thought beyond knowing that they are libraries which happen to contain the particular President's writings, papers and correspondence, while they do contain these things, they also feature exhibits on the specific President or about the time in which they held office. I found myself to be quite interested in the topics presented, which involved how do you keep the public involved with the particular past (something that most historiy museums face, if not all). What makes this so vital to the Presidential libraries, however, is that as time goes by people become increasingly separated from the events and the President himself, for example when school children come to view exhibits.

The first presentation was about FDR, entitled: "Action and Action Now" FDR's First 100 Days. In addition to giving a brief history on the events surrounding his election, we were presented with information regarding the challenges that were faced in creating the exhibit and how these were ultimately dealt with. In a sentence, it was the challenge of presenting the scale and scope of the crisis that was not a recitation of a history made stale by the cliches of Alphabet soup (brought on by the different things he created during his administration: WPA, CCC etc). In order to do this, they thought it best to create a narrative into five chapters of his administration, ranging from a room meant to give the feel of his radio "fireside chats" to installing scaffolding to bring about the effect that FDR was responsible for many building projects (and was often shown as a construction worker in cartoons that contained scaffolding on buildings). They also acknowledged that this era is a period of contested history and rather than promote or ignore one side, the decision was made to frame the debate and provoke a dialogue among the audience, a move I think is vital to have in a museum atmosphere. Initial comments of the exhibit were along the lines of how people had it rough during the Great Depression, but as we have entered our own economic crisis, many comments are about how the times are similar to today. It is because of this crisis that those at the library decided to leave this temporary exhibit on display until the end of this year.

The second presentation was on the JFK library, which gets an amazing 6 million visitors a year, many of whom are school children or foreign. This exhibit was created to look at events through the JFK's eyes and follows a chronological path of his administration. The exhibit even contains a replica of the stage used during the first televised Presidential debate. The goal of the exhibit was to strike a balance for those who witnessed the history with those who know relatively little about what took place so that all who go to the library have an engaging experience with history that is still meaningful today. The presentation also mentioned how size constraints have limited the amount of things that can be shown in the exhibit, and because of this events like the Vietnam War are left out of the story. They also mentioned how temporary special exhibits are highly successful and allow them to portray other facets of JFK's Presidency, for example they once displayed Jackie Kennedy's dresses. Things like this bring a whole new audience to the library (always important). There is also an extensive website for the library that can be found here. Interestingly, I learned that this library is also Kennedy's memorial, which is why there is not on in D.C.

The third Presidential Library is Ronald Regan's whose educational mission is to "Engage, Excite, Educate" a very good mission if you ask me. It houses 55 million papers of his and the exhibit is currently in a redesign where context is being added along with thematic presentations involving things like the Cold War. One of the interesting ideas the presentation was the Great Communicator Files, which shows the process of creating a speech. Another was the opening of the Air Force One Discovery Center which is geared to audiences at a fifth grade level and was created to provide room for debate among exhibit goers.

What I originally was disappointed in going to, I came out an hour and forty five minutes later being quite satisfied by this new information. If I'm ever in the area of one, I will totally go to a Presidential Library.



Other semi-conference related, but not so specific things I learned are: everyone has presentation troubles in some way, like verbal crutches (umm, uh, and um uh... unnecessary words that fill up empty space), going over time limits when not reading a script, and not having tested powerpoint images and movies prior to presentation time (sometimes your pictures are way too small to properly see in the audience). As a student, I see this a lot, and am glad it happens in the professional world as well. While certainly not desired by any means, it makes me feel better that it pretty much happens to everyone, as I am guilty for doing these on occasion as well. I continue to maintain that it is important to work on these elements (especially making sure that everything is working on powerpoint as that happens to be a pet peeve of mine).

* elsewhere is the homepage of the NCPH which is located at http://www.ncph.org

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.

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.

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.

Kingscote Photos

I knew I had some photos of Kingscote's exterior, and I found them last night. I apologize that they do not consist of a shot showing the proper massing or even a majority of one facade. These are the architectural elements that I enjoyed. So I thought I would share.

This is a shot of the entrance.

And another shot of the entrance, but from a different angle.

A detail of the roof line above the entrance.

And one last shot. I just love the architectural details.

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I had also wanted to mention in my previous post that my favorite house museum from my childhood is the Gilbert Stuart Birthplace in Saunderstown, Rhode Island. Gilbert Stuart is a famous portrait painter, best known for his portrait of George Washington which is featured on the dollar bill.

The site also consists of a snuff mill, gristmill, and a fish run. In 2007, the Hammond Gristmill started working again for the first time in about 100 years thanks to the efforts of the many who wanted to see it happen. It is definitely a sight to see and I highly recommend it.

My Favorite House Museum

Today is the first installment of my favorite museums. Today I feature my favorite museum house, Kingscote in Newport, Rhode Island.

Owned and operated today by The Preservation Society of Newport County, Kingscote is my favorite because unlike many other house museums, although certainly not all, everything in Kingscote is original to the house. Nothing has been brought in to add to the house or create an attitude. I always wonder how many people realize that the things in the Breakers, for example, were not necessarily owned by the Vanderbilt family. Many of these things are representations of what the family could have owned. In no way am I saying that this makes touring the Breakers not worth it. It is a fabulous mansion and totally worth the cost of a tour and the crowds. Look everywhere it is gorgeous both in its exterior architecture and its interior opulence.

Just make some time to visit Kingscote as well if and when you come to Newport. It is a great example of the Gothic Revival and as I have already mentioned, everything in the house goes with the house. The entire collection was left with the house by the last descendant of the King family. The Preservation Society became the property's owner in 1972. The collection contained within the house is large and amazing, but in some cases results in a little bit of object crowding. The tour groups are smaller however and the tour runs at a slower pace, allowing one to appreciate much of the collection and tour guides do a wonderful job pointing out the intricacies of certain objects that might get missed with only one glance around the room.

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Other favorite museum houses:

Smith's Castle in Wickford, RI - the history of the Smith family alone is enough to tour the house. It was also a dairy farm for sometime before becoming a house museum. It is also situated on a beautiful plot of land near the water, an area with a history of it's own.

The Whitehorne House in Newport, RI - owned by the Newport Restoration Foundation, it is a house museum in the sense that it is a house, but is more the home of a wonderful furniture collection. It also has a very interesting restoration story with the pictures to prove it. Well worth a visit if you are spending some time in Newport.

Edith Wharton's The Mount in Lenox, MA - this might be my favorite of the house museums that I have not yet visited but are on my list. The website makes it look beautiful, a very rags to riches in terms of preservation and restoration. It was recently saved from foreclosure and an uncertain future by the tireless efforts of those who work and love the Mount. I have been wanting to get here for quite some time; maybe I will see you there.