Thoughts on Giving Tours

I have been giving tours of the mansion and grounds at Grey Towers now for a few weeks and have been giving a lot of thought to the way I approach tours, and the ways in which I can make people understand the history I am presenting to them. Overall I have been a little bit disapointed with people's impatience, lack of attentiveness, and all out rude behavior on tours. I never gave a tour at Daniel Boone where someone in the group asked me to hurry up, or talked on their cell phone during a tour. These things have happened at Grey Towers.

The first thing I began to wonder was why? Was it the way I was giving a tour, or was it just that the people on the tour were in a rush or had other things on their minds? I think it was a little of both. The tour is supposed to last 50 minutes, but can easily last an hour if some people ask questions. This is just too long of a time to have to try to hold someone's attention. Most people have an attitude of "I'm not in college anymore, why should I listen to a lecture?" The other reasons for visitor's bad behavior is the location of Grey Towers. It's in Milford, the Pocono Mts., and the Delware Water Gap National Recreation Area is right near by. People have other things that they are doing while they are on vacation. They have dinner reservations, canoe trips, and hotels to check into. I think that at Daniel Boone they knew that the site was pretty large and they built more time into their schedules for it. At Grey Towers people think that they'll just poke around the house and the gardens for a few minutes and then be on their way.

So how do I make my tour more interesting for people? How do I hold their attention? I can't shorten my tour because I am not the one who determined how long it had to be in the first place, my boss did. I have experimented with a few things over the past few days with mixed results. I usually give a fairly long introduction (10 min.) outside of the house that fills visitors in on the construction of the house, how Gifford's father made his money, and I give an overvview of GP's life and work as a forester and governor. For a few tours I decided to keep the intro short and give more of that information once we got into the Great Hall (the first room of the house that is included on the tour). I thought that maybe it would keep people from getting too antsy to get inside the house. What I found instead was that people got very anxious to get out of the Great Hall after spending about 15 minutes in it, and they were getting even more impatient, and were less likely to ask questions about things in the room. I also tried to simplify my message. I spelled out my key messages right in the beginning of the tour by saying "these are the two things I want you to come away understanding after the tour today." I think that this helps, but most people understand the themes whether you come out and say it or not. I am also toying with the idea of using photos in the introduction to grab people's attention in the beginning of the tour.

We'll see how these innovations go. If they don't work, I will be convinced that as a nation we have collectively lost our attention spans, and that on our vacations we are in such a hurry to do all of the activities that we've planned that we don't take time to enjoy ourselves.

Biographies of Gifford Pinchot

I am currently reading by Gifford Pinchot and the Making of Modern Environmentalism by Char Miller. He is a history prof at Trinity University, and a senior fellow of the Pinchot institute. The book is probably the best bio of GP out there, much better than Pinchot's autobiography Breaking New Ground. If you're interested in environmental history you should check it out.

A Blast from the Past: Hunting for Samuel Boone's House

Every now and then I will post some photos from historic sites and other adventures I went on when I didn't have time to blog as much as I do now. Below are photos and some narration from when my friends Ryan, Nat, and I explored the outer limits of the Daniel Boone Homestead last December (it was actually the day before New Years and I was house sitting in Macungie for two weeks remember?). We found the foundation of Samuel Boone's house.
We met up at Daniel Boone and had a happy reunion with old coworkers and animal friends.



We started out on the horse trail because that was the only map that existed of that part of the homestead, and Jim gave us a rough idea of where he thought the foundation was in relation to the horse trails.


It was muddy.


We also got lost a little.


But in general it was fun, fun, fun. Indeed it was idyllic.




And then there was the thorn bushes. We fought our way through a great deal of them. In fact, the foundation was actually located inside of a grove of thorn bushes.


But we made it! The foundation just looked like a pile of rocks. But wouldn't it be cool to do an excavation? I wish I knew more about archeology, I would dig it up myself.



After such an excursion the three of us went home better friends then ever before. I will look back at that experience as one of the happiest moments of my life. It wasn't anything fancy or elaborate, just three friends working together for a common goal, and discovering something really amazing.

The Gift Shop: I Bet You Can't Spot Smokey Bear.

The Grey Towers Gift Shop is a cramped little tower room on the Northwest side of the house. It is run by a very bright and energetic volunteer named Ruth most of the time, but when Ruth is not around, us interns have to take our turns sitting in the gift shop. The shop houses numerous pieces of Grey Towers memorabelia like shirts, post cards, hats, mugs, etc. It also carries a lot of kids' toys, especially ones dealing with conservation and wildlife, like these cute little stuffed birds.

We do sell some books in the gift shop, but overall I was disappointed in the amount and depth of most of them. At Daniel Boone there was a vast assortment of books dealing with numerous topics in eighteenth century history. Many of them were scholarly in nature and written by well respected historians. I find that the books in the gift shop at Grey towers are either geared toward conservation and the green movement (not that there is anything wrong with that) or they are biographies (some of which are very good) of famous foresters and conservationists. Overall the book selection in the gift shop could be much more historical. There is nothing about teh time period that Gifford Pinchot lived, neither about the Victorian era or the Progressive era. There is very little about Teddy Roosevelt and his work in Conservation. There is nothing on the suffrage movement, or any of the other causes that Gifford and his wife were champions of.

However, there is Smokey Bear. I challenged myself to see how many different Smokey items I could take a picture of today. Here is what I found.








I guess you've got to give the people what they want, right?

Subtle Sexism in the Workplace

The other day at work I happened to mentioned to a coworker of mine that I was interested in Cornelia Pinchot. "Of course you are," he said. I was taken aback by this for several reasons. Firstly, gender history is a hobby for me, my main focus is ethnic and religious pluralism in colonial Pennsylvania, which I had told everyone at work about when I started. But secondly I felt it was a little unfair that he implied that my interest in women's history was something that was typical because I am a woman. It got me to thinking about empathy, a word that has been going around in the media lately with the confirmation hearing of Judge Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court. Why is it that women and minorities are viewed as having "special interests" that deviate from the norm, while white males are rarely accused of having particular biases or points of view that are attributed to their race or gender? To give an example, I have a friend with whom I graduated from Kutztown University, and who is focusing on U.S. diplomacy during the Korean War in graduate school. I never thought of saying to him, "Well Rich, it's pretty typical that you focus on men's actions in history since you are one." I never would have questioned his motives for being in that field. But when I say I am interested in the life of a female subject, it's automatically because I am a woman. So what? Maybe Cornelia Pinchot was just a remarkable person and it wouldn't matter what her gender was, I would always be interested in her. Or maybe I am interested in her because she was a woman. If that "special interest" is something that people construe as negative, then they should also consider all those male historians who are writing about male subjects as have a "special interest" as well, and hold them under the same suspicion.

Irises at Grey Towers

Irises must have been Cornelia Pinchot's favorite flower. Here are some pictures I took of some of our irises at Grey Towers.

The Letter Box

The letterbox is a small building on the grounds of Grey Towers that Cornelia Pinchot had built for Gifford when he was governor of Pennsylvania. He never really liked working in the building, and usually just let his staff work in there and used it for storage. Gifford Pinchot could be a real pack rat. When his papers were donated to the Library of Congress after his death they took up 1/4 mile of shelf space.

The letterbox contains a loft that was once used to store some of Pinchot's papers. We now use the letterbox to show movies, display historic items that we couldn't really justify putting anywhere else, and for storage. The loft of the letterbox was full of boxes containing brochures, books, and other random things, like old slates from the roof.


Below is a statue of Napoleon that Gifford's father tried to donate to the town of Milford, but they didn't want it. It's on loan to us from the Smithsonian.

My job for the past few days is to take everyhing out of the boxes that are in the loft of the letterbox and put it on the shelves or in the drawers that have been sitting up there, comleteley empty. Exciting right? Well, at least I'm making a historic building look a little neater.

Here it is as a work in progress.