Tours

I started giving tours at Grey Towers last Thursday. Each day I give about two tours, and each one is a little different from the next. As people ask me questions or sometimes as I think of different things, the tour changes. Some people are not at all responsive. They don't ask questions. They act as if they are watching tv, passively staring back at you. Then there are the families with children, or worse, the grandparents with grandkids. During these tours you can tell that no one is paying attention to a word that you say. Not everyone is bad though. Some people get excited, really excited. There are some who love antiques and could give a tour themselves about the objects in the house. I focus on people and stories during my tours, so these people usually end up teaching me something. There are also people who are very interested in history on the tours, I like to call these people amateur historians. They are always appreciative and interested in what you are saying. Once and a great while you get a very special group of people on your tour: academics. I had an academic on my tour today, and that is what I am going to tell you all about.

I had to get into work before 8 am this morning for a school program. By 11 am I had already been there three hours, and had not had any time to sit down. My tours the day before had been a little rough, and so I had been apprehensive all morning and had been devising ways that I could improve. The two people on my tour, husband and wife, were in their forties. I usually begin my tours by asking people about where they are from and why they came to Grey Towers, but they began asking me about myself before I could even begin. When I told them about my area of interest and my graduate school plans at UVM they were excited. They lived just two hours from Burlington VT, they explained. When I finally did get to ask them about themselves they told me that the man studied environmental history and that they had specifically come to Milford to see Grey Towers. This was unusual because most people come to Milford for the trendy home decor shops and restaurants and visit Grey Towers as an afterthought.

Since I knew that the couple was interested primarily in the life and conservation work of Gifford Pinchot, that was what I focused the tour on. They asked me so many questions and were so enthusiastic they I hardly stuck to the usual structure of my tour at all. They were especially interested in the Pinchot's role in the establishment of the Yale School of Forestry. I told them all I knew (which isn't that much) and I gave them directions to the model tent that interprets the Yale School of Forestry's summer field school which took place at Grey Towers for a few years. As we walked throughout the house and talked I realized that a lot of the questions that they were asking were answered in an issue of the journal Pennsylvania History that focused on the Pinchots. I told them that at the end of the tour I would get them the volume and issue number of the issue so that they could track it down. When I went into the ticket tower to look it up I told a coworker of mine about what I was doing and he said that we had lots of copies of that issue of Pennsylvania History and that I could just give them one. So I let them into the Letterbox with me, where we keep all of our books and pamphlets, and gave them a copy. This seemed to really make everybody's day, and I was glad that I could help this man with his research.

On tours, there are certain people that you develop an instant rapport with. They don't have to be academics, or even know very much about what you are talking about. This couple was special because the three of us got along very well, and they were extremely knowledgeable about the subject my tour was covering. It's people like this who make interpreting history to the public so rewarding.