Friday, May 30, 2008

Cornbread Eighteenth Century Style

Wednesdays at Daniel Boone are typically when we have school groups come that want to take field trips. This week we had two small groups of fourth graders come, and we showed them how to make candles, bake cornbread in a bake oven, and then we gave them a tour of the Boone house. I observed my co-worker Janelle doing the cornbread activity with the kids and I took pictures so that the Homestead could have some proof of all the nice, hands on things they do with kids.


First we set up a table with all the ingredients needed in the Bertolet Cabin, becuase that's the building closest to the bake oven.



When the kids came in we talked to them about food preparation and preservation in the eighteenth century. We explained what implements were used and how much cooking was done over a hearth. We also explained what a bakeoven was and how it was used.


And in case you don't know a bakeoven looks like a little house, like a smokehouse. Inside there is a big brick cavity that goes back several feet. Inside of this cavity you build a fire and let the bricks heat up. You let the fire burn down to coals, then scrape out the coals, and (here comes the amazing part) the bricks hold enough heat to bake whatever it si you put in there. In the eighteenth century you would probably do all of your baking for one week at on one day, and you could put a lot of pies and bread in five feet of oven space. You retrieve the food when it is done with a thing that kind of looks like a pizza paddle.


Back to the story. We then had each kid come up and at a different ingredient to the cornbread batter.



And stir.

We put the bread in the over and baked it for abotu twenty minutes. It came out a little black on the bottom, but such is prery inevitable when you're backing in a contraption like that and you aren't acustomed to doing it everyday like women in the eighteenth century would have been. The kids got to eat the cornbread afterwards. I tried a piece, and I thought it was very good, although I think I'll stick to my Jiffy corn muffin mix.

Thursday, May 29, 2008

My first tour




On Sunday gave my first tour of the Boone House. I went on two practice tours with each of the other interns, and gave a different part of the tour each time. Then I decided that I was ready to give a complete tour of the house. The tours always begin on the lawn of the Boone House, and you give an introduction and tell the people who the Boones were, and give a brief history of the house. Next you bring them down into the spring cellar, and talk about food preservation and how the Boones would have gotten along in such a small one room log cabin with thirteen people. Then you go back up and into the house, beginning with the English Parlor. This is a typical English setup with English Furniture. Then into the kitchen, then the German parlor, and the master bedroom. Then it’s upstairs, and into the spinning room, slave’s quarters, and two other three other bedrooms.
How do I feel after giving my first tour? Really it is not all that hard. People expect you to be the leader, you are the tour guide, and sort of the expert on the subject matter at hand. Most people listen pretty attentively and ask questions that show you that they are interested. I felt that the hardest part of the tour was the introduction that took place on the lawn of the Boone House. There you are just talking to people right off the top of your head. Once you get inside the house, all of the furnishings act as prompts to jog your memory and give you things to talk about. I pride myself on my public communication skills, and I really tried hard to elaborate on things enough to make myself understood. I think that people were following me because all of the questions I was asked were regarding things other than what I had already explained, so I knew that people were not confused by what I was saying. One woman even came into the gift shop later on and told me that she had enjoyed my tour.

The Second Floor Video

Today we shot a short film in the Boone house. This film is intended for people to watch who are unable to walk up the stairs in the Boone house. The stairs are very steep and narrow, and most people have some difficulty with them.



This is Emma. She agreed to be an actress in our movie, and play the role of a little girl in the eighteenth century. Isn’t she adorable?

We also shot a few seens with an "indentured servant" AKA my co-worker faith.

Here she is doing some laundry.

We also did a few shots in the attic of the Bertolet cabin. We set up a child's bed to try to give people the idea that that was where the kids would be sleeping.

Opening up






Everyday at Daniel Boone begins with opening up the buildings and setting them up so that people can look inside. The opening up procedure also includes feeding the animals, which in the summer consists of the horses and the cat. The sheep eat enough grass in the summer to warrant us not feeding them. Reds, our male horse, is 25 and arthritic, but still very aggressive. We have to lock him in the barn with his food and then feed Dancer, or else he will try to eat both of their food.



The cat doesn’t have a name and no one knows where it came from. Like most farm cats it just showed up one day and has stayed ever since. I like to give the cat a handful of food in the morning, and usually when it’s eating she’s eating she’s in the mood to be petted.
We also give the horses water in buckets, although there is also a stream running through their pasture.


Here's Red eating his breakfast.

Oh yes, and did I mention we have geese? They just eat grass and whatever else it is that geese eat.


We then walk around and unlock all of the other buildings, which include the black smith’s shop, barn, and Bertolet cabin. In this cabin we put up gates in front of the door so people can see in but can’t go in and touch anything.


Friday, May 23, 2008

Quill Pens, Ink, and Communications in the Eighteenth Century








On Tuesday night before I left the homestead, one of the full-time employees named Marcia told me that Ryan, another intern, and I would be doing an activity on quill pen writing with two classes of fourth graders on Wednesday, May 21. She gave me a sheet that explained the objectives of the activity and how to set things up. The next day Ryan and I were in the crafts building getting ready when we saw this.


Exeter township school district. I have to admit that I was nervous when I saw the bus pull up. The only time I had ever been assigned the difficult task of explaining history to kids was at the Pennsylvania German Cultural Heritage Center when I had to help my boss give two tours to forty kindergarteners. The whole thing went over well, but I was left with a feeling that the task of teaching young children history was difficult, especially when you’re a pointy-headed academic like me who wants to tie complicated themes like millennialism into everything. In my mind I rehearsed what I was going to say to the kids. I thought it was important to talk to them about literacy in colonial America. I wanted them to know that many people did receive at least a few years of education, and those that didn’t also could have been taught at home by their parents. I thought it was important to dispel the notion that eighteenth century Americans were all illiterate, save the fifty five men at the constitutional convention. I also wanted to get an idea across to them which is actually fairly new to my own discovery. It is highly probable that more colonial Americans could read than write. Historians have no real way to gauge this, but many speculate that women in particular were apart of these circumstances. They point out that widows ran their husbands’ businesses after they died and so must have been literate, but still were unable to sign their own names. I digress! Back to the quill pen lesson.





The first class came in and Ryan and I gave them a talk about the way to make quill pens and ink, and I also talked about literacy. The kids seemed more interested in dipping their quills into the Dixie cups of ink we had set out on the table. We suggested that the students write letters, but told then they could do whatever they wanted. I was surprised at how enthusiastic most of the kids became. Some of them completed three letters in the span of a half hour. Others drew pictures of cows, rabbits, cats, and dogs. One boy did a very nice abstract piece, and when I told him, “That looks very modern,” he said, “I know.”


Next the kids were told to bring their letters to me so I could blot them. This is the process by which you remove the excess ink from the paper, and it basically just entails pressing down with a paper towel. (We made blotter books that were paper towels and cardboard.) I folded the letters for them and then they took them to Ryan whose job it was to melt ceiling wax over a burning candle and let drops fall onto the letter so that they would be sealed. We also had stampers there to press into the wax and make a design.


With the second class we had basically the same results. I noticed that with this class the teacher and chaperones were much less involved with the project and helping the kids, but they all were still enthusiastic and made multiple projects. At the end of it all I thought that this project in particular was a good one to help convey history to kids because it forces them to do something that they do everyday (write) as a person living during the eighteenth century would have done it. I think they can connect with that a little bit better than with other activities like candle making for example, that they would probably never do in their normal lives. Still I think that activities like this just exaggerate the weird aspects of history. They encourage people to think of the past in sensationalist terms, to marvel at the backwardness of past societies, and stress the discontinuity between the past and the present. I am very interested in this aspect of how the public views the past and I hope to explore it more as my internship goes on. I think it is part of the reason why Amish is a household word and people like to go to reenactments so much.


Thursday, May 22, 2008

Daniel Boone was a Quaker?

Indeed he was. Or at least his parents were. His father eventually got read out of meeting, and there is no evidence to suggest that Daniel adhered to the Quaker faith, or that he gave much thought to religion in general. However, the meeting house where the Boones worshiped was about a mile down the road from their farm. The meeting house that I visited on Tuesday would not be the one that the Boones frequented. They probably worshiped in a log structure. This meeting house was built after the Boones had already left the area.



The Exeter Friends Meeting House was built in 1757, although the first Quakers came to the Oley Valley in 1717. My mentor Jim Lewars offered to take me to the meeting house on Tuesday, May 20, and really, I had no idea what to expect. The extent of my knowledge of the Quakers came from an article I read called “The World and William Penn,”by Edmund S. Morgan. Nevertheless I was excited. From what little I knew about the Quakers I had a few ideas about what the meeting house would look like. The Quakers don’t believe in decorating their churches (and I really don’t think that the Friends would call their meeting houses churches), so I was prepared to not see any crosses or alters. I also had a general idea of how quaker meetings took place. I knew that the Quakers don’t have an ordained clergy, and that at their meetings they allow anyone to speak.

What I found when we got inside the building didn’t surprise me. The walls, pews, everything was very plain. None of the wood was painted. The plaster walls were white. Nearly everything in the house was original. The benches were made in 1757, and I relished being able to sit on furniture that old. (Just try doing that in any museum!) The only signs of modernity were the electric lights, pamphlets, and some art projects left on a bench that children had been working on. They were collages that were drawn and decorated with words like “peace,” “simplicity,” and “the I have a dream speech.” Jim talked to us for about a half an hour and I learned quite a bit about the Quakers in that span of time. He talked about the Quaker marriage ceremony, the church structure, the way meetings progress, and he gave us a brief overview of Quaker history.But what really caught my attention was when he started talking about the Quaker church organization.

Jim explained that in the eighteenth century the Quaker churches were organized very differently from the German Lutheran and Reformed churches that were in the area, mainly because the German Lutheran and Reformed churches consisted of several leaderless congregations that were not organized at all. The Quakers however, assigned each meeting to a regional meeting that met once a month to discuss the business, changes, ideas, and day- to- day concerns of the churches. It was here that decisions were made about marriages, expulsions, transfer certificates, etc. I was surprised to hear about this apparent organization within the Quaker church because I had read for so long about how disorganized other religious groups in Pennsylvania were. As I already mentioned, the Lutheran and Reformed churches were practically leaderless, and they were being infiltrated by Moravians who posed as Lutheran and Reformed ministers. Henry Melchoir Muhlenberg and Michael Schlatter were sent to provide leadership and under their direction the churches finally created American governing bodies in the form of the Lutheran Ministerium and the Reformed Synod. I think that this subject could offer an interested researcher several good questions to answer in a paper. First of all, was the Quaker form of organization something that they created once they came to America, or was it already in place when they left Britain? Secondly, how did the Quakers respond to religious movements in the eighteenth century that threatened church organization and coherence? I'm specifically thinking of the Great Awakening here. I don't know if I'll ever get around to writing a paper in either of these topics but they are food for thought for anybody interested in the religious history of colonial America.

Sunday, May 11, 2008

About Me and My Internship



My name is Mary Lord and I will be completing my last semester at Kutztown University this fall with a BA in history and a minor in Pennsylvania German studies. My time at Kutztown has exposed me to many areas and time periods of history but I am hoping to study colonial and revolutionary America in graduate school. I am primarily concerned with social and intellectual history, and am in the process of writing an honors thesis on Thomas Paine's Common Sense and the print culture of revolutionary Philadelphia. I hope to one day earn a PhD. so I can teach at the college level and publish. Understanding my background will be key to understanding my experience as I record it in this blog because I am an academic historian who is going to be working in the field of public history. This is not a new position for me to be in because, as you will soon see, my previous jobs have all been in the field of public history.

My work in the field of public history began in the winter of 2007 when I served an internship with the Pennsylvania German Society. This organization, founded in 1891, is the publishing arm of Pennsylvania German Studies, and its members have included such scholars as Don Yoder, Preston Barba, and Arthur Graeff. At the Pennsylvania German Society I cataloged the materials of former PGS preisdent Richard Druckenbrod, created an annotated listing for the Society's journal, and performed a myriad of other tasks. Overall, the experience was extremely rewarding and I still maintain good relations with the Society and its members. In fact, I will be presenting a paper at their annual meeting on June 7th (more about this later). Last summer I had another experience with public history, this time in a corporate archive. I took inventory of the map collection of the Reading Anthracite Company located in Pottsville, Pennsylvania. Both of these experiences made me realize that I wanted to be more involved with the communication of history to the public rather than working rather solitarily in an archive, and that was what inspired me to apply for an internship with the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission.

The PHMC is the institution the state of Pennsylvania uses to preserve and interpret its historic sites. It's the organization that is responsible for those blue historic marker plaques that you drive past every now and then, and it runs sites like Ephrata cloister and the Landis Valley Museum. In January of 2008, at the behest of Dr. Michael Gabriel, chair of the history department at Kutztown, I applied for a Keystone Internship with the PHMC. This internship is highly competitive, as only 13 are awarded each year. In late March I found out that I had been awarded the internship and had been assigned to a position at Daniel Boone Homestead, located in Birdsboro PA. If you want for information on Daniel Boone you can go to http://www.danielboonehomestead.org/.

What will I be doing at Daniel Boone? From the information I have gotten so far it looks like a little bit of everything. There is a required reading list that is supposed to prepare me to be a tour guide at the site. Jim Lewars, my boss and internship mentor as the PHMC terms it, told me that I will be helping out with events, historical demonstrations, and re-enactments. I will also be expected to do things like answer the phone, clean, run the register at the gift shop, and feed the animals. The PHMC also has a few expectations for my internship. They require that I keep a journal, (part of the reason I started this blog) and give a presentation at the end of the summer on everything that I learned while working at the homestead. I am also required to go to PHMC seminars, although I have been told that Daniel Boone interns usually tele-comute these.

What do I want to get out of my internship at Daniel Boone? Obviously I want to learn more about the history of the site and the area. The Daniel Boone Homestead interprets the history of the Boones, the other families who lived on the site, and the history of the people in the surrounding area (so basically Pennsylvania German history). I would like to fit the history I learn at Daniel Boone into the wider knowledge I have about the Pennsylvania Germans. But there is much more that I want to get out of this internship than just that. I have become fascinated with the many ways in which history is used and presented to the public. Anyone who has studied history at the college level knows that the history of academia is not the history people watch on the history channel. It's not that the history channel's approach is bad, I think it is highly entertaining and really helps to educate a lay audience, it's just different. Academic historians are concerned with larger trends in history and ideas. They ask questions like, "What was the impact of millenialism on the American Revolution?" Public history does not always ask such complex questions, and why should it? People who take their kids to historic sites when they go on weekend trips don't care about the impact of millenialism on the American Revolution. They care about other things, and it is these other things that I am most interested in.

In all of my past experiences working in the field of public history I have noticed one thing about what lay audiences are interested in when presented with a historical topic. They want to understand how people who lived "back then" got through the day. I will tell you a story to illustrate my point. It's a humid Tuesday in early September 2007. I'm gathering eggs in the chicken coop at the Pennsylvania German Cultural Heritage Center which is a preserved farm that you should really check out if you haven't been there yet. There's a group of about forty kindergartners getting a tour of the site. One of the kids' fathers walks up to me as I'm leaving the coop with two eggs and asks, "About how many eggs do you get out of those chickens?" I tell him that a chicken will lay about one egg per day. He then said something I was not at all expecting. "Well, how many chickens did they have? They must have needed a lot of chickens." He was referring to the people who lived on the farm back in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I was stumped. Stunned really. Never in my entire academic career had I been asked that question. Never in all of the time I spent pondering historical topics (and I ponder quite a bit as you will see) had I ever bothered to ask that question. I had never come across the answer in anything that I had read. And NEVER had we EVER asked that question in any of the history classes that I had taken at Kutztown. We were too busy discussing millenialism and the Revolution again.

That curious suburban dad gave me an epiphany. He made me realize that people who lack advance degrees in history don't care so much about big ideas and themes. They just want something they can relate to. They want to know that people living in the past had to budget with chickens the same way that they budget their salary. The purpose of me telling that story was to allow you to see exactly what I want to get out of Daniel Boone. I want to understand what lay people care about when it comes to history. And not only that, I want to see how I can apply all of that academic historical knowledge I've been steeping myself in for the past three years to this lay audience. I want to explore the different ways to communicate history to the public, to bring in the big themes while still satisfying that craving people have to know how in the world the people of the past ever got by.