A Grizzly in the Mail and Other Adventures in American History

9. When Houses Talk

9 WHEN HOUSES TALK Houses are like the human beings that inhabit them. —Victor Hugo I am not a person who frequents open houses on Sundays and I rarely go on spring garden and holiday home tours. But when visiting a city with an interesting past, it doesn’t take me long to track down the historic district and walk its streets and peer into its buildings. My favorite place to house gawk is Charleston, South Carolina. Its historic area south of Broad Street has no rivals. I love to stroll its streets at night and gaze into brightly lit rooms that reveal gleaming antiques and old paintings. Other historic districts on my top-ten list include Philadelphia’s Society Hill, Boston’s Beacon Hill, and Old Town Alexandria and Richmond’s Fan district in Virginia. The gawking is easiest in those old East Coast cities where the houses sit close to the narrow streets. It proves harder in the Midwest and the West, where houses sit farther from the sidewalks. There is 104 When Houses Talk no shame in house gawking. A friend who lived in the Fan district once told me that the homeowners there take pride in keeping the curtains open for all to see their excellent taste. Historic houses, whether museums or private, hold an allure precisely because they are homes with the potential to tell the stories of their people. One of my favorite projects while at the National Museum of American History focused on the largest artifact in the museum’s collection. It is not the steam locomotive Southern Railway No. 1401 or the revolutionary-era gunboat Philadelphia, the oldest preserved warship in America. The largest artifact is an almost 250-year-old house that stood at 16 Elm Street in Ipswich, Massachusetts, thirty miles north of Boston. In 1963 the town planned to raze the house and build a parking lot, but several earnest members of the local historical society came up with a plan to save the house the very day the backhoe arrived to tear it down. They paid the crew chief to wait until they called the Smithsonian. There are various reasons why a Smithsonian curator might not accept a donation of an artifact. Lack of storage space is one of them. One would think that the Smithsonian might not have space to store a house, but the staff at the American History Museum, then known as the Museum of History and Technology, decided to accept the gift. They were trying to fill the new museum, which opened in 1964. The house was carefully documented, dismantled, and shipped to Washington, where in 1966 it was reassembled. The staff members who collected the house put it on display as a representative example of early American building practices. The exhibition remained on view for many years, and while the staff eventually suggested a reinterpretation, this didn’t happen. Finally the museum built temporary walls around it to accommodate new exhibitions and essentially the house was put into storage. It became a secret artifact as visitors to the museum were not even aware of its existence. In the late 1990s, however, the house’s period of slumber finally came to an end when new curators, funding in hand, embarked on a project to research the inhabitants of the house. The When Houses Talk 105 time had come to tear down the walls, put this huge artifact back on display and let it tell new stories. A Peek at America’s Homes There are over eight thousand historic house museums in America, ranging from the small dark apartments of America’s immigrants in the Lower East Side Tenement Museum in Manhattan to the estates of the fabulously rich and famous like the Vanderbilts’ Biltmore Estate in North Carolina and Hearst Castle on the Pacific Coast. Some tell the story of their well-known inhabitants, others of their equally famous architects. Historic houses come in all shapes and sizes and varieties. Yes, some are even houses of ill repute. An interpretive tour of a historic brothel in Cripple Creek, Colorado, remains etched in my mind because it offered an unexpected look at a part of Western history that gets overlooked. I’ve often wondered how so many house museums can manage to keep their doors open to visitors. My conclusion is that people are generally curious about how others lived. We live our...