Growing a historic site: The Oliver H. Kelley Farm

Farm fields at the Oliver H. Kelley Farm in Elk River, Minnesota

Jill Lepore has spoken about what she terms "cuspiness"--the feeling of being on the edge of big changes.  I often have that sense when I look at what's happening in the realm of food and farming interpretation in the museum and public history realm, and it's been confirmed by encounter with many people in those fields who are reaching toward a much more consequential and socially-engaged way of connecting audiences with big questions relating to food. 

Michelle Moon and I were once again struck by this at a workshop we led at the American Association for State and Local History conference in Minnesota last week, and it struck me even more on a tour I took as part of the conference, to the Oliver H. Kelley Farm in Elk River, Minnesota.

Briann Greenfield: What row to hoe?

The author picking spinach in February.

What role should a state museum, like the Connecticut Historical Society (CHS), play in preserving and interpreting the history of agriculture and food? How can such an organization tell the history in a way that fits its specific mission, institutional strengths and priorities? I ask these questions from a several perspectives. I am a Professor of History and Public History Program Coordinator at Central Connecticut State University where I teach courses in museum studies and material culture that regularly use the museum’s collection. I am also a member of CHS’s Collections Steering Committee and Deaccession Task Force, two groups charged with enhancing the collection’s strength, relevance, and overall quality. Finally, I’m interested on a very personal level as someone deeply involved in the local food movement as a 4- season gardener on my own city lot and a regular volunteer at Urban Oaks Organic Farm, a 12-year old farm in an urban food desert. These perspectives make me see both the potential for agriculture and food history, but also make me cautious about committing limited resources to its pursuit.

A New Year's Toast: Let Us Begin

Greetings all, and thanks to Cathy, our host at History at the Table. I'm delighted to be the first guest blogger in our discussion of public history and the local food movement, which will of course culminate in our Working Group meeting at the NCPH 2013 meeting in April. This will be the first of many posts on this intersection in coming weeks, as each member of the Working Group takes a turn offering insights and questions. Knowing that the conversation to follow will be lively and provocative, I raise a metaphorical glass to all present and say "Let us begin."

I'll be speaking from personal experience first, describing how my work at one museum led me into the local food movement, and then making the case more generally for a strategic re-evaluation of food interpretation in museums.

How One Museum Got Slower

In 2004 I became education director at a historic site and museum called Strawbery Banke,  a preserved urban neighborhood in Portsmouth, NH. Its more than 20 restored houses (with associated period landscapes) feature a mix of traditional interpretive strategies - first person roleplaying, didactic displays, period rooms, guided programs. 

Like many such sites, we faced the challenge of maintaining audience attendance in a time of widespread decline. With tongue only partly in cheek, Cary Carson, chief researcher at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, predicted "the end of history museums" in 2008, noting that attendance has been sinking for three straight decades . Reach Advisers found that history museums, compared with 7 other museum genres, ranked lowest in popularity with all demographic groups. Only 31% of family museum visitors even venture to historic sites.

What could we do to forge new connections with potential participants? We didn't have to look far for inspiration. The local food movement was blossoming around us.

Re-locating authenticity at Hancock Shaker Village

My hopes for an extended summer road trip taking in many of the farm history sites I've been keeping an eye on didn't quite come to fruition, but I did manage to get to Hancock Shaker Village in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, a place that seems to be especially venturesome in playing with the line between past and present.  My colleague and friend Patricia West and I spent a day looking around the village and came away very impressed with the way that HSV has made a case for its present-day farming and renewable-energy generation as entirely authentic to the Shaker history on display here.

HSV currently provides vegetables for about 60 CSA shareholders

A 3,000-acre farm and village of 300 people in the 1830s, the Hancock settlement shrank, like all Shaker communities, in the later 19th and early 20th centuries.  In 1960, the few remaining members sold the property to preservationists.  The village reopened as a museum in 1961, on the cusp of an expansive moment in living history that saw the creation of many such farms and villages around the U.S.[1]  The popularity of the Shaker aesthetic among collectors and decorators made this site, like nearby Historic Deerfield, upscale rather than rustic, and my sense is that the viewing and buying of Shaker-inspired crafts and furniture has always been a big part of its appeal for visitors.

The 90 kw solar array greets visitors at the main entrance

Recently, however, there have been some changes--or rather, some additions, as HSV certainly hasn't abandoned Shaker chic in its gift shop or its marketing.  Along with its traditional offerings, though, the site has added a 90-kw array of photovoltaic panels, installed in 2009, and launched a small CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) operation in 2011.  What's particularly interesting about these projects is the way that they're both implicitly and explicitly linked with contemporary concerns about energy use and sustainability, and how they're rhetorically linked with Shaker values and precedents in wayside plaques and other interpretive statements.  As it's phrased on HSV's website:

Hancock Shaker Village is a center for exploring what it means to live a principled life in the 21st century.  Part of that process is to understand the impact of energy consumption on our selves, our community, and our world.  We at Hancock Shaker Village look to the Shakers' use of water, wind and other renewable energy sources as an inspiration for how we run the Village today... [A]ll season long we incorporate this modern renewable energy and sustainable agriculture initiative into our daily and seasonal programming – helping to bridge the gap between past, present, and the potential for the future.

Farm and Facilities Manager Bill Mangiardi on the job

It's true that the innovative and iconoclastic Shakers provide particularly good raw material for this approach.  But it also requires present-day management that is not afraid of creating jarring juxtapositions within the kinds of of landscapes and practices we expect at historic sites. I've heard preservationists deplore the way that the location of the 450 PV panels--right at the main entrance to the complex--interrupts the historic landscape, but that's clearly the point:  not to hide a modern "intrusion," but to foreground it as a living example of how the historic site sees itself as following the Shaker ethos.  This year, some air conditioning was added to the Shakers' original root cellar in order to give the CSA more flexibility in how it harvests and packages food for shareholders to pick up.  Neither of these things is authentic to the literal landscape and technology of the 19th century, but they support what I see as a more sophisticated vision of authenticity that takes into serious consideration the meanings that the Shakers invested in this site as well as its buildings and their contents.

As I say, these additions don't represent a radical shift away from HSV's tried-and-true interpretation.  Its annual fall Country Fair and wildly popular Baby Animals event in the spring in no way challenge the conventional emphasis on the aesthetic qualities of this lovely New England place.  The fair is heavy on high-end handcrafts and the spring event reinforces the association of small-scale, "old-tyme" farming with the childlike, the nostalgic, the cute and fluffy, something I've tended to see as one of the more insidious strategies that historic farm sites adopt in order to attract an audience.

But the sheer numbers that HSV manages to pull in in this way--15,000 for the 2012 Baby Animals--make me less dismissive.  Out of that considerable crowd there are bound to be a substantial number of people who notice the PV panels and the working farm fields and who perhaps inquire about the CSA or leave with a sense that there's something unexpectedly vigorous and forward-looking happening at this beautiful historic site.  Over time, those oddly-juxtaposed elements--the cutesy and the experimental--may support a lasting shift into more consequential food and energy production, a circuitous route back (or forward) into a different and more interesting kind of authenticity.

[1] For more on the history of HSV, see its website.  On the fascinating subject Shaker tourism, see Gregory Clark, “Shaker Tourism and the Rhetorical Experience of the Aesthetic” in Rhetorical Landscapes in America: Variations on a Theme from Kenneth Burke (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2004, pp. 50-68), and recent work by emeritus Cornell historian R. Laurence Moore.  

The Italian Connection: Part II

A few weeks ago I wrote a post wondering whether non-profit historic sites that incorporate farming might be playing a role similar to the gentleman-farmers of an earlier era who often incubated new ideas and preserved older farmland that had become less profitable in the commercial marketplace.  Today, in my second "Italian connection" post, I want to profile someone who seems to me to combine elements of the gentleman-farmer, the businessman, and the non-profit visionary, all mixed together with an Italian-inflected sensibility that values heritage and terroir--a sense of place linked with good food and good living.

Joe Famolare, photographed by Richard Avedon

This multi-faceted character is Joe Famolare, who owns a former dairy farm in Brattleboro, Vermont that has become the Vermont Agricultural, Business and Education Center (VABEC). Son of a successful Italian-American shoe pattern-maker and engineer, Joe started out in the family business from an early age and eventually owned his own international shoe company.  Famolare, Inc. produced iconic wavy-soled platform shoes that were hugely popular in the 1970s, among other designs.  A conversation with Joe is peppered with mentions of the glam-rock years, shoes for Broadway musicals, and a Halston fashion show built around his footwear.

In his globe-trotting years as the company's CEO, Joe maintained part-time residences in many places, including Vermont (his daughters liked horses) and Italy.  He owned and restored a 16th-century villa built by the Florentine explorer Giovanni da Verrazzano, which seems to have reinforced his love of the old and his appreciation for landscapes and buildings that reveal a many-layered history.

When he sold his shoe business, he retired to Vermont, but quickly found himself at loose ends.  At that point, when he was looking for something to do, the Lawrence farm in Brattleboro came and found him.  The Lawrence family had run a profitable dairy farm since the early 1950s, but by the 1970s, with Interstate 91 bisecting their land and Vermont's agricultural economy in decline, the elder Lawrences were looking to retire.  There was pressure on them to sell the land for residential development--it is conveniently just off the highway and next to the high school--but Maria and Milford Lawrence wanted to see it kept as farmland.  Enter Joe Famolare, who purchased the 40-acre core of the property and began to try to figure out what to do with it.

He renovated the farmhouse and rented it as apartments at first, but had a sense that there was more that could be done to connect an old Vermont farm with the state's emerging "new economy."  Unsure what that might be, he rented a construction trailer for the site, put a sign on it that said "Famolare, Inc.", and began coming in to the "office" each day to see what might happen.  People came to him with various ideas, some impractical, some more promising, and he germinated--and is still germinating--a vision of the site as a combined educational, agricultural, and entrepreneurial hub for southern Vermont.  He converted the massive 1883 dairy barn into classrooms and meeting spaces, added parking, and installed a state-of-the-art video-conferencing system, as well as working to turn the site into a foreign trade zone to expedite international importing and exporting.  His tenants now include several educational institutions, including the University of Vermont Extension, a nursing program, and the Brattleboro center for Union Institute & University's adult college programs.

Union's B.A. (in its former incarnation at Vermont College) is my alma mater, and I've been teaching in the program for the past several years, which is how I happened to get to know the VABEC site and to talk with Joe about his vision for its future--I took a group of students to meet him last fall as part of a discussion we were having about place-making and sense of place.  Anyone who knows my work knows that I tend to be skeptical (at best) about projects that try to blend history and heritage with economic development efforts, because the historic pieces so often come to be enlisted largely to build a brand identity that serves the demands of profitability.  But I have to admit that I came away from our group's conversation with Joe surprisingly inspired by the way he has woven together an appreciation for the past, a business-minded approach to the present, and an openness to all kinds of possibility--including reinventing this site as part of a re-emergent small-agriculture economy--for the future.

His appreciation for the past shows itself all over the site, with plaques and memorials that keep the Lawrences and others very present in the landscape.  If these were the only signs of the farm's former use, it would follow the all-too-common pattern of erasing-while-memorializing (as Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett has put it, "Heritage is produced through a process that forecloses what is shown,"* a process that too often creates places filled with the ghosts of former workers and residents).  But the fact that Joe has sought out tenants whose missions he sees as compatible with this site's identity as a farm--for example, UVM's Extension program runs farming programs for students and conducts occasional agricultural experiments here--makes this memorialization of the past more than just symbolic or sentimental.  Even more significant are some of the potential projects he talks about, relating to renewable energy, expanded cultivation of the fields, and small-scale production of various kinds of local food.

Which brings me back to the Italian connection.  At the risk of invoking ethnic stereotyping, it does seem clear in Joe's conversation that his time in Italy--which clearly relates to his own Italian roots--influenced his sense of how a working landscape can harmoniously incorporate past and present layers and meanings.  I don't think it's just Joe's personal charm that got past my usual cynicism, although it is pretty hard to resist!  It just struck me that there was something in his approach quite different from the usual enclaving of history in set-aside non-profit sites, or its use in business as a cosmetic aspect of a brand identity.  In what seems to be a largely intuitive way, Joe Famolare is maintaining a careful balance of historical stewardship, a sense of the economic and environmental importance of farming, and a savvy eye on where the postindustrial economy may be headed--a model that may be worth watching from both sides of the for-profit/non-profit divide. 


For more on Joe Famolare, read this 2009 Union Institute & University interview with University President Roger Sublett, or this business profile focusing on his efforts to make Brattleboro a foreign trade zone.

*Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Culture:  Tourism, Museums, Heritage (University of California Press, 1998, p. 149)

How do we know when farming is "for real"?

I launched the blog last week in a fit of somewhat irrational exuberance, without having all of my initial examples listed and organized on the links page. Finishing that task this week pushed me to think through how I’m defining “working farm” and “historic site,” the two sides of the equation that I’m planning to focus on here. And it reinforced my initial sense that there are lots of things going on at the borders of these two things, but still relatively few that are actually finding ways to merge them.

When I think about what makes a “working farm,” I’m looking for something that is directly involved in selling food that people will eat in their everyday modern lives (not just apple butter or maple syrup that is made as part of a demonstration and perhaps sold as essentially a souvenir, but something that people would buy as part of their food shopping).

This definition knocks off the list a number of farming projects at historic sites that seem, on the surface, to be worth including. For example, at Booker T. Washington National Monument, the local Rotary Club helps distribute food from the national park’s Heirloom Garden to low-income residents of the area. At Carroll’s Hundred in Baltimore, the “Black Damask Project” involves urban youth who have helped replant a 1760s orchard as a way to help them gain a sense of community history. These kinds of projects, while they utilize historic places, foods, and methods in often exciting and creative ways, don’t rely on the proceeds of the food they grow to support themselves. They’re more oriented toward education, demonstration, or providing a service, rather than selling a product.

There are certainly lots of farms and farmers in the sustainable/local food movement who are interested in more than just making money.  To give just one example, my friends Deb Habib and Ricky Baruc at Seeds of Solidarity in Orange, Mass., blend farming, education, environmental awareness, and social change on every level of their operation.  (Those are Ricky's greens in the photo at the top of the page.)  But entering into the real-life agricultural marketplace makes an important statement that farming is about real-life food production, and that it’s not enough just to show how food can be grown, cooked, and consumed in ways that challenge the dominant industrialized food system--we also have to address the marketing and distribution pieces of the puzzle as well. Finding a customer base and a distribution network becomes a test of a farm’s vision and viability, and argues for the realistic possibility of small-scale farms surviving without heavy subsidy of one kind or another.

So the various historic sites that host community gardens (for example, Fort Dupont in Washington, DC or the massive community gardens at Gateway National Recreation Area in New York City) didn’t make it onto my links page, because those growers are producing food for their own use rather than selling it to others.

And for a different set of reasons, historic sites where representing the past is the underlying goal also didn’t get onto the list. A recent issue of Organic Gardening features an article about how Colonial Williamsburg recreates colonial-era food gardening techniques and crops. But the emphasis at CW is on depicting the past as accurately as possible--what Richard Handler and Eric Gable have called “mimetic realism”--rather than on farming in a way that directly engages the present. That dividing line shows up in a discussion of how the site’s growers deal with pests that hadn’t taken up residence in North America until after the eighteenth century. “We have to deal authentically with inauthentic pests,” one of the gardeners is quoted as saying. This is very different from the approach of Tillers International, which has created a “Reinvention Lab” to experiment with ways in which historic methods and tools might make “low-capital” farming more feasible for farmers around the world.

So that’s how I chose the examples on these links pages. Can you think of other examples that might test or challenge my definitions here? Should I be including anything that I’ve decided to keep off the list?

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And I promised to give a shout-out to the first ten of my Facebook friends who signed up to receive these blog posts via email. Here are the top ten—but I’m very grateful to all who’ve signed up so far!

Thanks to Carrie Kourkoumelis, Pam Donnelly, Craig Stockwell, Susan Sawyer, Maureen Riendeau, Stacie Gay, Amahl Bishara, Sue Cloutier, Linda Ruel Flynn, and Leah Mason.