The deceptively unreal experience of visiting “real” historic sites

It’s interesting to see how these buildings were constructed and to hear about life in the mid-18th century, but I came away somewhat unsettled: I was looking at a historic site, but not really. When I talk to re-enactors, I think of what they say about their “life” and their “times”, but I also think of them as contemporaries for whom this is work: what kind of work is does he act? What are they paid? How long per year do they work?

Authenticity usually takes a back seat to experience. A neighborhood in downtown Salem is dedicated to the famous witch hysteria of the late 17th century, filled with displays of nooses, torture devices, screams and people in period costumes, but we quickly notes that none of the buildings are from the period. 1690s and that the events of the Salem witch trials took place in a separatist town that called itself Danvers (to avoid the stigma of the trials), about five miles away. One can head to the local Peabody Essex Museum to see more than 550 actual documents from the era of the Salem Witch Trials, but downtown Salem itself is just a theme park. Visitors learn something about the period of the witch trials and can have fun, but they cannot trust their own eyes.

Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia is closer to Fort Louisburg, a 175-acre historic site dedicated to recounting and demonstrating late 18th-century life in the new nation. About 100 of the site’s many buildings date from the last quarter of the 1700s, while several hundred others are reconstructed to resemble homes and workplaces from that era, based on documentary and archaeological evidence.

Two connected museums focus on 18th-century American folk art and decorative art, but it’s in and around the other buildings that the curators’ extensive research bears fruit. Based on probate records, letters and other inventories, Colonial Williamsburg curators know “what furniture was in which room, where that furniture was made, what type of tableware was in the dining room “. From soil samples, they know for sure which plants were growing around the houses. And when they don’t have complete information, they “look back” to determine what probably happened somewhere. Period objects and some occasional reproductions of furniture are the majority, but the houses also have many fully authenticated objects for visitors. “A large percentage of our visitors want to know that this clock, this chair, this table was there 200 years ago or more,” says Ronald Hurst, vice president of collections, conservation and museums at Colonial Williamsburg. “We are committed to authenticity. »

There are also reenactors throughout Colonial Williamsburg, dressed in period costumes and speaking to visitors about “current” (18th century) events while working in period occupations (basketmaker, blacksmith, brickmaker, carpenter, farmer, milliner, shoemaker). , wigmaker and carpenter, among others) and using reproduction tools and materials (copied exactly from those in the collection). We see what a historical period “looked like” without really seeing a historical moment, a different but not necessarily lesser type of truth.

My experience at Fort Louisbourg or Colonial Williamsburg consisted largely of conversations I had with re-enactors. No doubt what they told me was based on someone’s research, but it’s very different from reading someone’s letters from that era. At Lincoln Cottage in Washington, D.C., a museum established in 2008 in the soldier’s home that Abraham Lincoln used as a summer home during his presidency, each piece of furniture on display is a guess at the kind of thing that was likely to have been there. “We realized early on that we weren’t going to find the original pieces that were here when Lincoln was president,” says Erin Carlson Mast, the Cottage’s now-retired executive director. “There was no Lincoln period furniture on site. There was no contemporary inventory of what was here, nor any sketches or photographs of the interior. As a result, the Cottage was furnished in the style of the period “using period furniture and a high degree of guesswork”.

After a while I get tired of things that could have been there but weren’t and I want the real thing: This This is where Lincoln sat and read the battlefield reports. This An 18th century letter reveals what someone was thinking at the time, and This is the type of writing they learned at that time. The real thing focuses my mind, unlike replicas and vintage items.

At the Petersen House, across the street from Ford’s Theater and where Lincoln was taken after being shot by John Wilkes Booth, no furniture was there at the time either. Everything visible is period, but unlike the Cottage, the National Park Service, which owns and operates the Petersen House as well as Ford’s Theater, has had the benefit of numerous photographs revealing the furnishings and decorations of the house in era. “We used the photographs to find period pieces that looked like the originals – the same wood, the same siding – and I think we narrowed it down to a T,” says site manager William Cheek of the Park Service.

At Ford’s Theatre, no interior is original; the presidential box was recreated from photographs taken at the time by Mathew Brady. Looking at old things, or things that are made to look like old things, is not uninteresting, but our minds are directed in different directions than when we examine genuine objects. If we see period furniture or 19th-century reproductions in a room Lincoln visited, we are likely to think about how people lived at the time and notice the style of the furnishings and the type of decorative carving on the wooden tables, frames and chairs that were in vogue. at the time, rather than thinking about the experience of the 16th president seeking moments of relaxation and contemplation at one of the most important moments in American history.

German writer Walter Benjamin heralded the growing ubiquity of replicas in his 1936 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” The widespread availability of photographic reproductions of paintings and other works of art breaks the hold that tradition and custom – what we call authenticity – had on progress, allowing the modern mind to take ideas new and old, to mix them, to reshuffle them and to form a new idea. entire. Ultimately, Benjamin put into words what Braque and Picasso expressed in painting under the name of Cubism. “What withers in the age of mechanical reproduction,” writes Benjamin, “is the aura of the work of art. ” It’s hard to disagree with this logic, and we can be grateful for the readily available illustrated art books, posters, and other photographic materials that allow us to “know” works of art (not to mention landscapes, buildings, clothing and even foreign landscapes). the topography of the Moon or Pluto) without having to travel personally to see them. Our knowledge and our ability to use what we have learned are thus increased and advanced.

However, the aura counts, and for good reason. The presence of a historical object focuses the mind on it, its creator, and its context in a way that replicas, reproductions, and photographs of it cannot. I am in no way condemning the experiential historical site – how else could I know what a certain era in the past looked and felt like? – but I recognize it as a kind of truth that is only somehow true.

Daniel Grant is the author of “The Business of Being an Artist.”