Introduction
Recreating America’s past
For the past 60 years as we have traveled around the U.S., we have been impressed with the time, energy and expertise that has been spent preserving our country’s past in living history museums and historical sites. In recent years we have been amazed by the sheer number of these attractions that have been added and improved with buildings, artifacts and re-enactors brought together to give visitors a meaningful slice of history.
The Step into History website on the Internet lists over 550 places in the U. S. where you can see and experience life as it was in some era of the past. The historic periods covered by these museums range from the earliest settlements such as St. Augustine in Florida to the American Museum of Science and Energy in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, that tells the story of the ongoing research on sources of energy.
Most living history museums are outdoors with authentic buildings and structures from the past. The original living history museums such as Williamsburg in Virginia and Old Salem in North Carolina are on the original historic sites with the original buildings. The newer living history museums, on the other hand, have been constructed with buildings that have been rescued from destruction around the countryside and moved to the museum area, recreating as nearly as possible the original setting.
Some of living history museum sites cover a large area of land such as Old World Wisconsin at 876 acres and Williamsburg in Virginia at 301 acres. Sometimes a whole area of a community has been reconstructed or has been saved such as the squares and buildings in Savannah in Georgia or the houses in the two-block area around Abraham Lincoln’s home in Springfield, Illinois. In other cases much energy has gone into renovating old buildings and getting them on the National Register of Historic Places. Sometimes these homes such as at Macon in Georgia have been preserved and renovated at great expense to the owners.
The buildings in many of the more recent living history museums come from small towns and farms. For example, in our state of Missouri, in St. Louis and Kansas City urban renewal destroyed many historical places, but in smaller towns such as St. Charles, Lexington, Hermann and St. Joseph, the land on which old buildings sat had little commercial value, so they were left undisturbed.
When the appreciation of the past came to the foreground, they were there to be renovated. It seems that practically every state had one-room schoolhouses, small churches, vacant post offices, and old railroad stations standing empty. Others had lumber mills, grain-grinding mills, and sometimes waterwheels driven by small waterfalls. These added to the charm and historical significance of their living museums’ re-creation of history.
Why visit living history museums and historical sites?
Visiting these museums can help you build your own memories of what life was like in critical periods of U.S. history or experience your own past, such as Wayne did when we visited Pioneer Village in Jamestown, North Dakota. The visitor can come away from a visit to Michigan’s Wellington Farm USA: The Great Depression, with a better understanding of what the depression was like, or from Old World Wisconsin: The Immigrant Experience with a better idea of what the struggle on new land was like for new immigrants from Norway and other northern European countries.
Even spending time in a hard-time environment can be enjoyable if you can step out of it and back to the luxury that is the modern U.S., which for most of us will give us a renewed vision of how pleasant our present age is. On a visit to Williamsburg you can enjoy the grandeur of the early days, and in Old Salem see how a different ethnic group tackled the task of taming the country.
And perhaps even more important is the educational benefits for children. We have personally seen how much our children and grandchildren benefited from experiencing history first-hand on our travels. We have also watched as bus loads of schoolchildren toured the sites. They often seemed to be experiencing history in an even more intense way than the adults.
At Old World Wisconsin: the Immigrant Experience the children were excited to have a hands-on experience of collecting eggs in a chicken coop and watching cows being milked. Some schools regularly take their students on tours of these sites as a way of teaching them history.
In addition millions of people are now interested in genealogy; they want to know who their ancestors were, what they did and how they lived. You can now get a better idea of your ancestors’ lifestyle by going to living history museums where you can see how they ate, dressed, worked and entertained themselves. You can pick your time of history and somewhere in the U.S. find a historical site that welcomes you into the past to relive parts of your own genealogical past.
Personally we have probably enjoyed most the places where we could make contact with our own ancestors and see through our own eyes the labor, the tedium, the danger and the pleasures that they experienced in this new country.
Re-enactors
Most living history museums people their era with costumed re-enactors, but they do so at different levels. The most frequent role-players we have encountered in our travels have been costumed individuals who are well rehearsed in the knowledge of the time and who give visitors background information, answer factual questions and perhaps more importantly demonstrate skills of the period such as blacksmithing, cooking, glassblowing and leather-working. Some of the museums involve the visiting children in tasks such as spinning, basket weaving, and cooking with recipes of the period.
We have been especially entertained by re-enactors who dramatize scenes such as a trial, battle or wedding, staying in role so realistically that at times we have felt as if we have met real characters from the past. Costumed guides who tell stories of the era are impressive especially those who tell ghost stories as they lead visitors through the grounds at night, making even nonbelievers like ourselves feel the presence of the unhappy dead.
When you are at an historical site, be on the lookout for any special presentations by re-enactors. Some of the best ones are given on holidays or for special commemorative events. The most frequent ones are often reenactments of Civil War or Revolutionary War battles, but other large scale reenactments are also presented.
For example, for five days in May of 2004 we followed in the footsteps of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark as we previewed preparations for a three-year commemoration of their voyage of discovery. From 1804 to 1806 their travels took them nearly 8,000 miles, beginning and ending on the Missouri River near St. Louis. Among the re-enactors in the encampment in St. Charles, we particularly enjoyed seeing Charles Clark. In his blue captain’s uniform, he bears a strong resemblance to his famous ancestor, William Clark. He claims he is a thoroughbred, descended from William Clark on both his mother’s and father’s sides.
Charles Clark is frequently asked to appear as his ancestor, and like most of the re-enactors his costume is authentic. It felt strange to be sitting at dinner with Clark because it was easy to forget he was playing a role. His knowledge of Lewis and Clark has been carefully researched, and he has answers to many puzzling questions such as what happened to Pomp, the baby of Sacagawea, the Shoshone woman who traveled with the expedition.
After dinner, Charles Clark as Captain Clark walked us through the encampment of soldiers and river men that stretched along the Missouri in St. Charles. The men’s responses to him gave us an even more powerful feeling we were time-traveling as at the flickering campfires the men called him “captain” and took their hats off to him. Most of the men had been doing this boat trip together since 1996. Many of them had beards, were dressed in rough boatmen clothes and were eager to share stories of their previous trips.
We experienced
