Jennifer Fair asked about interpretation of historic houses with conflicting
restoration, interpretive stories, and furnishing plans. 

Jennifer,

The questions you have asked should be addressed in several planning
components: research reports, an interpretive plan, and a furnishing plan.
The purpose of these planning documents are to 1.) document the history of
the house, 2.) develop interpretive strategies to tell the stories at
stations within the home, and 3.) create a material culture environment that
supports the stories you have identified as most important and intend to
interpret. It sounds to me like these pieces may not yet be in place. 

Historic houses are interpreted in a myriad of different ways, depending on
the restoration and interpretation strategies that organizations have
selected. For instance, some houses interpret change over time, preserving
all changes and trying to illustrate and interpret the entire history of the
house. Others select a particular time period that they decide is most
significant for that structure and restore the house to the way it looked in
that period, attempting to furnish it to the period and interpret the lives
of the people who lived in it during the selected period. When you begin to
mix restoration dates, furnishing plans, and interpretive plans in ways that
conflict and do not contribute to a coherent story, your visitors will
become confused and unable to understand your story. I think the first
option I noted above (change over the entire house's history) is also
difficult for most organizations to pull off, because visitors have trouble
abstracting the entire history of a house and understanding stories that are
not supported by the material culture of the house. So my advice is select
an interpretive story that corresponds to the structure's (carefully
selected) restoration date and support it with an appropriate furnishing
plan.

Tom Woods

Thomas A. Woods, Ph.D.
President, Making Sense of Place, Inc.
1521 Grandview Ave.
Oconomowoc, WI 53066-3422
[log in to unmask]
262-569-1698
Fax: same as phone

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