The Trees of Grey Towers

Yesterday Lee took a few of us on a tour of the grounds and pointed out some noteworthy trees. Here are some of the ones I remembered.

European Copper Beech

Black Locust

Pitch Pine

Mulberry Tree (The Silk Worm Tree)

Apple Tree

Gifford Pinchot was a Radical: Thoughts on my First Tour

I gave my first tour of the Pinchot mansion yesterday. Even though I gave tours all last summer at Daniel Boone, I was still nervous. My co-worker Joe Blanco went with me in case I felt like I needed him, and fellow intern Tori also came along for moral support. The people who were on my tour were very nice, and, sort of like at Boone, were interested in what I was saying but were not historians themselves. I started out by giving them a little background on the house and on Gifford Pinchot. Then I took them inside the Great Hall and talked to them about the Pinchot family, the activities that would have went on in the room, and some of the furniture and artwork. I also gave a few anecdotes about Cornelia. I took them through the library, sitting room, and outside to the fingerbowl, reflecting pool, letterbox, and the vista as well.

The key message that the Forest Service wants its tour guides to get accross is about Gifford Pinchot's contributions to conservation. This is awkward for me for several reasons. First, I don't really like to be told what to talk about on my tour. I find Cornelia Pinchot and her feminism to be very interesting and I like to talk about that just as much as Gifford. Secondly, Gifford didn't live in the house until he was already finished with his career as a professional forester and chief of the Forest Service. He lived in the house when he was Governor. So you are using the house to interpret a time period that predates it. Still, I found numerous ways to incorperate information about Gifford's conservation legacy when I took my group through the house. At the elk heads mounted on the wall I reminded everyone of Gifford's policy of "wise use" of natural resources. I talked about his trip to the South Pacific and how he loved to learn about biology and nature. I talk about the clearcutting that was done around Milford and point out that because of Pinchot, the surrounding area is now full of vegetation.

I don't want to make it seem like I am not interested in Pinchot's conservationism. Pinchot talked about natural resources in a way that I wish politicians would talk about them today. He was opposed to big bussiness dominating natural resources and creating monopolies. He thought that the timber in America's forests belong to everyone and that all Americans shoudl benefit from it, not just the men who own the logging companies. In regards to the management of natural resources he wrote in his autobiography that it should achieve, "the greatest good, of the greatest number, in the long run." This quote makes me think, would anyone working in the current administration say that about oil or any other resource today?

I was talking to a volunteer at Grey Towers yesterday, and she said something that really helped me create my tour. I had been feeling all week like there was a disconnect between the house and the story the Forest Service wanted me to tell. It's a mansion full of antiques, own by a really rich family. I kept wondering how I was supposed to tie that in with Gifford's ideas about conservation. This volunteer, whose name was Rita, said, "Yes, the Pinchots had this huge house,and they were very rich, but look at what they did with it." They didn't go out and try to make themselves richer. They tried to make this country a better place for everyone. That is the focus I wanted my tour to have. I am still developing it, but hopefully as the summer goes on I can convey that message, and make people think a little bit about how natural resources were managed 100 years ago, and today.

The Pinchot Mansion

Blogger has really been screwing things up for me lately. Instead of allowing me to view the pictures that I upload while I am writing the post, it just puts them into html code, so I don't know where one begins and another ends. Thus all the pictures are at the beginning of the post, because I can't drag them to where I want them. They do go in backwards order, however, so you can follow along with me on my virtual tour by scrolling up to the appropriate picture whenever I reference it. The first picture of Joe at the fingerbowl is the photo I talk about last, and the last picture of the painting of James Pinchot is the photo I talk about first.





On Thursday I finally got a full-legnth tour (actually it was a bit longer and more in depth than normal) of the Pinchot Mansion. Initially I was not very excited about hearing the story of the Pinchots because I felt that they were just another rich family, and therefore there wouldn’t be any purpose in me learning about them. I study poor colonial Americans after all, why bother with rich nineteenth and twentieth century Americans anyway? I soon realized that the Pinchot story is not only very interesting, but it ties into many things that I have researched. As I was guided through the Pinchot house I began to wonder, how did these nineteenth century French immigrants view themselves, their ethnicity, and their place in American society? Were they Catholic? Did they experience any prejudice? I hope that throughout the summer I can answer some of these questions, and many more.

The best part of the tour, which a seasonal employee named Joe Blanco gave, was about Gifford Pinchot’s wife Cornelia. She was, even by 1920s standards, a progressive woman. She engaged in such unproper activities as wearing pants, gardening, and vacationing with a man before she was married. She was a suffragette who picketed against child labor, and she was an early advocate of birth control. She attempted to have a political career of her own, and although she was unsuccessful, she was extremely popular with the public and was credited with heling her husband win his two gubernatorial elections.

And now I am going to give you all my own quick tour of Grey Towers. For those of you who don’t know (which is probably most of you) Gifford Pichot was the father of the American Conservation movement, Chief of the National Forest Service under the Roosevelt Administration (TR) and a two-time governor of Pennsylvania.
Here is the main room of his house, called the grand hall. The house was constructed by Pinchot’s father, James, in 1886. This is the only room that Gifford and Cornelia didn’t make changes to when they moved in. This room was used for entertaining.


Here, in fact, is a picture of James Pinchot.



These are French doors located in the library. This was originally two rooms, but Cornelia decided that she liked it better as one big room. She was also responsible for putting in the doors, prior to her arrival they were only windows.



This terra cota camel is in the Pinchot’s dining room. The Pinchots liked to collect things from Asia. This camel dates from the 6th or 7th century.


The finger bowl is probably the biggest attraction of the tour. It was where the Pinchots dined with guests in the summer. Food was placed in wooden bowls and people would pass it to one another over the water. We simulate this with fake fruit and it is lots of fun.

I felt like I learned a lot from Joe’s tour. I will be expected to go on a few more to absorb more information and see how other employees conduct their own tours, so you all will be learning more about the Pinchots in the days to come.

School Groups

On my second and third days at Grey Towers I shadowed a few staff members doing programs with groups of second graders. I first watched a seasonal interpreter named Cora give one class a tour of the first floor of the mansion. As soon as the kids got off of the bus I could tell that they were more hyper than most kids that I had dealt with at Daniel Boone. I soon saw, however, that Cora ran quite a tight ship when she gave tours to school groups, and that besides being a little loud, the students were failry well behaved. Each class got a tour of the mansion, as well as a hike on our forestry trail.

At Daniel Boone it was easy to keep kids occupied. Start baking, spinning, or making candles, and you had their attention for the morning. Grey Towers is decidedly less kid friendly. There isn’t anything to touch. You can’t show them how the Pinchots made things like food or clothes because the Pinchots were rich enough to have other people do those things for them, and their kitchen has not been preserved anyway. The Pinchot mansion is full of antiques that we tell everyone up front they cannot touch. A house tour with school kids consists of us telling them about what would have went on in each room of the house, and then walking them through it in an orderly line.

The kids seemed to be quite amazed by the fingerbowl. They couldn’t believe that the Pinchots only used it to pass food. “They never swam in it?” the kids asked, as if they couldn’t see the use of having a pool that no one ever swam in.

We also took the kids on the forestry trail, which is a half mile long path through the woods that is designed to teach people a little about foresty. (I say this with hesitance, if you walked the trail without a guide you’d probably just think it was a normal trail). Lee, who guided the kids through this trail, was very good at teaching them about forestry, and about basic wildlife behavior. He started out by talking to the kids about how they got their food, and how animals get theirs. As we went along the path he pointed out things animals ate. Further along the trail he showed us how to take a core sample from a tree to count the rings and determine its age, and he let all of the kids turn the tool he used to bore into the tree. He also talked to the kids about the Yale Forestry Summer School which Pinchot hosted at Grey Towers for a few years.

The Farmhouse

I was nervous when I drove to Grey Towers on Monday morning. Even though I had worked in the field of public history before and knew what to expect (somewhat) from this job, the idea of living on site all summer made me a bit apprehensive. When I got to Grey Towers and Lori McKean, my boss, showed me around, I immediately felt better. Below are some photos I snapped that first day when Lori brought me to the farmhouse, which is where I will be living for the rest of the summer.

In the front yard there is this sweet creek, and a picnic table.

The porch is nice to sit and read on when the weather is warm.

Inside the farmhouse is somewhat modern. There is no internet access or cable television, but that just means that I will have lots of time to read, right? I have not begun to explore the area outside of the farmhouse very much, but it seems like there are lots of places to walk, bike, and there are a few hiking trails on Grey Towers’ property.

This Summer

I have not written in a while because I was just too darn busy with life, finishing up school (I graduated from Kutztown University this May with a BA in history) and planning for the future (I am starting an MA program at the University of Vermont this fall). This summer I am starting work at Grey Towers National Historic Site, which is administered by the National Forestry Service, as a seasonal interpretive intern. It's pretty much the same thing I did at Boone. Grey Towers was the summer home of Gifford Pinchot, the father of the forestry movement in the United States, and a Governor of Pennsylvania. I will not bore you with more details about Pinchot, the times he was living in, or the site, because in the coming weeks you will learn all you need to know.

So this summer's mission is similar to last summer's. I want to better understand the ways that history is presented to the public. I also am curious about how the public interacts with history. As you all probably know, the state of Pennsylvania is shutting down six historic sites this summer in order to cut costs. Everyone keeps saying that this is a bad thing, but why? What do historic sites provide to the American Public. My own personal view on this is that they educate people about history. For many people historic sites are one of the few ways they expand their knowledge about history after they graduate from high school. This summer I want to explore this topic and see what else historic sites do.