Enshrining Past Lives: House Museums and the Lessons of Objects

Abstract

These two books tell many tales. Together they span a century of America's social history from the Civil War to the 1950s: the dates are bounded in Patricia West's Domesticating History by the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association's possession of George Washington's home in 1860 and by the establishment of Booker T. Washington's birthplace as a National Monument in 1956. Within this span, Laura Bragg's story unfolds, in Louise Anderson Allen's biography, in the early decades of the twentieth century. The books explicitly tell the tales of the politics-local, regional, national-behind the scenes in the establishment and growth of a sample of American museums. They also explore the changing role of women in the early history of America's museums. They recount collectively a tale of the evolving professionalization (and masculinization) of the museumadministration business. They tell tales of class differences in the creation and use of public museums, differences that still pertain today. And they recount the story of the sheer relentless hard work involved in establishing and maintaining a mission that can guide a museum. But one interesting tale told here has to do with the role of house museums and other community-based museums in enshrining past lives in frozen moments of goodness. That is part of the job of history and art museums, whose collections are high-quality and/or telling artifacts from the past and whose programs aim to tell us about how those objects lived and what they meant at the time. House museums, and variations such as rooms and period places like the restored Colonial Williamsburg or Lincoln's Old Salem Village, are even more explicitly dedicated to portraying a past-usually but not always a somewhat-distant, premodern, past. I have noticed in many county historical museums a tendency to focus the