Florida State University Libraries
2016 A Certain Kind of Southern: Authenticity at Public History Sites in Florida and Georgia Elizabeth Dean Worley
Follow this and additional works at the FSU Digital Library. For more information, please contact [email protected] FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY
COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES
A CERTAIN KIND OF SOUTHERN: AUTHENTICITY AT PUBLIC HISTORY SITES IN
FLORIDA AND GEORGIA
By
ELIZABETH DEAN WORLEY
A Dissertation submitted to the Department of History in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
2016 Elizabeth Dean Worley defended this dissertation on July 8, 2016. The members of the supervisory committee were:
Suzanne Sinke Professor Directing Dissertation
Denise Von Glahn University Representative
Andrew Frank Committee Member
Jennifer Koslow Committee Member
Maxine D. Jones Committee Member
The Graduate School has verified and approved the above-named committee members, and certifies that the dissertation has been approved in accordance with university requirements.
ii
To Brandon for continued love and support.
To my parents for their dedication and hope.
iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Firstly, I want to thank my dissertation committee and express how grateful I am for their continued guidance. Dr. Jennifer Koslow, Dr. Andrew Frank, Dr. Maxine Jones, and Dr. Denise
Von Glahn all provided valuable contributions that helped me finish this project. I especially want to thank my major professor, Dr. Suzanne Sinke. No one could have asked for a more supportive, protective, kind, generous, and knowledgeable adviser. She not only encouraged my research and all of the various veins it took, but she also helped me sieve through my ideas to find the most valuable components that would lead to the best work. Dr. Sinke is perhaps the most “pro-student” major professor in the department. She regularly advocated for me and all of her students to ensure employment and tuition waivers. She connected us with other scholars for their assistance. She pointed us towards new scholarship and ideas. She was instrumental in me finishing my degree so that I could move on to my dream job. I will be forever thankful for that.
I also want to thank the rigorous, inquisitive, and generous graduate student culture at
Florida State University, particularly in the history department. Together, we all matured into each other’s colleagues and peers. They will be valuable friends in and out of the profession for years to come. I especially want to thank Logan Edwards. During a conversation in my office in spring 2013, she pointed me to a college in Southwest Georgia. Through that connection, I found an internship, dissertation research, professional experience, and now a career. She forever changed my life’s professional path. I cannot thank her enough for that even though she may not even remember that one moment in my office in Bellamy.
Finally, I wish to thank my family and husband. My parents always encouraged my education. They supported me, by every possible definition, throughout my graduate career.
They are equally proud of the next phase of my career. Without them, I could not have pursued
iv this degree. I also wish to thank my husband, Brandon. Without him, I could not have finished this degree. His unfailing faith in me carried me when I doubted all of my own capabilities. His commitment to my own dreams served as a testament to his kind and generous nature. My darling, I love you. Everyday, yes.
v TABLE OF CONTENTS
Abstract ...... vii
1. INTRODUCTION ...... 1
2. THE STEPHEN FOSTER MEMORIAL: PLANTATION LONGINGS IN WHITE SPRINGS ...... 14
3. THE FLORIDA FOLK FESTIVAL: THELMA BOLTIN, FOLK, AND AUTHENTICITY .36
4. THE AGRIRAMA IN TIFTON, GEORGIA: BRINGING THE HISTORY OF RURAL LIVING TO LIFE ...... 62
5. AGRIRAMA STUDENT WORKSHOPS: MAKING 19TH CENTURY FARMING FUN ....93
6. CONCLUSION ...... 112
References ...... 123
Biographical Sketch ...... 141
vi ABSTRACT
Steven Conn recently argued that as museums change from warehouses of artifacts focused on public instruction to a different model of education by engagement, their emphasis on objects will become less necessary. This dissertation directly engages with that idea and argues that for many local museums objects mean as much as they ever did, maybe even more. My idea, the “currency of authenticity,” builds on two strands of scholarship. One that traces the increasing commodification of history. The other that local museums are just as worthy of study as national institutions. Specifically, I analyze how smaller museums use material culture to convince their audience that their textual narrative and/or oral interpretation is just as truthful as its objects.
Using institutional records, newspapers, and oral histories, this dissertation examines how the Stephen Foster Museum and Florida Folk Festival, both in White Springs, Florida, and the
Georgia Museum of Agriculture and Historic Village portray aspects of Southern culture. Each of these places emphasizes different qualities, objects, or ideas as they construct their own brand of authenticity. Simultaneously, these places also all emphasize their own kind of Southern identity, unique to their regions and the people they want to represent. Their exhibits demonstrate that Southern heritage is vast, complex, and more diverse than some people understand.
vii CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION
According to a 2014 article in The Washington Post, there are 11,000 different Starbucks
locations across the United States. The same article listed more than 14,000 McDonald’s
Restaurants across the country. However, even when adding up those two chains together, they
still do not come close to the number of museums in the United States: 35,000.1 That is a staggering and conservative estimate. Staggering because according to the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), a government agency that counts the number of museums in the
United States, that is double the number from the 1980s; conservative because those numbers do not reflect what may be the total number of museums in the United States. 2 Those are only the museums that applied to membership of the IMLS, meaning there are potentially hundreds or thousands of museums the IMLS is not aware of yet.3 The majority of these are very small and
highly local museums; 15,000 reported less than $10,000 in income each year.3 The United
States is in a second “golden age” of museums.4
Americans love museums and Americans really love history museums. Of the American
Association of Museum’s (AAM) members, 55.5% are public history sites and/or societies.5
These institutions play a vital part of the American educational and cultural landscape. Director
1 Christopher Ingraham, “There Are More Museums in the US than There Are Starbucks and McDonalds- Combined,” The Washington Post, June 13, 2014, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/06/13/there-are-more-museums-in-the-us-than-there-are- starbucks-and-mcdonalds-combined/. 2 American Association of Museums, Data Report from the 1989 National Museum Survey (Washington D.C.: American Association of Museums, 1992), exhibit 9, no. 29. The data from this survey estimated that by 1989 there were 13,800 museums in the United States, 9,200 of those were history museums. 3 Ingraham, “There Are More Museums in the US than There Are Starbucks and McDonalds- Combined.” 4 Steven Conn, Do Museums Still Need Objects? (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 1. 5 Institute of Museum and Library Services, “Government Doubles Official Estimate: There Are 35,000 Active Museums in the US,” Institute of Museum and Library Services, May 19, 2014, https://www.imls.gov/news- events/news-releases/government-doubles-official-estimate-there-are-35000-active-museums-us. 1 of the IMLS, Susan H. Hildreth, argues that museums keep the nation’s cultural heritage and
“they provide the rich, authentic content for a nation of learners.”6
Museums and public history sites thrive on their use of material culture. Guests find the ability to interact with the physical object richly satisfying and Americans consistently rank museums as being the most trustworthy places to learn history.7 Roy Rosenzweig and David
Thelens’s groundbreaking study in 1998, showed that the general public rated museums as an 8.4 on a scale of 10, above and more trustworthy than family, schools, films, and books.8
Rosenzweig and Thelen deduced that a visitor’s ability to make a personal connection with a primary source was a large part of why she/he trusted museums. The participants in the study reported that they viewed objects as neutral, without narrative or agenda.9 Additionally, many people trusted sources, including museums, more if the sources connected them on an emotional
level as well as an intellectual level.10 Their findings suggested that people trusted museums even more when they confirmed what the guest already thought they knew.11
It should not surprise historians that the public enjoys attending museums. Humans seek
to gain their bearings and locate themselves within a historical narrative. Beginning in recent
decades, scholars have analyzed the development of public history and begun to unpack the
meanings of display when combined with the authoritative perspective of academics and professionals. More recently, historians, anthropologists, and other scholars have begun to
evaluate exactly how to assess public history sites in regards to accuracy and authenticity. This
6 Institute of Museum and Library Services, “Government Doubles Official Estimate: There Are 35,000 Active Museums in the US.” 7 Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen, The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life, 1st ed. (Columbia University Press, 1998), 20-22, http://chnm.gmu.edu/survey/. 8 Ibid., 20–21. 9 Ibid., 106. 10 Ibid., 93. 11 Ibid., 92. 2 dissertation examines ideas about authenticity at the Stephen Foster Folk Memorial Culture
Center and the Georgia Museum of Agriculture and Historic Village.
For this dissertation, I created the term “currency of authenticity” to embody the ways
that museums and public history sites emphasize their integrity, accuracy, or truthfulness by
going back to material culture. A museum may stress that contractors made the reconstructed building with historically accurate tools or methods. A historic house may point to the
authenticity of the furnishing and decorations, or a state park brochure may emphasize how no
modern person has ever disturbed the Native American mounds. These places affirm that it is
the objects in the museum that point to the truthfulness or accuracy of their overall presentation.
However, museums display more than just the material of the past, they also
contextualize and present a narrative about the people and historical circumstances of that past.
Guests say they find the physical interaction with objects plays a large role in why they see
museums as so trustworthy. In 2001, the American Association of Museums paid for an
extensive research study to evaluate different museums’ overall effectiveness with their guests.
In the same survey that counted thousands of museums across the United States, the IMLS and
the AAM asked guests to evaluate the trustworthiness of museums on a scale of 1 to 5. 87% of
the respondents rated museums as “one of the most trustworthy sources for objective
information” and scored museums as a 4.62 for trustworthiness out of 5.12 Because of this relationship with objects and the public, public history sites have a special platform for education. They speak with a unique authority and the public imbues them with a significant kind of confidence to present the most truthful, accurate, and authentic presentation possible.
12 Jose Marie Griffiths and Donald W. King, “Institute of Museum and Library Services: Interconnections: The IMLS National Study on the Use of Libraries, Museums, and the Internet” (University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 25, http://www.interconnectionsreport.org/reports/IMLSMusRpt20080312kjm.pdf. 3 In the 1990s, different academics developed theoretical concepts regarding authenticity
that influenced this work. There are roughly three types of authenticity: objective, constructive,
and postmodern. Objective authenticity “involves a museum linked usage of the authenticity of
the originals.”13 This approach is largely top-down because it relies on museum professionals to
tell guests the meaning of objects. This approach implies that there is only one level of
authenticity, one truth, or one perspective that is correct. Constructive authenticity argues that
“plural meanings of and about the same thing can be constructed from different perspectives.”14
This perspective fits firmly with New Museology thinking, the idea that guests will bring their own experiences to create meaning from objects and that because each guest interprets the objects in her or his own way, there can be multiple meanings of authenticity. Guests are searching more for “symbolic authenticity” over objective authenticity.15 This idea of authenticity allows guests to construct their own narratives of what is authentic and discard whatever they find inauthentic without it tainting the authenticity of other objects. Postmodern authenticity argues that the quest for authenticity is an illusion and does not consider
“inauthenticity a problem at all.”16 Sociologist Dean MacCannell argues that most guests are
after authenticity in two ways: authenticity as feeling and authenticity as knowledge.
Additionally, MacCannell writes that many guests determine what is authentic by comparison to
something they have already determined as inauthentic.17 This allows for the combination of authenticity to be both objective and constructive simultaneously. Essentially, guests determine what is or is not authentic using a constantly changing and evolving definition. Often, guests
13 Ning Wang, “Rethinking Authenticity in Tourism Experience,” in Tourism: Critical Concepts in the Social Sciences, ed. Stephen Williams (London: Routledge, 2003), 213. 14 Ibid., 216. 15 Ibid., 217. 16 Ning Wang, Tourism and Modernity (Amsterdam; New York: Emerald Group Publishing Limited, 1999), 54. 17 Dean MacCannell, “Staged Authenticity: Arrangements of Social Space in Tourist Settings,” American Journal of Sociology 79, no. 3 (November 1973): 145, 178. 4 evaluate something to be authentic or not based on what they have already decided is inaccurate,
commercial, or inauthentic.
Recently, in addition to discussing what is authentic, historians and other scholars have started to argue about the consequences of consumerism for museums who have to think about patronage as much as they do about education and public outreach. Marita Sturken’s book,
Tourists of History: Memory, Kitsch, and Consumerism from Oklahoma City to Ground Zero, argues that Americans use consumerism to heal from national trauma. Sometimes that takes the form of a person buying something at the gift shop to help raise funds for victims; other times it is buying pictures of destruction or actual pieces of broken buildings.18 Tammy Gordon’s The
Spirit of 76 touches on the same theme. Americans celebrated the Bicentennial with as many
trinkets and souvenirs as they did parades and public events. Owning these souvenirs was part of
celebration and commemoration.19 However, it is not just consuming at historical sites that
shapes the public’s relationship with history, it is also that some people commodified the act of
historical discovery or knowledge. History is big business. Consuming History: Historians and
Heritage in Contemporary Popular Culture, by Jerome de Groot, argues that where a business,
site, or pastime can prove historic connection there is potential for a big profit. When video
game designers created first-person shooter games around the theme of World War II, not only is
the game in a historical setting, adding to the lifelike scenarios and objectives, but it allows players to reenact historical scenes while at the same time determining the outcome of events.20
18 Marita Sturken, Tourists of History: Memory, Kitsch, and Consumerism from Oklahoma City to Ground Zero (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2007), 130–31. 19 Tammy S. Gordon, The Spirit of 1976, Public History in Historical Perspective (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2013). 20 Jerome de Groot, Consuming History: Historians and Heritage in Contemporary Popular Culture (London ; New York: Routledge, 2008), 140–42. 5 The very act of consumerism has become a part of how Americans remember important
historical events.
Despite the myriad of ways to identify the historical integrity of objects—provenance perhaps being the most important for museums professionals—, sometimes museums tell less than accurate historical narratives. This is where the idea of authenticity as a type of currency becomes important to museum studies and the history of museums. Museums stress the authenticity of their objects and material culture to their guests, implying that because audiences can trust in them, then the museum’s overall narrative is both accurate and authentic. Public historians have a large responsibility here because, as Stephen Williams points out, few guests are “able to see through the inauthenticity of contrived attractions.”21 This dissertation studies
how the ideas of authenticity affect a diorama exhibit in North Central Florida, a folk festival in
White Springs, and school field trips at a living history museum in Georgia.
In White Springs, Florida, the Stephen Foster Folk Culture Center hosts a museum devoted to the music of the nineteenth century parlor and minstrel composer. As a part of its display, the museum presents several dioramas themed around different Foster songs, some of which depict slaves in antebellum America. The museum has never updated their dioramas or their accompanying interpretive plaques since it opened in 1950. The first chapter examines what type of narratives these dioramas depict and how the memorial’s creators use Foster’s image to design a museum devoted to mid-twentieth century ideas about the Old South. This was unusual for Florida in the 1930s and 1940s, when at the time of the memorial’s creation other tourist attractions focused on celebrating the state as exotic and a beach playground. The chapter concludes with the theoretical consequences for museums that fail to either update their
21 Stephen Williams, Tourism: The Experience of Tourism (London: Taylor & Francis, 2004), 214. 6 exhibits or acknowledge their place in history. The second chapter focuses on the Florida Folk
Festival, an annual music and culture event at the Stephen Foster Folk Culture Center since
1953. This chapter examines the second director of the festival, Thelma Boltin, and her personal
definitions of who and what counted as authentic “enough” to be a part of her folk festival. This
chapter demonstrates how this individual and the associated public history site created and
constructed its own definition of authenticity.
The final two chapters focus on the Georgia Museum of Agriculture and Historic Village
in Tifton, Georgia. One chapter outlines the history of the museum’s creation. This is a museum
that depended more on local oral histories than quantitative evidence or qualitative research to
form its interpretation. After it opened some historians performed National Endowment for the
Humanities-funded research, but the museum did not meaningfully use that evidence to change
its presentation. The research told an uncommon, unexpected story of landed farm owners, which
did not exactly support the original narrative of poor subsistence farming that was ultimately being replaced by lumber and turpentine mills. The final chapter focuses on that museum’s school field trips and how they approached gender roles on turn-of-the century Southwestern
Georgia farms. While large portions of their field trips were accurate as far as their information was concerned, the museum decided to divide school tour groups by gender; the museum’s justification for this division was both feminist and anti-feminist simultaneously.
Historians began to develop a historiography of history museums in the 1980s. In 1989,
Warren Leon and Roy Rosenzweig published History Museums in the United States: A Critical
Assessment, and stated that a “critical silence” of museum analysis and history existed in the
U.S.22 Their overall argument was that the public visited museums by the thousands each year,
22 Warren Leon and Roy Rosenzweig, eds., History Museums in the United States: A Critical Assessment (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), xi–xii. 7 but historians and other scholars devoted almost no critical analysis to these institutions. They
divided their book into two sections. The first collection of essays examined museums in
historical context. The second section focused on how the ideas of New Museology and social
history had impacted exhibits. Before the work of these two historians, museum professionals published the majority of the literature on the history of museums.23
Scholars in the 1990s answered Leon and Rosenzweig’s challenge with efforts at rigorous studies of the idea of display and encouraged museums to share power with their public.
Scholars examined the power that curators and historians had when they decided what to put or not put on display, and how museums could serve as a community outreach service by sharing that power and authority with the communities the museums served.24 Other scholars, like Tony
Bennett, applied various theoretical concepts, ones that scholars usually applied to ideas about
race and gender, to museum studies.
Starting in the 1990s, historians and other scholars have examined museums as
theoretical constructs.25 Tony Bennett shook the field when he applied Foucauldian theories to
museum studies. He argued that governments in the nineteenth-century used museums as a way
to civilize the masses; the governments believed that exposing the public to culture encouraged
23 Edward P. Alexander, Museums in Motion: An Introduction to the History and Function of Museums (Nashville: American Association for State and Local History, 1979); Alma S. Wittlin, Museums: In Search of a Usable Future (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1970). 24 Steven C. Dubin, Displays of Power: Memory and Amnesia in the American Museum (New York: New York University Press, 1999); Michael Frisch, A Shared Authority: Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral and Public History (SUNY Press, 1990). 25 Gail Anderson, Reinventing the Museum: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on the Paradigm Shift (Walnut Creek: AltaMira Press, 2004); Jennifer Barrett, Museums and the Public Sphere (Chicester: Wiley- Blackwell, 2011); Hugh H. Genoways and Mary Anne Andrei, Museum Origins: Readings in Early Museum History and Philosophy (Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press, 2008); Robert R. Janes, Museums in a Troubled World: Renewal, Irrelevance, or Collapse? (London: Routledge, 2009); Amy K. Levin, ed., Defining Memory: Local Museums and the Construction of History in America’s Changing Communities, American Association for State and Local History Book Series (Lanham: AltaMira Press, 2007); Ian Tyrrell, Historians in Public: The Practice of American History, 1890-1970 (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2005). 8 working classes to emulate middle class ideals.26 Stephen Conn found the period between 1876 and 1926 to be pivotal in the development of the public museum in the United States. The movement to create professional organizations combined with a Victorian Era interest in collection and display.27 Conn documented how museums and universities focused on the preservation of knowledge more than sharing that knowledge with American citizens.
Historians since the 1990s have also looked at the power of history in shaping public culture. Mystic Chords of Memory, by Michael Kammen, studied the idea that people can use
history either as a divisive or binding tool, particularly in terms of nationalism and ethnic
communities. Kammen documented that before the Civil War Americans saw their history as a burden for failing to be as grandiose as European empires, however, after the war, history became a kind of “secular religion” and even community building as white male Civil War
veterans on either side tried to heal past wounds.28 Kammen outlined how history can serve as a tool for community building and organization. While his is not the only book that does this, his was the first that I read that taught me that history museums are just as performative of identity, such as gender or ethnicity. It was quite formative because his work taught me that I could apply ideas about gender theory to public history. Conn’s work emphasized the same principles. Conn argued that “objects could tell stories” and that they were “visual sentences.” Conn’s statement encouraged me to see that if objects were story, than the arrangement of those objects- the exhibits- were storytellers or performers.29
26 Ibid., 15; Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics, Culture : Policies and Politics (London ; New York: Routledge, 1995), 94. 27 Conn, Museums and American Intellectual Life, 1876-1926, 8. 28 Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture, Reprint edition (New York: Vintage, 1993), 5, 24–25. 29 Steven Conn, Museums and American Intellectual Life, 1876-1926 (Chicago: Chicago University Pres, 1998), 262. 9 Another important source to this dissertation is Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s book,
Destination Culture. Her main question “what does it mean to show?” caused me to think differently about how historians and others present history.30 Her work examined both museums and other places of memory as performance theatre and examined their power of display and showing. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett studied folk festivals, museums, world’s fairs, and other historical and tourist attractions. Her conclusions were that officials used memory and public history events to help Americanize immigrants.31 Kammen and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s books continue to shape how I view public history sites in part because they taught me to view museums and public history sites as creators of narrative as much as keepers of information.
In recent years, different historians have turned their attention to local history. Amy
Levin’s Defining Memory: Local Museums and the Construction of History in America’s
Changing Communities examined how local museums and public history sites helped to
celebrate, create, and affirm local identities and stories. Levin argued that as American culture became more and more standardized and uniform, local history sites emphasized regional
difference and specialness.32 Tammy Gordon built on Levin’s collection of essays. Her book,
Private History in Public, argued that local history sites told the history that mattered to them.
As an example, the men and women connected to the Strippers Hall of Fame in California felt a
need to display their past because members of the site worried about erasure.33 Gordon’s point was that historians and other scholars cannot ignore local histories as kitsch or roadside attractions. Instead, as Levin argued, these museums represent the “cradle of democracy,”
30 Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1998), 2. 31 Ibid., 78. 32 Amy K. Levin, Defining Memory: Local Museums and the Construction of History in America’s Changing Communities (Lanham: AltaMira Press, 2007), 1. 33 Tammy S. Gordon and Harold Skramstad, Private History in Public: Exhibition and the Settings of Everyday Life (Lanham: AltaMira Press, 2010), 8. 10 because so many people participate.34 Seth Bruggeman’s work, Born in the USA:
Commemoration and American Public Memory, pointed out that smaller museums, public history sites, or even just birthplace markers remembered the history they wanted to celebrate and discarded what did not fit. He also argued that many places or people felt as though they own history, adding to the idea that history is a commodity.35 There are themes of these same anxieties at the GMAHV, the Florida Folk Festival, and the Stephen Foster Memorial as local citizens sought to document and present their own ideas about history.
This dissertation contributes to public history historiography because it builds and develops a new theoretical concept. While some theoretical approaches to authenticity view the proximity of an object to a specific region, historical event, or people as evidence of accuracy or truthfulness, I instead approach authenticity as an exchange between guest and museum and call this the “currency of authenticity.” The idea of authenticity as a type of currency, that museum staff exchange with guests not only strengthens the ideas that museums are performance spaces but also that guests are part of that performance.
In 2010 Stephen Conn asked “do museums still need objects?” He argued that as museums adjusted to twenty-first century ideas that museums be performance spaces, community empowerment space, and educational centers, the object lost some of its esteem.36 I
disagree with his overall conclusion and argue that in smaller museums objects are perhaps more
important than narrative. I believe that some museums emphasize objects disproportionately.
Guests, because they can interact with the object, trust the museum as forthcoming and accurate
34 Amy K. Levin, ed., Defining Memory: Local Museums and the Construction of History in America’s Changing Communities, American Association for State and Local History Book Series (Lanham: AltaMira Press, 2007), 17. 35 Seth C. Bruggeman, ed., Born in the U.S.A.: Birth, Commemoration, and American Public Memory (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012), 9, 17. 36 Conn, Do Museums Still Need Objects?, 7. 11 based on the authenticity guests interpret from or project onto the object. The guests develop a
relationship built on trust with museum staff and directors. However, guests are not only buying
authenticity in the form of the object. They are also buying authenticity in the entire story or
narrative that the museum tells as well. This is the “currency of authenticity.” The idea of the
“currency of authenticity” also builds on Michael Kammen’s work specifically, because it adds
to his idea that museums place too much emphasis on objects and not enough on their narrative.
However, this dissertation expands Kammen’s and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s work by emphasizing
that the fascination with the object combined with the power of showing, does an overall
disservice to guests when museums use poor narratives. When museums stress the truthfulness
of their artifacts or methods of creating reconstructions, but fail to research or update the overall
history they tell, they can potentially confuse or mislead guests.
Museums directors and public historians can apply this concept to all types of museums, big or small. The “currency of authenticity” can be a very useful tool for small museums with
tiny collections or limited options for growing their collections. It is a way to stress to guests
that the museum, memorial, festival, historic house, et cetera, is just as legitimate and valuable as
larger museums with greater name recognition. Larger museums can use the sheer size of their
collections, presentations, and exhibits as a way of garnering immediate trust and currency with
visitors. The more currency a space has, the more the public can museum directors as keepers of
sacred objects but also as keepers of sacred stories.
This “currency of authenticity” emphasizes that museums and public history sites are
sellers as much as visitors are consumers. Museums and public history sites do not only sell
their objects, however, they also sell their narratives, or the stories they tell in order to organize
and display their objects. Consumers, or visitors, buy these narratives based on the implicit trust
12 the museums accrued due to the objects that guests found to be authentic and accurate.
However, sometimes the narratives are not good. Sometimes they are outdated or problematic.
Sometimes museums have very specific narratives they want to tell. Museum guests, also called
consumers in this scenario, buy those narratives based on how much they trust the museums and
their objects.
This dissertation examines how public history sites build credibility and trustworthiness
with guests. If museums use objects as evidence of authenticity and truth, guests may perceive
their narratives as static, unchanging, and therefore unquestionable or innately accurate and less
open to interpretation, presentation, or change. This does a disservice to guests, but also to
historians, history, and researchers who work hard to provide the public with as much usable
information as possible. This dissertation project hopefully will point out some of these flaws, but also equip museums to better serve and educate their communities as well.
13 CHAPTER 2
THE STEPHEN FOSTER MEMORIAL: PLANTATION LONGINGS IN WHITE SPRINGS
Musicians and historians have often called Stephen Collins Foster “America’s troubadour.”37 This father of American music made his patriotic debut on July 4, 1826 in
Lawrenceville, east of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in a white cottage on a hill above the Allegheny
River. Between 1848 and his death in 1864, Foster composed more than two-hundred songs, mostly parlor and minstrel show music. Foster wrote common or vernacular music. He wrote songs in the common tongue, dialects, and styles of average Americans. Some of his more famous songs include “Camptown Races,” “Beautiful Dreamer,” “Old Folks at Home,” and “Oh!
Susanna,” which became the unofficial anthem of the California Gold Rush.38 Stephen Foster’s songs are simultaneously both demonstrative of antebellum-period music and, in their own way, timeless. His works focused on the unifying themes of family, love, and compassion and unlike many minstrel show composers, he tried to bring a level of humanity to his songs’ subjects that other writers did not. He is the only musician to have composed two state songs: Florida’s and
Kentucky’s.39 He spent the majority of his life in Pennsylvania, and although he lived in a free state with a significant abolitionist movement, he and his family were all Democrats (a political party committed to expansion in the west, white people’s rights to own slaves, and opposed to government interference in economic practices) and overall the family did not participate in the
37 Both of Foster’s two main biographies call him this and the biographies base their decision to call Foster “America’s Troubadour” on different primary sources calling him this throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Ken Emerson and Liversidge Collection, Doo-Dah!: Stephen Foster and the Rise of American Popular Culture (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997); John Tasker Howard, Stephen Foster: America’s Troubadour (New York, NY: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1934). 38 Stephen Foster, “Oh! Susanna,” 1848, http://www.stephen-foster-songs.de/foster021.htm. 39 Kentucky’s state song is Foster’s “My Old Kentucky Home.” 14 antislavery movement.40 Foster died in New York City in 1864 after a fever rendered him delirious and he fell and hit his head on a washbasin.41 His death came two weeks after he published his greatest work: “Beautiful Dreamer.” In his pockets were 38 cents and a scrap of paper with the words “dear friends and gentle hearts.”42 Historians know very little about
Foster’s private life beyond his music because his brother, Morrison Foster, destroyed much of
Stephen’s private papers because he believed they reflected negatively on the family.43
Because of Foster’s significant and continued impact on American music, there are many
different tributes to his life and achievements across the United States, most of which were
created in the 1930s and 1940s. The Stephen Foster Memorial at the University of Pittsburgh
houses two theatres that both local residents and tourists regularly attend to see various performances that the university puts on every year. Also in Pittsburgh, near the Carnegie
Museum of Natural History, is Giuseppi Moretti’s bronze sculpture of Foster. Moretti depicted
Foster composing a song, while a slave sits at his feet. Outside of Lexington, Kentucky, is the
My Old Kentucky Home State Park. This park produces Kentucky’s longest-running outdoor
drama, “Stephen Foster: The Musical” every year. Kentucky adopted Foster’s song as their state
song in 1928 and attendees of the Kentucky Derby sing it as the inaugural event to their famous
horse race. In 1940, New York University added his bust to the Hall of Fame for Great
Americans, making Stephen Foster the first and only musician to be honored in this unique
way. Floridians celebrate Stephen Foster at the Stephen Foster Folk Cultural Center and State
40 Ken Emerson, 10. 41 There is some disagreement over exactly how Foster died. While the story of Foster dying from a fever and hitting his head is a more common story, there is an argument that he cut himself while shaving at a brothel. Michael Friedman, “Can’t Escape Stephen Foster,” The New Yorker, March 10, 2014, http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/cant-escape-stephen-foster. 42 Emerson, 301. 43 John Tasker Howard, “The Literature on Stephen Foster,” Notes 1, no. 2 (1944): 10, doi:10.2307/891301. There are twenty of Foster’s own letters in the Foster Hall Collection in Pittsburgh. 15 Park, which is located on the banks of the Suwannee River in White Springs. This unique tribute
to Foster includes a carillon tower, a picturesque park with access to the river, an amphitheater,
and a museum with ten dioramas depicting Foster’s songs.
In addition to state and local memorials, the federal government has honored Foster in
different ways. In 1936, the Department of the Treasury minted a fifty-cent coin with his picture
on it. In 1940, the U.S. Postal Service put Foster’s face on a one-cent stamp. Lastly, during
World War II, one of the nation’s Liberty ships was named the U.S.S. Stephen C. Foster.44
Stephen Foster’s music continues to permeate American culture and reflects many people’s understanding of nineteenth century America. This chapter builds on the ever
engaging, ever growing historiography of race and American memory, but especially how
museums and public history sites tell the story of slavery, the Old South, and life on plantations.
While historians can discuss difficult topics amongst each other, museums are in a more precarious situation. Museums depend on public support and often state or federal support as
well. Museums, memorials, and other public history sites have to account for the fact that the
history they tell must attract repeat visitors.
The most influential work on the use of memory to conceptualize slavery in the aftermath
of the Civil War is David Blight’s, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. His
work has served as a blueprint for scholars who have wanted to understand how race, slavery,
and memory intersected. Blight focused on how Northern and Southern veterans chose to create
44 “All Members Ship List,” accessed July 13, 2016, http://www.armed-guard.com/allnames.html. 16 their understanding of the roots of the war and its causes. Blight refers to this as a “reminiscence
industry.”45 Blight’s narrative ends in the 1920s, when the last Civil War veterans passed away.
Building on Blight’s work, Representations of Slavery: Race and Ideology in Southern
Plantation Museums focused on why museums avoided difficult topics such as slavery and
racism. The authors, Jennifer Eichstedt and Stephen Small, came to the conclusion that guests’
desires and interests dictated a lot of what museums will or will not do.46 Ira Berlin reached a similar conclusion. He found that many museum visitors had very emotional connections to the history they encountered and saw different presentations as either attacking, defending, or ignoring their ancestors.47 Other scholars, such as Lois and Oliver Horton, applied many of
Blight’s same research questions to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Their edited anthology, Slavery and Public History: the Tough Stuff of American History, assembled a variety of authors’ case studies on how different museums, historic sites, and the national parks handle the issue of slavery and public presentation. Although the work demonstrates resistance to change, it also offers examples of what museums and memorials can do with the topic.
Scholars and researchers also examined how public history sites throughout the South dealt with slavery, the memory of the Civil War, and the war’s connection to slavery and racism.48
45 David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, Revised ed. edition (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2002), 2. 46 Jennifer L. Eichstedt and Stephen Small, Representations of Slavery: Race and Ideology in Southern Plantation Museums (Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002). 47 Ira Berlin, “American History in Slavery and Memory and the Search for Social Justice,” Journal of American History 90, no. 4 (2004): 1260. 48 James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, Slavery and the Making of America (New York City: Oxford University Press, 2005); Lois E. Horton and James Oliver Horton, eds., Slavery and Public History: The Tough Stuff of American Memory (New York: New Press : Distributed by Norton, 2006); Cynthia Mills and Pamela H. Simpson, Monuments To The Lost Cause: Women, Art, And The Landscapes Of Southern Memory, 1st edition (Knoxville: University Tennessee Press, 2003); Roberts, “Living Southern in Southern Living”; Stephanie Yuhl, A Golden Haze of Memory: The Making of Historic Charleston (Chapel Hill, N.C: University of North Carolina Press, 2005). 17 The purpose of this chapter is to outline the creation of the Stephen Foster Memorial in
White Springs, Florida, and, specifically its use of dioramas for telling the story of slavery. Curators put the dioramas on display in 1950 and the museum staff have left them unchanged for more than sixty years. As a result, I also analyze the possible consequences that result when a museum continues to perpetuate the scholarship of the past instead of keeping pace with current historiographic trends.
On October 4, 1950, the state of Florida and a group of dedicated volunteers opened the
Stephen Foster Folk Culture Center State Park, located in White Springs, Florida.49 The museum
is located on the very banks of the river that Foster made famous, the Suwannee River, and it
occupies more than 240 acres of lush North Central Florida landscape: oak trees dripping with
Spanish moss, cypress trees steeping in the banks of the sweet tea-brown river, as well as the
occasional sandy pine. The museum, originally named The Stephen Foster Museum and
Memorial, is in a neoclassical-style building that state workers and architects designed and
constructed in the 1940s. The museum is home to a variety of Fosteriana- artifacts relating to
Stephen Foster – as well as two large Howard Chandler Christy paintings of Foster and eight
dioramas.50 Each diorama depicts an artistic interpretation of one of Foster’s more famous songs, including “My Old Kentucky Home,” “Way Down Upon De Swanee Ribber,” and “Old
Black Joe.”51 A separate building houses a carillon tower that plays a variety of Foster’s songs every two hours. The J.C. Deagan Company of Chicago built the tower in 1957. At the time the carillon tower was the largest in the country with ninety-seven tubular bells and is presently still
49 This park and museum have had a few different names in the past; I use Stephen Foster Memorial, Stephen Foster Museum interchangeably. 50 There are eight dioramas in the museum, but an additional two are on display at the carillon tower, for a total of ten on the entire property. The memorial also owns an eleventh diorama, “Beautiful Dreamer,” but does not display that diorama. 51 In addition to the three listed the other songs depicted are “Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair,” “Camptown Races,” “Oh Susanna!,” “My Old Dog Tray,” and “Open Thy Lattice Love.” 18 the largest that the Deagan Company ever made.52 There are two additional dioramas in the
carillon tower: a second diorama of the “Way Down Upon de Swanee Ribber” and “The Glendy
Burk” about a paddleboat that went up and down the Ohio River.
Although officially opened in 1950, the original idea for a memorial in Florida was born
in 1931. Louie W. Carpenter traced the idea for the park to Fosteriana collector, Josiah Kirby
Lilly.53 Lilly, a pharmaceutical industrialist, was a collector of rare works in American and
English history. He owned the original manuscript of J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan as well as a
Gutenberg Bible, a folio of work by William Shakespeare, and thousands of other rare manuscripts and first editions.54 Lilly also collected a variety of Fosteriana including Foster’s first printings of different songs, Foster’s desk, and other objects that might be connected to
Foster or Foster’s family. Lilly regularly wintered in Florida and in 1931 he suggested to friends that Florida should have a site dedicated to Stephen Foster.55 The Florida Federation of Music
Clubs carried Lilly’s idea to completion. This group also campaigned to get the state song changed from “Florida, My Florida” to “Old Folks at Home” in 1935.56 In 1938, the twenty- seventh Governor of Florida, Fred P. Cone appointed three people to chair a commission to supervise the creation of a memorial: Earl Brown, who designed significant parts of Florida’s exhibits in three World’s Fairs; Lillian Saunders, a resident and member of a powerful family in
52 Stephen Foster Memorial Commission, Florida’s Memorial to Stephen Collins Foster : “the American Troubadour.” (White Springs, Florida: Stephen Foster Memorial Commission, 1951), 6. 53 Louie Wendell Carpenter, “The Stephen Foster Memorial 1931-1969: A Socio-Cultural Force in a Rural Community" (Dissertation, Florida State University, 1969), 16. 54 Joel Silver, J.K. Lilly Jr., Bibliophile (Indianapolis, Indiana: The Lilly Library, 1993), 7, 8, http://www.indiana.edu/~liblilly/digital/collections/items/show/913. 55 Carpenter, 17. 56 “State Song - Florida Department of State,” accessed May 22, 2016, http://dos.myflorida.com/florida- facts/florida-state-symbols/state-song/. 19 White Springs; and Mrs. LeRoy Smith, a leading member of the Florida Federation of Music
Clubs. Cone also appropriated $25,000 to get things started.57
The idea of dedicating a tourist attraction to Foster was unusual in comparison to
Florida’s other marketing efforts. David Nelson has outlined how the state of Florida used the
state park system to manufacture an image of Florida that did not actually resonate with many of
its own residents. While most Floridians lived largely rural lives, the state carefully cultivated an
image of exotic flora, sandy beaches, adventure, and subtropical climes.58 However, many
Florida residents resisted this advertising development and instead reinvigorated a stereotype of the Florida Cracker.59 The Stephen Foster Memorial, however, did not fit into the trend Nelson described and the museum did not celebrate any kind of Cracker idea. Instead, it told the story of slaves.
While a memorial, park, or museum dedicated to the memories of planation and antebellum white living may have been unusual for Florida, it was not unusual for other parts of the Southern United States. The marketing of the Old South as a tourist attraction started before the Civil War itself. Diane Roberts argued in Dixie Debates: Perspectives on Southern Culture that as early as the 1840s and 1850s Southerners started to purposefully cultivate an image of the hospitable, bucolic, gracious South as a way of countering attacks against the peculiar institution of slavery propagated by abolitionists, and especially as Harriet Beecher Stowe portrayed in her book, Uncle Tom’s Cabin.60 Stephanie Yuhl focused on historic Charleston and examined how in the 1920s and 1930s certain wealthy members of the city preserved historic buildings while
57 Ella May Davis to Fred Cone, 29 October 1938, Fred Cone Papers, box 34, folder “Stephen Foster Memorial Commission” Florida State Archives. 58 David Nelson, “Florida Crackers and Yankee Tourists: The Civilian Conservation Corps, the Florida Park Service and the Emergence of Modern Florida Tourism” (Dissertation Florida State University, 2008), 1. 59 Ibid, 3. 60 Roberts, “Living Southern in Southern Living,” 90. 20 they also promoted their own vision of the Old South. While some of the narrative they told
focused on Southern valor and honor, a large part of the story they told focused on civilian life.
Charleston preservationists made a focused effort to tell the story of a “pre-Civil War past as a
heroic time when Old World gentility, a successful plantation system, and revolutionary patriotism reigned supreme.”61 The memorial to Foster, therefore, was not unique in using images of the Old South for the purposes of tourism.
The commission selected White Springs, Florida, as the location for a park and memorial.
Governor Cone enthusiastically agreed with this and was heavily involved in making sure the memorial went to White Springs. White Springs was near Cone’s birthplace in Columbia
County. Cone believed a memorial devoted to Stephen Foster to be a potentially lucrative tourist site in a place he cared for and wanted to see prosper despite the Great Depression. Foster’s song “Old Folks at Home” was Cone’s campaign song and he adamantly promised cooperation with the Florida Federation of Music Clubs.62 There was a brief discussion of putting the memorial in Ellaville, Florida, also on the Suwannee River and the site of a Confederate fort, but
Cone used his power of persuasion to end that debate.63 Cone’s appointment of Earl Brown was also a significant decision that shaped the museum’s use of dioramas in its presentation.
Earl W. Brown was head of the Florida National Exhibits Committee, which was located in Deland, Florida. Florida Senator W. Randolph Hodges described Brown as an “outstanding, public spirited citizen.”64 In the 1930s, Brown participated in creating Florida’s contribution to the World’s Fairs held in 1933 (Chicago), in 1936 (Cleveland), and in 1939 (New York City).
61 Yuhl, A Golden Haze of Memory: The Making of Historic Charleston, 35–36. 62 Fred Cone to Ella May Davis, 4 November 1938, Fred Cone Papers, box 34, folder “Stephen Foster Memorial Commission,” SAF. 63 “Memorandum,” Harry Lee Baker, 18, February 1838, Fred Cone Papers, box 35, folder “Stephen Foster Memorial Commission,” SAF. 64 William Randolph Hodges to Doyle Carlton, 17 May 1932, Carlton Papers, box 13, folder “Century of Progress,” SAF. 21 Brown believed that dioramas were the epitome of “the science of showmanship.”65 He saw them as an efficient tool for advertising, especially at a fair where people could walk among them, or even inside them. Brown described the impact that a diorama could have on a viewer:
“the whole technique of exhibiting has been revolutionized by it. Dull and monotonous displays are, as if by magic, made highly dramatic and fascinating.”66
While most of Florida’s dioramas focused on agriculture, especially the citrus industry, and tourism, Brown’s Florida National Exhibits also designed imagery of the Old South.67 For instance, Brown created “Way Down Upon the Swanee Ribber,” for the 1933 World’s Fair. 68
(Later, it found a permanent home in White Springs.) In a press release, the state described it as
“animated or humanized to the extent that by the use of mechanical devices instrumental and
vocal rendition…” The statement goes on to call the characters in the diorama “negroes gathered
around the old cabin home.”69 Florida displayed the diorama again at the World’s Fairs in 1936
and 1939.
The movement to create a memorial to Foster slowed down considerably in the war
years. Between 1942 and 1944, all spending and building came to a halt as the state and country
diverted materials and manpower to the war effort. David Nelson discusses in his dissertation,
“Florida Crackers and Yankee Tourists,” that state parks and other state projects all stopped
growth as well.70 Lillian Saunders, one of the commission’s leading members, continued to ask
65 “Department of Promotion, Florida Commission World’s Fair 1933,” 1933, Carlton Papers, box 13, “Century of Progress,” SAF. 66 Century of Progress press release, n.d (circa 1931), Carlton Papers, box 14, “Century of Progress,” SAF. 67 Joel Hoffman, “From Augustine to Tangerine: Florida at the US World’s Fairs,” The Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts 23 (48-85): 63–64. Hoffman mistakenly calls the diorama “Sunset on the Suwannee.” 68 “Department of Promotion, Florida Commission World’s Fair 1933,” 1933, Carlton Papers, box 13, “Century of Progress,” SAF. 69 “Century of Progress Press Release,” 2 November 1932, Carlton papers, box 13, folder: “Century of Progress,” SAF. 70 Nelson, 173–75. 22 for money, arguing that the park could increase “patriotism and loyalty,” but for the most part the
state rebuffed her requests.71 Between 1942 and 1944, the state only paid the bare minimum for caretaking expenses.
In 1941, Earl Brown brought in Foster Barnes, a landscape architect and surveyor, to
serve as caretaker, builder, planner, and general manager of the museum. Barnes and Brown had
worked together crafting exhibits for Florida’s participation in the 1939 World’s Fair in New
York. Brown originally hired Barnes to design and develop the designated land in White
Springs. During World War II, Barnes mostly just cared for the property, but starting in 1944,
the commission began to reset its plans in motion. Barnes was neither a professional museum
curator nor historian. In 1941, he moved onto the property and over the next ten years Barnes
worked closely with the various commission members and state politicians to develop the park. The memorial’s commissioners, Barnes, and many other dedicated volunteers worked
ceaselessly to get state and private funding for the park. Without any formal training in history,
curating, or art, Barnes constructed the museum and arranged its exhibits. As the museum had
no budget to purchase artifacts, Barnes encouraged donations.72
After the war, the state resumed building the memorial at a rapid pace. In 1947,
Governor Millard Caldwell and the state appropriated $500,000 to commence building the
memorial. The commission and others believed it would be a significant tourist attraction.
However, by October 1948, the state had only released $200,000.73 Nonetheless, the museum
opened its doors on October 4, 1950.
71 W.E. Duckwitz to Spessard Holland, 19 December 1941, Holland papers, box 39 folder: “Stephen Foster Memorial Commission,” SAF. 72 Carpenter, 39. 73 “The Stephen Foster Memorial,” Fuller Warren papers, box 31, folder: “Stephen Foster Memorial Commission,” SAF. 23 In fundraising literature and other pamphlets, the memorial outlined a clear list of public
goals. First, the goal was to honor Stephen Foster as a songwriter “whose simple melodies stir
the hearts of the entire civilized world.” Their second official goal was to honor the river that
Foster immortalized. Finally, the museum aimed to provide a place for public concerts and
music benefits.74 The memorial commission and Governor Doyle Carlton expected the memorial to have thousands of visitors each year.75
The memorial had several attractions upon opening. In addition to a Foster-themed museum, the memorial had an outdoor stage for music performers, motorized Conestoga wagons for rides around the park themed to complement “Oh, Susanna,” and a replica of paddlewheel riverboats for rides up and down the Suwannee River. In its first year, the park hosted more than
250,000 registered visitors. The park’s popularity even made headlines in The New York
Times.76 In 1952, the Stephen Foster Memorial Center hosted its first “Jeanie with the Light
Brown Hair” singing contest, in which young women with dark blonde or light brunette colored
hair wore hoop-skirt dresses and sang Foster’s song for trophies and local prestige. The
following year, 1953, the memorial hosted its first Florida Folk Festival, a public event that
celebrated local Floridian and American music, especially folk and bluegrass. (I will write more
about this festival in the next chapter). By 1957, the memorial described itself as “the most
visited non-commercial attraction in the southeast.”77
The museum and memorial in White Springs used dioramas to tell the story of slavery.
Dioramas can be powerful mediums of display because they combine 3-D effects with depth
74 The Florida Stephen Foster Memorial pamphlet by the Florida Federation of Music Clubs, 1939, Doyle Carlton papers, box 14, folder: “Stephen Foster Memorial Commission,” SAF. 75 Untitled statement from Carlton about memorial, 1939, Carlton papers, box 14, folder: “Stephen Foster Memorial Commission,” SAF. 76 C.E. Wright, “Shrine to a Song,” New York Times, November 18, 1951, sec. X30. 77 Stephen Foster Memorial Commission, Stephen Foster Memorial at White Springs, on the Suwannee River (White Springs, Florida: Stephen Foster Memorial Commission, 1957), 3. 24 illusions by using occlusion, parallax, and other trompe l’oeil to trick the viewer into believing
that he or she is seeing a much larger space or looking off into a distance.78 Stephen Asma traced how museums began to use dioramas and other kinds of re-creation in their collections.
He argued that dioramas were “aesthetic representations” that extended a “museum’s epistemic potential.”79 In other words, dioramas can help museum guests learn in a different way when compared with interacting with objects, reading plaques, or taking a tour.
Dioramas are unique when compared to other forms of material culture presented at museums because curators make them in the present-day to depict some moment or idea of the past; this makes dioramas different from display cases of objects or other more traditional exhibits. Asma concluded that dioramas “blurred beyond any recovery” the distinction between art, the narrative, and display.80 Many other sources at a museum will be primary sources, such as historic artifacts, reprints of speeches, or paintings from the time period. In contrast, dioramas
are secondary sources. In this way, they can, at times, be anachronistic representations of
history.
Some academics have rejuvenated the study and evaluation of the diorama since the
1980s but almost all of their work is on how natural history and science museums recreated
habitat and environmental scenes. Asma’s Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads explains how
science museums used dioramas to distinguish themselves from less respected museums of
sideshows.81 Karen Wonders’s Habitat Dioramas: Illusions of Wilderness in Museums of
78 Jackie Assa and Lior Wolf, “Diorama Construction from a Single Image,” Eurographics 26, no. 3 (2007): 599. 79 Stephen Asma, Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads: The Culture and Evolution of Natural History Museums (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 240. 80 Ibid., Asma, 274. 81 Ibid., 31–33. 25 Natural History argues that besides demonstrating humankind’s relationship with biology and
animal studies, Progressive Era habitat dioramas influenced architecture.82
The original eight dioramas depicting Foster’s songs constituted the museum’s major permanent exhibit. According to an undated pamphlet describing the dioramas, they cost more than $40,000 to plan and build; in 2015 dollars that would be almost $319,000 for eight small displays.83 When the carillon tower opened in 1957, it housed two additional dioramas for a total of ten for the entire park.84 The Stephen Foster Memorial commission selected the songs for the
dioramas to depict, basing their choices on their perceived popularity and interest in the different
tunes.85
Exhibit Builders Inc. in Deland, Florida, staffed by the same designers and builders from the Florida National Exhibits in the 1930s, built the dioramas. As many as fourteen different artists spent more than two years creating the different exhibits. Each diorama measured roughly six feet by nine feet, although the public only sees about one foot by three feet because the mechanic of the diorama, that works the moving parts, are both underneath and behind what visitors see. Exhibit Builders prided themselves on making models that emphasized not only beauty and true-to-life likeness, but accuracy as well. For instance, Exhibit Builders Inc. used raw materials such as small tufts of real cotton grown in Florida to make hundreds of cotton bolls, each no larger than half the size of a pencil eraser, in two of the dioramas. In “Way Down
82 Karen Wonders, Habitat Dioramas: Illusions of Wilderness in Museums of Natural History (Uppsala, Sweden: Uppsala University Publishers, 1993), 17. 83 No author, Dioramas Pamphlet (White Springs, FL: Stephen Foster Memorial Center, no date). Samuel H. Williamson, "Seven Ways to Compute the Relative Value of a U.S. Dollar Amount, 1774 to present," MeasuringWorth, 2016. 84 There is an eleventh diorama that the museum chooses not to display, “Beautiful Dreamer,” because the museum believed it was too sexual. It showed a white woman reclining on sofa, while a white man climbed steps towards her. The museum did not allow me to see it; it was too difficult to get to because of its size and storage location. 85 Carpenter, 49. 26 Upon De Swanee Ribber” each “paper leaf was individually fastened to a metal stem, stems to
twigs, twigs formed into a plant, painted, and the bolls of cotton attached all by hand.”86 In the
same diorama, a paddleboat, Belle of the Suwannee, moves at a historically accurate speed because artists spent hours researching how fast the boat should go down the waterway so as to be true to antebellum paddleboats. The museum continues to believe that the dioramas are a popular draw.87
The Stephen Foster Folk Cultural Center and State Park holds eleven total different
Stephen Foster dioramas, but this chapter will only focus on the four that clearly depict antebellum life in the Old South.88 Those include “Old Black Joe,” “My Old Kentucky Home,” and two different dioramas presenting “Way Down Upon De Swanee Ribber.”89 Before the exhibit opened in 1950 the memorial installed wooden plaques that serve as labels. These markers only denote the song’s title and the year of the song’s original publication.
It does not appear that the museum ever intended for any of the four dioramas to depict
slavery in an overtly offensive light- meaning that there is nothing purposefully violent or sordid
in any of the displays. In “My Old Kentucky Home,” there are two slave quarters with a variety
of slaves engaging in different activities including laundry and caring for children.90 On the far right of the exhibit, two male slaves play music on a banjo and harmonica and tap their feet.
This part of the exhibit is animated so the characters actually move. One of the more enchanting
86 “Dioramas Pamphlet” (Stephen Foster Folk Culture Center and State Park, n.d.). 87 Andrea Thomas, interview with Elizabeth Worley, Stephen Foster Folk Culture State Park, May 13, 2013. 88 The other dioramas are “Oh, Susanna,” “My Old Dog Tray,” “The Glendy Burk,” “I dream of Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair,” “Camptown Races,” and “Open thy Lattice Love.” An eleventh diorama, “Beautiful Dreamer” is not on display. My dissertation examines the four that depict slavery: two for “Way Down Upon De Swanee Ribber,” “My Old Kentucky Home,” and “Old Black Joe.” 89 The second dioramas is in the carillon tower. They are not original to the museum’s opening, but were in place by 1957 when the carillon tower opened and were also put together by the same artists and designers. 90 “My Old Kentucky Home” diorama, Exhibit Builders, Inc., Deland, Florida: circa 1945-1950. 27 moving parts of this diorama is a donkey pulling a cart. In “Way Down Upon De Swanee
Ribber,” a few slaves work a cotton field that borders their cabin while others visit with each
other casually.91 In the background there is a paddleboat, the Belle of the Suwanee, going down
the river while black children play under an oak tree.
The diorama “Old Black Joe” focused on an individual rather than offer a panoramic
view of a place and/or community. The idea for the song originated from when Stephen Foster
courted the woman who would later became his wife, Jane McDowell. During his courtship he
came in frequent contact with a black servant the family called “Old Joe.” According to Foster’s
granddaughter, Jessie Welsh Rose, Joe watched Foster come and go in the McDowell home and
Foster wanted to write a song about the old man. The memorial described the song as “haunting
strains which tell of the trials and tribulations of an old Negro servant.”92 In the diorama, an elderly black slave stands in a cotton field, a plantation mansion in the painted background. “Old
Black Joe” gazes up into the sky. In the clouds, he sees the faces of his deceased friends and relatives.93 The song itself was unusual for Foster. While music historians considered this song
to be a minstrel, or Ethiopian, song, Foster did not write the song in the stereotypical “Negro
dialect” like his other plantation melodies.94 This song was different because it was about someone Foster knew and respected; his lack of use of the “Negro dialect” demonstrates this difference.
There are several themes that these dioramas all have in common with one another. In each, white people are absent. There are no owners, overseers, visitors, or other white
91 “Way Down Upon De Swanee Ribber” diorama, Exhibit Builders, Inc., Deland, Florida: circa 1945-1950. 92 Stephen Foster Memorial Commission, Florida’s Memorial to Stephen Collins Foster : “the American Troubadour.,” 16. 93 “Old Black Joe” diorama, Exhibit Builders, Inc., Deland, Florida: circa 1945-1950. 94 Harold Vincent Milligan, Stephen Collins Foster: A Biography of America’s Folk-Song Composer (Boston: G. Schirmir Press, 1923), 87. 28 people. They each include a mansion, assumed to be the ‘Big House,’ but always in the far, far background and often on a hill, removed from any tangible interactions with the slaves’ lives. In these displays, the dioramas acknowledge a white planter class with the mansions but it is abstract and unobtrusive. In fact, in “Way Down Upon De Swanee Ribber,” the river itself separates the white mansion from the slave cabins: a liminal object divides the two worlds. The slaves have leisure time for music and play. They talk idly with each other and raise their own children, not their masters’. The black men and women in these depictions have a great deal of autonomy in the structure of their day, and although a cotton field, often associated with backbreaking work, a lifetime of exhaustion, and the violence of a foreman, encroaches upon slave quarters.
The dioramas are material artifacts that represent the romantic mythology about the Old
South that had gained significant traction among academics and in popular culture in the first few decades of the twentieth century. During the era of Jim Crow, scholars across the country from many disciplines spilled considerable ink analyzing the contours of American slavery and the institution’s relation to the Civil War, if any.95 A new wave of historians developed an interpretation of antebellum America that slavery was benign and, at times, even beneficial to
African Americans. Perhaps the most influential of these historians was Ulrich B. Phillips and his book American Negro Slavery (1918).
Using plantation records, the main theme of American Negro Slavery was that slavery benefited enslaved people. He argued that black men and women had the mental capacity of children and therefore needed white leadership and guidance. He stated that “every plantation of
95 John David Smith, An Old Creed for the New South: Proslavery Ideology and Historiography, 1865-1918 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008), 4, https://login.proxy.lib.fsu.edu/login?url=http://site.ebrary.com/lib/fsulibrary/Doc?id=10555653. 29 the Southern type was, in fact, a school constantly training and controlling pupils who were in a backward state of civilization.”96 He also wrote that “plantations were the best schools yet invented for the mass training of that sort of inert and backward people which the bulk of the
American negroes represented.”97 Phillips “depicted slave masters who provided for the welfare of their slaves and contended that true affection existed between master and slave.”98 His work
“portrayed African Americans either as children, ignorant dupes manipulated by unscrupulous
whites, or as savages, their primal passions unleashed by the end of slavery.”99
Phillips’ work and other scholars who based their research on “negro incapacity,” shaped how people in the 1930s and 1940s understood slavery, plantation life, and the South.100 Images of slavery in popular culture influenced and resonated with this historical literature. For instance, Margaret Mitchell used Phillips’ research to depict ideas about slavery, antebellum life, and the Southern planter class in Gone with the Wind (1936).
Tara McPherson argues in her book, Reconstructing Dixie, that in the 1930s American movies used a “nostalgia industry” to sell an imagined idea of the antebellum South.101 For example, in 1935’s The Littlest Rebel, child star Shirley Temple played a Southern girl during
the Civil War left alone on a plantation with only a loyal slave, “Uncle Billy” played by Bill
Bojangles, to care for her and he does so despite opportunities to run away.102 Similarly, the
1938 film Jezebel, shows Bette Davis’ character, Julie Marsden, literally conducting slaves as
96 Ulrich B. Phillips, American Negro Slavery: A Survey of the Supply, Employment, and Control of the Negro Labor, as Determined by the Plantation Regime (New York and London: Appleton and Company, 1918), 177, http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/11490/pg11490-images.html. 97 Ibid, 178. 98 Horton and Horton, Slavery and the Making of America, 9. 99 Eric Foner, Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction (New York City: Vintage Reprint Edition, 2006), xxii. 100 Ibid. 101 Tara McPherson, Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender and Nostalgia in the Imagined South (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 3. 102 David Butler, The Littlest Rebels (Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation, 1935). 30 they happily dance and sing for her entertainment.103 A year later MGM’s film adaptation of
Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind depicted slaves as devoted to their masters, even after
emancipation.
In the late 1930s and 1940s, companies and corporations regularly used images of happy
slaves on cookie jars, salt and pepper shakers, and other figurines as decorative knick-knacks for
white homes.104 Karen Cox, author of Dreaming Dixie, has argued that between the 1890s and
1940s advertising agencies regularly used images of the past, especially the rural South, to
emphasize stability and tradition in a changing, industrializing nation.105
Hence, at the same time that the Stephen Foster Memorial Commission developed its
ideas for the memorial and museum, modern culture was awash with the image of the happy,
contented, and faithful slaves in advertising, films, and books. It is not surprising then that the
dioramas “My Old Kentucky Home” and “Way Down Upon De Swanee Ribber” showed a beneficent system. The cabins, although modest compared with the plantation mansion, are
sturdy. All of the slaves wear clothing, although none wears shoes. They entertain themselves
and make some of their own food. There is no sickness or pain. A guest in front of the dioramas
would find it easy to see the smiles on slaves’ faces. In the second “Swanee Ribber” diorama
inside the carillon tower, there is a close-up of a young male slave sitting on the banks of the
river, eating watermelon, and fishing with a cane pole. In these illustrations of antebellum race
103 William Wyler, Jezebel (Warner Brothers, 1938). 104 Steven C. Dubin, “Symbolic Slavery: Black Representation in Popular Culture,” Society for the Study of Social Problems 34, no. 2 (April 1987): 127. M.M. Manning, Slave in a Box: The Strange Career of Aunt Jemima (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998), 45–50 and 60-78; McElya, Clinging to Mammy; Marilyn Kern Foxworth, Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben, and Rastus: Blacks in Advertising, Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1994), 31–113. 105 Karen L. Cox, Dreaming Dixie: How the South Was Created in American Public (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 36-38. 31 relations, the dioramas argue that slaves experienced a peaceful life: satisfying to them and their
nature.
While the park’s specific goal was to celebrate Foster, and music more generally, the
museum also clearly became a memorial to the Old South. When speaking about the memorial,
different people and organizations regularly commented that this memorial was as much about
tradition and “nostalgia” as about music.106 One writer described two Suwannee Rivers: the
literal river that flowed through North Florida into the Gulf of Mexico, but also a second river,
one “flowing through the pleasant, sunny vales of memory.”107 In a fundraising speech, Claude
Pepper, one of Florida’s state representatives, stated that he perceived the purpose of the
memorial to be to “keep fresh the glories of the past soft sentiments of our nature.”108 After the memorial and museum opened in 1950, it described the dioramas as “reminiscent of the Old
South.”109 The memorial commission believed that Foster and his music portrayed antebellum
life.
The memorial and museum used powerful imagery beyond the dioramas to connect their
site to ideas about the Old South. The memorial described the museum itself, a neoclassical building with two story columns, as a “stately antebellum mansion.”110 In reflecting on the park’s creation, Lillian Saunders, one of the original members of the commission, remembered that the commission rejected one company’s proposed architectural design because they were
106 Stephen Foster Memorial Commission, Florida’s Memorial to Stephen Collins Foster : “the American Troubadour,” 3. 107 Ibid., 4. 108 State Bulletin: Official Publication of the Florida Federation of Music Clubs, 1939, Cone papers, box 34, folder: “Stephen Foster Memorial Commission,” SAF. Also in this folder is a copy of a federal piece of legislation that Pepper proposed to fund a memorial to Foster. 109 Stephen Foster Memorial Commission, Florida’s Memorial to Stephen Collins Foster : “the American Troubadour.,” 30. 110 Ibid., 5. 32 “too modern.”111 In 1944, Foster Barnes designed a proposed map of what the commission envisioned the memorial, museum, and park to become. He described the museum as a “typical plantation mansion.”112 In this same map, Barnes detailed plans for horse stables he named “Old
Black Joe” and “Uncle Ned” after more of Foster’s minstrel songs. Additionally, there was a walking or bike trail that Barnes named “To de Old Cotton Field.”113
Museums are not static. They produce messages, meaningful statements, or
actions.114 People cannot evaluate exhibits for simply what they display but they must also
examine how they interact with the audience and museum employees. The Stephen Foster
Museum functions as a symposium where public history and cultural memory interact. It is because of this relationship that it is especially troubling to this public historian that the museum has not changed its exhibits for sixty years. The messages that the Stephen Foster Museum depicts in regards to its representation of slavery for a present-day audience may not be what the museum intends. Nevertheless, the Stephen Foster Museum has not attempted to grapple with the changing scholarship of slave experiences or the methods of public history for tackling difficult subjects.
Instead, the Stephen Foster Museum perpetuates the myth that slavery was a paternalistic and overall benign institution and they do so by claiming that the dioramas represent
legitimate historical work. One pamphlet, available to all guests free of charge, simply titled
“Dioramas,” speaks glowingly of the tender care that each diorama received when being
111 “Florida Memory - Interview with Lillian Saunders,” Florida Memory, accessed January 29, 2015, https://floridamemory.com/items/show/241483. 112 Landscape Study of the Stephen C. Foster Memorial, White Springs, Florida, 1944, Caldwell papers, box 29, folder: “Stephen Foster Memorial,” SAF. 113 Ibid. 114 Richard Handler and Eric Gable, The New History in an Old Museum: Creating the Past at Colonial Williamsburg (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 9. 33 designed. The flier boasts that the exhibits were made with the strictest standards. Words and phrases like “research,” “great amount of planning,” “historically accurate,” and “eloquently depict a way of life” litter the page.115 A close examination of the dioramas and the literature provided by the museum, however, allows scholars to know that while the dioramas are
materially accurate they are not historically true. The details of the shingles in “My Old
Kentucky Home,” for instance, are correct but the story the diorama tells is fictitious. When the
museum emphasizes to guests and visitors that the dioramas are accurate, historical, and
authentic the guest might confuse the methods of creation or material accuracy with the narrative
that museum instructs. In fact, guests may not even be aware that museums present a narrative at
all because they see museums as places to interact with objects, not necessarily interpretation.
What happens to a museum that fails to update its exhibit over any extended period of
time? The Stephen Foster Center’s original goals were to provide a cultural, historical, and
educational center in a primarily rural community. In many ways, the museum is no longer
exhibiting Stephen Foster’s life and work. Rather the museum has become a museum piece
itself. When guests visit the Stephen Foster Center, they will certainly see Fosteriana but they
will see much more as well. They will behold a perfectly preserved memory. Visitors will be
witnesses to how the American South wished itself to be and as some Floridians understood
antebellum life in the middle of the twentieth-century. The audience will examine a display of
how the Jim Crow South wanted to remember slavery.
The Stephen Foster Museum and Memorial began as an idea dedicated to preserving the
legacy of a gifted musician. Collaborative private and state efforts brought the funds and land
115 Dioramas Pamphlet.
34 together so that the park could become a reality. In its heyday of the 1950s and 1960s, large
numbers of tourists visited the memorial in North Central Florida. Since the museum opened,
the dioramas have been popular with guests. The dioramas are the centerpiece of the museum’s
exhibits. Aside from a desk, few pianos that Foster may have walked past once and the Christy paintings of Foster, the museum’s largest permanent presentation of history is the dioramas.
The four dioramas that depict slavery show a romanticized picture of the antebellum
South. Their portrayals of the loyal or happy slave are provocative examples of the types of material culture that were created in the 1930s and 1940s. Although similar to the cookie jars, waffle mixes, and pancake syrup bottles that used the idea of the loyal slave to sell products, these dioramas tell the story of slavery in a public space.
The Stephen Foster Museum and all sites of public history produce meaningful images and ideology. They both hold and disseminate knowledge and the public trusts them to be honest and accountable for the history that they present. If the state allows its museums’ historical narrative to remain static then the image and education it presents will most assuredly change without them knowing it. The museum will instead become a relic: a timepiece that teaches the public about what scholars and the general public used to think about history. If the
Stephen Foster Museum and Memorial, now the Stephen Foster Folk Culture Center State Park, could reinterpret its presentation, perhaps with interpretive labels that put the dioramas into a historical context, it might be able to convey a more meaningful sense of the complex intricacies of American history and the breadth of the American experience.
35 CHAPTER 3
THE FLORIDA FOLK FESTIVAL: THELMA BOLTIN, FOLK, AND AUTHENTICITY
Every Memorial Day weekend, the Stephen Foster Folk Culture Center and State Park
hosts the Florida Folk Festival, a three-day celebration of music, dance, stories, food, and crafts
that demonstrates Florida and the surrounding region’s cultural heritage. Each year more than
300 performers play at the festival as a tribute to this region’s rich history. The Florida
Department of State’s Folklife Program presents research and field documentation each year so
that viewers and audiences can share in local history and art. In addition to watching performances, festival guests have the opportunity to participate in various art forms as well.
The hobby-musician can be a part of a “jam session” with local and regional guests. Others can
try to weave pine-straw baskets. Guests can also choose to call a square-dance or learn to
differentiate between the abundant flora of the scrub pine brush of White County. Some visitors
come simply to sample the cuisine of hoppin’ john, kumquat pie, or a lime fizz.116
As of 2015, the festival boasts around 30,000 visitors annually.117 Musicians from around Florida are the main attraction although some performers may be from other parts of the
South or even just a part of Southern traditions. The festival also promotes artisans, storytellers, craftsmen, and others who regularly appear on the program. The early organizers of the festival emphasized local and Floridian culture (especially Florida “Crackers”), immigrant groups with a significant presence in Florida, and Native Americans. However, today the program highlights a broader definition of folk culture.
116 “Florida Folk Festival | Florida State Parks,” accessed June 20, 2016, https://www.floridastateparks.org/folkfest. 117 Andrea Thomas. 36 This chapter analyzes the relationship between history, memory, and the “currency of
authenticity” as both production and performance by examining how the Florida Folk Festival
determined what constituted an authentic folk tradition. First, the chapter places the history of
the Florida Folk Festival into a historic context by discussing the evolution of folk festivals
nationally.118 Second, it looks at the festival organizer from the 1950s to the 1960s, Thelma
Boltin, to understand how she defined “folk.”
Folk revivals and festivals in the United States started in the 1930s and then experienced a second resurgence in the mid to late 1960s when folk music became mainstream music instead of a niche. Before the folk revival, there were a few scholars who demonstrated interest in the history of folklore.119 Since the second movement’s end, sociologists, ethnomusicologists,
anthropologists, and historians have contributed to a growing body of work documenting
118 Ronald D. Cohen, A History of Folk Music Festivals in the United States: Feasts of Musical Celebration, American Folk Music and Musicians Series 11 (Lanham, Md: Scarecrow Press, 2008); Ronald D. Cohen, Rainbow Quest: The Folk Music Revival and American Society, 1940-1970 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002); Kip Lornell, Exploring American Folk Music Ethnic, Grassroots, and Regional Traditions in the United States, 3rd ed, American Made Music Series (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012); Patricia Sawin and Inta Gale Carpenter, Reflections on the Folklife Festival: An Ethnography of Participant Experience (Indiana University Press, 1992); Michael Ann Williams, Staging Tradition: John Lair and Sarah Gertrude Knott (University of Illinois Press, 2006). 119 John Lomax, Adventures of a Ballad Hunter (New York, NY: Hafner Publishing, 1947); John Lomax, Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads (New York City: Sturgis and Walton Co, 1911); Alan Lomax, Our Singing Country: Folk Songs and Ballads (Courier Corporation, 1941); Richard Mercer Dorson, American Negro Folktales (Fawcett, 1967); Francis James Child, “Ballad Poetry: Johnson’s Universal Cyclopaedia, 1900,” Journal of Folklore Studies 31, no. 1 (1994): 214–22; Cecil Sharp, English Folksongs of the Southern Appalachians, ed. Maud Karpeles, vol. I (New York and London: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1917); Richard M. Dorson, Folklore and Folklife: An Introduction (University of Chicago Press, 1982), etc. 37 folklore, folk music, and the rise of folk music in popular culture.120 Additionally, scholars have studied folk festivals as their own entity.121
During the late twentieth century, folk scholars and historians began to look at festivals
with renewed interest. A number of authors documented who performed and what they did at
the festivals but did not ask what these performances meant about culture.122 That changed in
1978, when David Whisnant, a historian of the Appalachian region, wrote, “Folk Festival Issues:
Report from a Seminar.” In that article, Whisnant argued that folk festivals affirm “the existence of a benign tolerance for cultural pluralism in our society, in the face of such overwhelming evidence to the contrary.”123 He encouraged historians to examine folk festivals as creation of culture. Whisnant believed that folk festivals were farce: that they “perform” (my word, not his) a myth of multiculturalism that ethnic minorities would find difficult to apply to their everyday lives.124 According to Ronald D. Cohen, the definition of folk became so broad that it could
include almost any ethnic group. He also argued that, especially in the South, a renewed interest
in folk music often started when communities worried for “a seemingly lost, or at least
120 Rodger Lyle Brown, Ghost Dancing on the Cracker Circuit: The Culture of Festivals in the American South (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997); Ronald D. Cohen, Rainbow Quest; Ronald D. Cohen, A History of Folk Music Festivals in the United States; Rachel Clare Donaldson, “Music for the People: The Folk Music Revival an American Identity, 1930-1970” (Dissertation, Vanderbilt University, 2011); Kip Lornell, Exploring American Folk Music Ethnic, Grassroots, and Regional Traditions in the United States; David E. Whisnant, All That Is Native and Fine: The Politics of Culture in an American Region, Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition edition (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2009). 121 Jane S. Becker, Selling Tradition: Appalachia and the Construction of an American Folk, 1930-1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Michael Ann Williams, Staging Tradition: John Lair and Sarah Gertrude Knott (University of Illinois Press, 2006); Whisnant, All That Is Native and Fine. 122 David A. DeTurk and A. Poulin Jr., The American Folk Scene: Dimensions of the Folksong Revival (New York: Dell Publishing, 1967), 42. 123 David E. Whisnant, ed., Folk Festival Issues: Report from a Seminar (Los Angeles: John Edwards Memorial Foundation, Bibliographical and Special Publications, 1979), 12. 124 Whisnant, 12–13. 38 disappearing, rural past.”125 Despite the increase in literature, most scholars do not analyze folk and music festivals as public history events.126
In 1998, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s Destination Culture asked “what does it mean
to show?”127 Her work has helped me to think differently about how historians and others presented history especially history in places like fairs, festivals, and other events. Her work on museums and other places of memory as performance theatre examined the power of display and showing. She examined folk festivals as venues for representations of culture. Festivals evoke the celebratory atmosphere associated with traditional feasts and fetes, but their actual purpose, she argues, is to “re-enact, re-present, and re-create activities and places in a discrete performance setting designed for specular (and aural) commerce.”128 Kirshenblatt-Gimblett contended that folk festivals are reconstructions of ideas of history, presumptions about folk culture, and performances separated from their original intentions and meanings. Part of their appeal to the public is their sensory overload and the othering of the past, which to many members of the audience, feels strange and exotic.
125 Cohen, Rainbow Quest: The Folk Music Revival and American Society, 1940-1970, 10. 126 I. Sheldon Posen, “On Folk Festivals and Kitchens: Questions of Authenticity in the Folksong Revival,” in Transforming Tradition: Folk Music Revivals, Examined, ed. Neil A History of Folk Music Festivals in the United States . Rosenberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 127–36; Neil V. Rosenberg, Transforming Tradition: Folk Music Revivals Examined (University of Illinois Press, 1993; I. Sheldon Posen’s, “On Folk Festivals and Kitchens: Questions of Authenticity in the Folksong Revival,” questions the role of history in folk festivals. Mostly Posen asks whether or not academic scholarship has any place in folk culture. However, this chapter is on Canada, not the United States. Additionally, the second question that Posen asks is how historically accurate are the performances at the festival, not on shared authority, performance, mythology, or power. Posen emphasizes that scholars and folklorists need to know that folk revival is different from traditional folk. Posen says that folk revivals must be understood as their own entity. To Posen, asking if a performance is authentic is irrelevant because the performance at a festival is already different in style and meaning from the original folk intention 127 Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1998), 2. 128 Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, 2, 66. 39 Scholars began to publish books that questioned what folk revivals meant to audiences, to performers, and as political or social catalysts for change.129 The same year that Kirshenblatt-
Gimblett published Destination Culture, two authors, Jane S. Becker and Simon J. Bronner, examined how commercialism shaped ideas of what folklife and folk culture were, as well as what authenticity meant when creating and selling folk culture. In Selling Tradition: Appalachia and the Construction of an American Folk, 1930-1940, Becker revealed that many saw authenticity as a part of production but not a part of situation. Becker argued that “consumers were purchasing… an icon of an imagined past, provided by a group of contemporary citizens who had assumed the task of preserving a carefully selected version of the nation’s heritage in the present.”130 Becker stated that promoters “proceeded to sanitize culture, weeding out the vulgar and crude and presenting only those forms that upheld their middle-class standards of propriety and taste.”131
Other works affirm Becker’s sentiment; consumers of culture have significant power.
Simon Bronner’s Following Tradition argued that presentations of folk often evaluate nationalism and multiculturalism. Bronner stated that participants felt as though they were a part of something transnational, but also very local and regional as well.132 In 2001, Jurgen
Heideking’s anthology Celebrating Ethnicity and Nation examined how folk festivals across the
129 Rosenberg, Transforming Tradition; David A. De Turk and A. Poulin, The American Folk Scene: Dimensions of the Folksong Revival; Sawin and Carpenter, Reflections on the Folklife Festival. 130 Jane S. Becker, Selling Tradition: Appalachia and the Construction of an American Folk, 1930-1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 13. 131 Ibid, 37-40. 132 Simon J. Bronner, Following Tradition: Folklore in the Discourse of American Culture (Utah State University Press, 1998), 2, 6. 40 United States shaped nation building.133 Gillian Mitchell’s 2006 article “Visions of Diversity”
explored similar themes but within a Canadian context.134
In the 2000s, some authors began to reexamine the question of who exactly is folk and what counts as folk culture.135 Benjamin Filene’s Romancing the Folk, demonstrated how
collectors shaped the definition of folk through what they accumulated or dismissed. As
Heideking’s work showed, folk festivals are not just about literal performances but have
symbolic importance as well.136 Rodger Lyle Brown took this idea a step further and provocatively argued that folk festivals were not celebrations but instead wakes; they represent the mourning of the loss of culture and not its preservation.137
Originally, folk festivals in the United States focused on ethnic diversity.138 According to
Destination Culture, scholars see festivals as unique opportunities for staging culture. As different immigrant communities felt threatened by what they believed to be an encroaching dominant culture, they created folk celebrations to preserve their history and traditions. Ronald
Cohen documented several ethnic music and folk festivals throughout the U.S., such as the 1850s
Northeastern Singers Union in Philadelphia and the Swiss New Glarus in Wisconsin. Cohen
133 Jurgen Heideking, Genevieve Fabre, and Kai Dreisbach, eds., Celebrating Ethnicity and Nation: American Festive Culture from the Revolution to the Early 20th Century (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2002). 134 Gillian A. M. Mitchell, “Visions of Diversity: Cultural Pluralism and the Nation in the Folk Music Revival Movement of the United States and Canada, 1958-65,” Journal of American Studies 40, no. 3 (December 1, 2006): 593–614. 135 Cohen, A History of Folk Music Festivals in the United States; Benjamin Filene, Romancing the Folk: Public Memory and American Roots Music, Cultural Studies of the United States (Chapel Hill, N.C: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Lornell, Exploring American Folk Music Ethnic, Grassroots, and Regional Traditions in the United States; Gillian A. M. Mitchell, The North American Folk Music Revival: Nation and Identity in the United States and Canada, 1945-1980, New edition (Ashgate, 2013); Ron Eyerman and Scott Barretta, “From the 30s to the 60s: The Folk Music Revival in the United States,” Theory and Society 25, no. 4 (August 1996): 501–43; Rachel Clare Donaldson, “Music for the People”; Cohen, Rainbow Quest: The Folk Music Revival and American Society, 1940-1970; Mitchell, “Visions of Diversity.” 136 Jurgen Heideking, Genevieve Fabre, and Kai Dreisbach, eds., Celebrating Ethnicity and Nation: American Festive Culture from the Revolution to the Early 20th Century. 137 Rodger Lyle Brown, Ghost Dancing on the Cracker Circuit: The Culture of Festivals in the American South (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997), xi. 138 Cohen, A History of Folk Music Festivals in the United States, 1. 41 observed that folk music and celebrations of folk culture of the 1800s and early 1900s remained
ethnically isolated as different groups around America fought to preserve what they thought were
dying traditions. Timothy Lloyd’s study of folk festivals showed that these served not only as
wholesome leisure activities but also as ways for an ethnic community to pass its heritage on to
the next generation.139 An Italian immigrant family, for instance, encouraged their child to learn
the tarantula for the purposes of public performance, but they simultaneously ensured the
tradition passed through the family.140
In the twentieth-century, communities around the country continued the traditions of
ethnic music and folk festivals as well as folk revivals, but the events began to change. Cohen
argued that folk festivals shifted focus from only celebrating singular ethnic groups, but they began to cater to a broader cultural community.141 Cohen successfully demonstrated that by the
1930s, many festivals emphasized a narrative that immigrants were a valuable part of America that other cultures could and should connect to. Over the next two decades, music clubs, state and municipal governments committed themselves to hosting a series of annual or semi-annual folk festivals with regular attendance in the thousands.
As the Great Depression began the reasons to collect and preserve folklore changed. In order to help bolster the psyche of the American people, scholars and artists looked for what historian Michael Denning calls a “usable past,” which also served a political purpose in the
139 John Bodnar, Immigration and Industrialization: Ethnicity in an American Mill Town, 1870-1940 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1977); John Bodnar, The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985); Sharon Sassler, “Learning to Be an ‘American Lady’?: Ethnic Variation in Daughter’ Pursuits in the Early 1900s,” Gender and Society 14, no. 1 (February 2000): 184–209; Daniel Soyer, Jewish Immigrant Association and American Identity in New York, 1880-1939 (Camrbridge: Harvard University Press, 1997). 140 Timothy Lloyd, “Whole Work, Whole Play, Whole People: Folklore and Social Therapeutics in 1920s and 1930s America,” The Journal of American Folklore 110, no. 437 (Summer 1997): 239=259. 141 Cohen, A History of Folk Music Festivals in the United States, 1-5. 42 present. 142 Artists painted scenes of everyday life, Dorothea Lange took photographs of migrant
mothers, and different members of the Works Progress Administration took oral histories of
former slaves.143 During this time of collecting histories, images, and traditions of the everyday
American, interest in American folk music surged.
While revivalists differed in their motivations, political beliefs, and other perspectives, they overall agreed on the idea that American folk- and American history and national identity by implication- rested on cultural diversity, democracy, and equality.144 In 1932, St. Paul,
Minnesota, started an annual “International Folk Festival.” The 1934 program boasted of both
male and female performers, of varying ethnic backgrounds, and across social classes. Ronald
Cohen argues that this festival, and others that followed suit, were similar to the Progressive Era
settlement house pageants that promoted cultural diversity.145 There were some festivals, especially in the South, that did not embrace a program of cultural diversity, but they did not represent the overall pattern of diversity in folk revivals.146 During the rise of these dozens of folk music revivals around the country, a woman named Sarah Gertrude Knott began to organize a new type of folk festival.
Sarah Gertrude Knott, born in 1895, was from McCracken County, Kentucky, in the far
west corner of the state. In the 1920s, Knott was a member of the Carolina Playmakers. This
troupe, out of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, traveled and put on plays and
other performances. In 1929, Knott became the executive director of St. Louis’ Dramatic
League. In the early 1930s, Knott organized and led a handful of shows, including what St.
142 Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: the Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century, (New York: Verso Publishing, 1997), 128-132. 143 William Stott, Documentary Expression and Thirties America, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 128, 29, 241. 144 Ibid, 43. 145 Cohen, A History of Folk Music Festivals in the United States 2. 146 Donaldson, “Music for the People,” 45. 43 Louis eventually called the “Festival of Nations.” In this show, various immigrant groups presented their own stories in their native languages. Knott’s biographer, Michael Ann
Williams, argued that this production inspired her to attempt some kind of national show based
on different immigrant groups.147 This show became the National Folk Festival.
While Knott was not the first program director to create a multi-ethnic platform, she did set several precedents for folk festivals. Knott insisted that folklorists and folk collectors, like
Zora Neale Hurston, attend her festivals to help collect folklore and make their professional services available to the inquiring public. She also insisted that folk presentations include material culture as much as music or dancing. She made sure different craftsmen attended her festivals to demonstrate their skills and also help the public try the craft whenever possible.
Knott’s plans for the National Folk Festival demonstrated her interest in the pluralist culture of other folk revivalists. She wrote that in order to manifest a genuine American identity, artistic expression should not only depend exclusively on the educated or artistic elite, “but it must be so democratic that it will include people of every class.”148 Michael Ann Williams argues that
Knott’s multicultural and multiregional focus was different from other festivals of the 1920s and
1930s, making Knott’s work particularly special. Knott did not view folk art as material for theatrical presentation, instead, she saw it as a performance unto itself.149
Understanding some of Knott’s ideas about the purpose of folk festivals is important to
this dissertation because she designed the first Florida Folk Festival in 1953 and the festival has
continued to follow Knott’s original model for years. In many ways, her influence is still felt to
147 Michael Ann Williams, Staging Tradition: John Lair and Sarah Gertrude Knott (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 15-19. 148 Sarah Gertrude Knott, “Texas Celebrates Its Hundredth Birthday,” Recreation, vol. 30 (October 1936), 374, in “Music for the People: the Folk Music Revival in American Identity in 1930-1970 by Rachel Clare Donaldson, (Dissertation, Florida State University), 51. 149 Williams, 13. 44 this day. Whereas, many festivals focused on particular ethnic groups, Knott’s was one of the
first and largest to put multiple groups on stage at once and insisted that was what made it an
American folk festival. Native Americans always opened the ceremonies; Knott argued that
Native Americans had a deeply valuable folk culture that was in the United States before
Europeans. Knott’s ideas about cultural pluralism and ethnic diversity did have their limitations.
Knott only promoted groups that she believed had a long, established history in the United States
and who Williams stated “integrated into American life.”150 In this way, Knott promoted her
own version of American identity despite the fact that she was often progressive in her views.
After World War II and into the 1950s, the number of folk festivals and attendees grew
across the United States. Some festivals perpetuated Knott’s values: using folk cultures to
display a history of America and emphasize its cultural diversity. This method allowed folk
revivals to emphasize national character and patriotism. Others were more influenced by
folklorists like Alan Lomax, and other regionalists, who saw folk music as an ever changing,
evolving thing building upon itself with each generation. These festivals used folk culture less to
tell a specific narrative, and focused more on how communities used folk culture (like music, art,
or dance) to organize their lives or make sense of different situations.
In 1952, after a tour of the Stephen Foster Memorial, the then-president of the National
Federation of Music Clubs (NFMC), Ada Holding Miller, suggested to the Florida Music Club
that the Memorial would be an ideal setting for a large outdoor folk festival. The NFMC had
worked closely with the Florida chapter to lobby for the state legislature to pass Stephen Foster’s
“Old Folks at Home” as the state song in 1935.151 The Florida chapter was also instrumental in
150 Donaldson, “Music for the People,” 52. 151 Martha Nelson, “Nativism and Cracker Revival at the Florida Folk Festival,” in Florida Folklife Reader, ed. Tina Bucuvalas (Jackson, Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 2011), 208. 45 the creation of the Stephen Foster Memorial in White Springs. The Memorial’s directors
understood they needed to create special events and programs to keep the public and community
aware of the Stephen Foster Center and to make it relevant for repeat visitors. It would also help
to offset the cost of upkeep and caretaking of the developing museum and park. If the Memorial
could host public music performances then the directors could elevate the park from a museum
to a living cultural center, one used for the celebration of music and Florida culture.
Later in the year, the Stephen Foster Memorial Commission approved Miller’s idea and
approached Sarah Gertrude Knott to help the commission develop its own folk festival. Knott
organized a program for a three-day festival for the first weekend in May of 1953.152 She worked to display Florida’s diverse folk culture and purposefully emphasized the same pluralist point of view she used at the National Folk Festival; she invited many different kinds of performers, both in style and ethnicities, to participate in the festival.153 Knott had two goals for the Florida Folk Festival: to make the festival an annual event and to make this the largest event in the region. Knott also wanted to help create smaller and more regional folk festivals around the state of Florida.154
Amidst a backdrop of magnolias and sandy pines, the call of a town crier and the ring of an old school bell started the event on May 7, 1953. The first festival presented performances from Spanish Minorcans, the Seminole Tribe, Miccosukee Indians, Greek Americans, Jewish
Americans, Spanish Americans, African Americans, and Florida Crackers.155 A Florida Cracker
152 Now the Florida Folk Festival is held every Memorial Day weekend. Originally and until the 1970s the park hosted the event every first weekend in May. The Florida Folk Festival, 1975, Bureau of Florida Folklife collection, box 2, folder: “Folk Festival (Festival and Folklore Articles, 1975,” SAF. 153 Gregory Hansen, “Obituary: J. Russell Reaver,” The Journal of American Folklore, 117, no. 464 (Spring, 2004), 192. 154 “Florida Memory - Florida Folklife Collection - Festival Programs,” 1953, Florida Memory Website, State Archives of Florida, https://floridamemory.com/collections/folklife/festival_programs.php?year=1953&page=3. 155 “Florida Folk Festival | Florida State Parks,” accessed February 14, 2014, https://www.floridastateparks.org/folkfest. 46 is a phrase with a complex and adapting definition, but by the mid-twentieth century primarily
meant a native Floridian. Various school groups came to sing, led the audiences in square-
dancing, and performed Maypole dances. Adults told folk stories, shared superstitions, and
explained local and regional histories. Some sang or performed old ballads. There was even one
saw player. Knott directed the event in both 1953 and 1954. In 1955, she could no longer direct because her work for the National Folk Festival took too much of her time, but she stayed
connected to the festival organizers through correspondence.
The Memorial Commission and the Florida Folk Festival Association looked for someone new to take charge of the event. Alton Morris, professor of folklore at the University
of Florida and chairman of the festival committee, argued that they should not rely on an out of
state person to organize the Florida Folk Festival. Morris wanted to keep Knott on as a
consultant, but he believed that someone local needed to at work at the Stephen Foster Memorial
all year long if the festival was to grow in reputation and attendance.156 Morris suggested
Thelma Boltin, from Gainesville, for the position of director. Boltin’s previous experience with
the festival as a “tale teller” made her an ideal candidate because she was connected to the
festival’s inaugural years, performed folk culture, and was a Floridian (despite the fact that she
was born in South Carolina). In an interview with state folklorist, Peggy Bulger, Boltin joked
that they found themselves a “true Floridian” to run the festival- a transplant from another
state!157
By 1956, the Memorial employed Boltin full-time as director, not only of the festival, but to supervise all of the Memorial’s events. Festival visitors and those in and around North
156 Barbara Beauchamp, Interview with Barbara Beauchamp, MP3, August 19, 1982, State Archives of Florida, https://www.floridamemory.com/audio/folklorists.php#01. 157 Thelma Boltin, Interview with Thelma Boltin, Cassette Tape, October 30, 1978, S1576 C79-68, State Archives of Florida. 47 Central Florida came to call her “Cousin Thelma.” Before her time as director of the folk
festival, Boltin was a high school English teacher. In 1953, Boltin participated in the first
festival as a storyteller, telling tales about a haunting of her aunt and about the Devil’s
Millhopper, a sinkhole in Gainesville.158 After she became a part of the festival, Boltin regularly
attended events in a white linen dress that came from her costume collection. This costume
symbolized her transformative self: she described herself as more ‘folksy,’ spoke with more of a
lilt, and she embodied the character of someone she believed to be part of Florida folk history.159
Boltin continued to emcee, direct, and participate in the Festival until the 1980s.
Between the 1950s and 1960s, the Florida Folk Festival extended and refined its programs, purpose, and goals. This chapter focuses on that development. First, I will examine
who Thelma Boltin was and what her contributions were to the Florida Folk Festival. Second, I
will explore what exactly Boltin believed about what and who deserved the title of “folk” and
what was “authentic.” Finally, I will analyze Boltin’s actions as a performer and who and what
she considered appropriate for the Florida Folk Festival and how she influenced and shaped the
festival and performances.
On August 31, 1904, in Beaufort, South Carolina, William G. Boltin and his wife, Harriet
R. Compton Boltin, welcomed their daughter, Thelma Boltin into their lives. William Boltin’s
family was from Fairfax, South Carolina; his wife’s from Beaufort. Boltin was a Coca-Cola
salesman and he saw central Florida as a developing area of the nation. He moved his family to
Gainesville in 1907; Thelma was almost three years old at the time. Thelma grew up in
158 “Florida Memory - Florida Folklife Collection - Festival Programs,” 1953. 159 Interview with Thelma Boltin, May 22, 1969, in “The Stephen Foster Memorial 1931-1969: A Socio-Cultural Force in a Rural Community,” by Louis Carpenter (Dissertation, Florida State University, 1969) 39-40. 48 Gainesville.160 Active in her Baptist church and school drama groups, Boltin regularly spent her time performing in school plays, church programs, and recitation ceremonies.
After graduating from Gainesville High School, she attended Emerson College in Boston where she wanted to study “speech arts” and drama. She completed her Bachelor’s Degree in
Literary Interpretation in 1928. In Sandspun: Florida Tales for Florida Tellers, authors Annette
Bruce and Stephen Brooks report that Barbara Beauchamp, one of Boltin’s best friends, said that
Boltin dreamed of becoming an actress and her commitment to theatre and performance aided her as a storyteller and emcee for the festival. Beauchamp also said that Boltin’s college professors spent hours and hours trying to rid Boltin of her Southern accent.161 After college,
Boltin returned to Gainesville. For the next few decades, Boltin taught drama and speech at
Gainesville High School. She was the city’s inaugural certified high school speech teacher.
Between the 1920s and 1930s, the city of Gainesville also made her the first director of the
Gainesville Recreation Center and the first Children’s Creative Theatre Director. Boltin was also a founding member of Little Theatre.162 People around North Central Florida began to know her
name and her stories because she made regular appearances on the WGGG Story Lady Hour on
local radio.163
In 1943, Boltin became the director of the Gainesville Recreation Center and during
World War II, her chief responsibility was to provide entertainment to soldiers and their dates.
During that time, she organized church groups to provide snacks. She also convinced stores to donate bathing suits for the male and female members of the military to borrow for use at the
160 Ibid. 161 Annette J. Bruce and J. Stephen Brooks, Sandspun: Florida Tales for Florida Tellers (Sarasota, FL: The Pineapple Press, 2001), ix. 162 Ronald Johnson, North Florida Folk Music: History and Tradition (Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2014), 78-80. Little Theatre continues to provide quality plays and festivals to Alachua County. 163 Ray Washington, “Thelma Boltin, Folklorist,” Gainesville.com, July 27, 2004, http://www.gainesville.com/article/20040727/NEWS/40727032. 49 community swimming pool. She arranged dances with live musicians and other performers.
According to The Gainesville Sun, the USO hosted more than 11,000 soldiers and personnel in
its first month.164 Boltin regularly told the story about the Thanksgiving meal the Recreation
Center hosted in 1944. The center prepared a dinner for soldiers expecting about two hundred.
They fed more than four hundred and had to wash the same dishes and utensils more than four times during the meal just to meet demand. “We didn’t get panicky,” Boltin said, “it was something like the miracle of the loaves and the fishes.”165 This story catches the spirit of
Boltin’s performance as a folklorist; she told a modern day miracle by evoking a Bible story most people knew. Through the 1940s and into the 1950s, Boltin participated in the Florida
State Museum’s annual Heritage Fair and Collectors Day at the University of Florida campus.166
It was through these networks that Boltin became connected to the Stephen Foster Museum and
the Florida Folk Festival.
Once in charge of the folk festival, Boltin became directly responsible for scouting talent, recruiting folk artists for performances, and organizing the multi-day, multi-stage event. Boltin regularly traveled all across Florida and the Southeast to find performers and to collect folk stories. When she could not travel, she routinely auditioned acts over the phone.167 Through her
influence, Boltin helped the festival define what and who exactly the festival would consider
authentic folk. Her definition relied on certain themes: that real folk performers perform for free because they love their craft more than money, that performers learn through family teachers and
not a formal education, and that folk culture is something that historians know very little about.
164 No Author, “The Legacy of Thelma Boltin,” The Gainesville Sun, Columns, last modified October 16, 2003, http://www.gainesville.com/article/20031016/COLUMNS04/210160304. 165 Mick O’Hearn, “Recreation Center Director Reminisces on Amusing Trials and Tribulations Here,” The Gainesville Daily Sun, 24 June 1956, Bureau of Florida Folklife Programs: Thelma Boltin Papers, box 1: folder "Newspaper Articles," SAF. 166 Donaldson, 78. 167 Ibid. 50 Thelma Boltin’s insistence at maintaining annual festivals stemmed from her belief that modern
Americans were losing or forgetting their family or regional traditions and that it was up to the
folk to preserve the culture. Additionally, Boltin performed a character, “Cousin Thelma,” that
emphasized her connection between history and performance as a Florida Cracker.
Thelma Boltin and the Florida Folk Festival faced considerable pressure to provide
quality programming that was also entertaining. According to Andrea Thomas, the current state park ranger in charge of the festival, the festival has hosted somewhere between 15,000 and
30,000 guests since its inception.168 However, the Memorial did not keep attendance records before the 1960s. It became Boltin’s and her cohort’s job to distinguish quality performers from
all applications. Because Boltin decided who would perform, she ultimately decided who was
authentic and who was not. This made her the most powerful person in the Florida Folk Festival.
Because she auditioned different performers, wrote or co-wrote each year’s program, and performed at the festivals herself, her definition of folk became the public definition of folk for
the Florida Folk Festival.169
Boltin and others strongly emphasized that performers at the festival be authentically folk and perform in what Boltin and the Memorial considered to be an authentic manner. Her obsession was not unique. Other scholars and professional folklorists of the same period focused on separating “real” from “fake” folklore. In 1950, Richard Dorson, a folklorist, defined the term “fakelore” for this very reason. Dorson argued that some people manufactured inauthentic folk and presented as if it were the genuine article.170 Dorson used the legend of Pecos Bill as an
168 Andrea Thomas. 169 It should be understood that Boltin’s definition and professional folklorists’ definition of folk were not always the same and the focus of this chapter is on Boltin’s definition as director of the Florida Folk Festival. 170 Richard M. Dorson, American Folklore (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1977), 4. 51 example. Dorson argued that the legend of Pecos Bill presented itself as an old cowboy tale.
However, a man named Edward J. O’Reily published the story in 1923.171
Thelma Boltin believed that genuine, true performers provided their craft for free. Boltin and the festival committee used this as a way to filter out performers and artists who Boltin saw as commercializing folklore and folk culture. For Boltin, it seemed, if a person commodified their own history, or folklore, then they were no longer a part of the folk. Boltin and others stated that the festival would never pay participants for their performances or services. Some of this was a logistical practicality, especially in the first few years when the festival only charged a
“nominal fee” for per car entrance. Nonetheless, as Boltin explained, philosophically national, regional, or state folk festivals did not charge audiences to make a profit. Instead, she argued, the host city and “home communities of the participating groups” shared fiscal responsibility.172
There are no documents that explain whether or not Boltin allowed performers to sell recordings as a way of offsetting costs. In a list of new craftsmen from 1959, Boltin repeatedly listed these artists as displaying their wood carvings, homemade bonnets, palm weavings, etc.
Boltin expected artists to teach guests their crafts. However, she allowed some craftsmen to sell their wares but she did not outline any specific criteria regarding who got to sell their products and who did not. All of this was left to Boltin’s discretion.173 A 1964 informational pamphlet for potential performers, artists, and craftsmen, outlined that they could sell their products but they had to give ten percent of their profits to the Stephen Foster Memorial.174 In addition to financial limitations, the Memorial’s commitment to not paying their performers was symbolic.
171 Ibid., 214–26. 172 Florida Folk Festival Stephen Foster Memorial White Springs, 1959, Bureau of Florida Folklife Programs: Thelma Boltin Papers, box 2, folder: "Florida Folk Festival Commission,” SAF. 173 Florida Federation of Music Clubs Report for Fall Board Meeting, 1959, Bureau of Florida Folklife Programs: Thelma Boltin Papers, box 3, folder: "Florida Federation of Music Clubs," SAF. 174 Florida Folk Festival Stephen Foster Memorial White Springs, 1959, Bureau of Florida Folklife Programs: Thelma Boltin Papers, box 2, folder: "Florida Folk Festival Commission,” SAF. 52 By only hosting artists that were willing to perform for free, the festival was able to weed out
those that Boltin saw as imposters or inauthentic.
Boltin was not the only member of the Florida Folk directors and participants to consider paying performers problematic or anti-folk. Ada Miller, the woman who originally conceived of
the festival for White Springs, argued something similar in one of her yearly statements about the
folk festival’s status in the community. “Nobody is ever paid for performance… this is a true
Festival from the Grass Roots.”175 Miller affirmed Boltin’s argument that paying performers was antithetical to the festival and folk culture.
Anxiety over whether or not performers were authentic seemed to be a running theme throughout the 1950s and 1960s as folk music resurged in popularity. Wayland Hand, editor of the Journal of American Folklore, stated as early as 1948 that the way that the entertainment industry appropriated folk music and other aspects of folk culture for movies, radio, music, commercials, and advertisements was “distressing,” “trashy,” and “a willful yielding to the box office expedients.”176 The folk festival and folklorist community distrusted the commercialism of folklore and one of the best ways to filter out those using folk culture for a payday was to see if they would still perform if no one was paid. This complemented the anti-commercialism and leftist roots of the folk revivals since the 1930s.177 Because Sarah Gertrude Knott modeled the
Florida Folk Festival after the National Folk Festival, it should be of no surprise that she insisted
on not paying performers or artists. Thelma Boltin continued this policy during her directorship.
The fear that some folk performers were inauthentic or only performing for money permeated Boltin’s and others’ work in the 1950s, 1960s, and beyond. In one 1964 unsigned
175 Florida Folk Festival Revisited, 1975 (originally published in 1965), Bureau of Florida Folklife Thelma Ann Boltin Papers, box 2, folder: “Florida Folklife Revisited,” SAF. 176 Wayland Hand, “The Editor’s Page,” The Journal of American Folklore 61, no. 239 (1948): 82. 177 Eyerman and Barretta, “From the 30s to the 60s: The Folk Music Revival in the United States.” 53 letter to Boltin from Washington, D.C., the writer encouraged Boltin to recommend Sarah
Gertrude Knott for a position on Lyndon Johnson’s National Council on the Arts as the folklorist
for the council. The author goes on to express “we are fearful that some commercial entertainer
in the make-believe folk field might work his way into the picture.”178 In 1977, Peter Gallagher, writing about past Florida Folk Festivals for the St. Petersburg Times, argued that state budget cuts failed to weigh heavily on folklore fans because “non-commercialization is an integral part of folklore tradition.”179 Throughout its history, the festival committee remained committed to
the notion that commercialization was antithetical to folklore and folk tradition.
Part of Boltin’s dedication to finding artists who performed for free tied into her second idea that the festival should be filled with amateurs who only learned their craft by colloquial methods. Throughout her years as emcee and director, she repeatedly reminded audiences that different performers had no formal training. Boltin wrote in an essay about the Florida Folk
Festival that one of the festival’s founding principal objectives was to “emphasize survivals of traditional heritages, which have been handed down orally from generation to generation.”180 In the 1954 Florida Folk Festival program, the directors tried to explain what exactly folklore was to their guests by reprinting a definition from the Standard Dictionary of Folklore. The excerpt explains:
Whenever a mother shows her daughter how to sew… whenever a farmer on the ancestral plot trains his son in the ways long familiar… whenever a village craftsman trains his apprentice… Then we have folklore in its perennial domain, at work as ever, alive and shifting, always apt to grasp and assimilate new
178 No Author letter to Thelma Boltin, August 24 1964, Bureau of Florida Folklife Programs: Thelma Boltin Papers, box 2, folder: "Florida Folk Festival Commission,” SAF. The letter is either unsigned or Boltin did not keep the second page of the letter. 179 Peter B. Gallagher, “Folk Festival: A Showcase of Florida’s Heritage,” St. Petersburg Times, September 11, 1977, sec. G, 1, State Archives of Florida. 180 The Florida Folk Festival: Activities on the Banks of the Suwannee River the First Week in May, 1975, Bureau of Florida Folklife Programs: Thelma Ann Boltin Papers box 2 Folder Florida Folk Festival 1973-1975, SAF. 54 elements on its way… It is the born opponent of the serial number, the stamped product, and the patented standard.181
Boltin’s use of the latter part of this quote emphasized that she shared in part the belief that certain people owned folk culture, while others were imposters. Boltin, and people like her and under her influence, saw folk culture as something to be protected from those who viewed folkways as either a path to riches or as a commodity to be bought. Boltin distrusted performers with professional training, whom she believed stole traditions from the real folk.
Children’s performances emphasized Boltin’s deeply-held beliefs that unless adults taught children various folkways and crafts, then America risked losing these traditions. Boltin and the Florida Folk Festival committed to integrating children into almost every event.
Elementary, middle, and high school children almost entirely dominated the first day of the festivals- sometimes Thursdays, sometimes Fridays. Boy and Girl Scout troops, school dance groups, and church children’s choirs graced numerous festival performances. This tradition has continued up through recent festivals.
This puts the analysis of Boltin and the festival committee in an interesting position: the emphasis of older generations teaching traditions to younger generations conflicted with the fact that these were school groups, learning from teachers, not from family or some other established artist. Or, because these were teachers at local schools, did Boltin and others see them as a part of this heritage? Boltin was a teacher before she joined the festival staff so this was probably not any kind of conflict of interest to her. As a former teacher, Boltin believed in the importance of education and using folklore and folk traditions to teach children their history. However, despite the fact that teachers were educated and paid professionals, this did not conflict with the idea that
181 “Florida Memory - Florida Folklife Collection - Festival Recordings,” Florida Memory, May 5, 1955, https://floridamemory.com/collections/folklife/festival-recordings.php. 55 people should only learn from those who taught their craft for free out of love and commitment
so as not to commodify culture. Boltin never addressed any of these conflicts openly at the
festivals or in her personal papers. This researcher is not sure if she even saw these as issues or
inconsistencies at all because Boltin left very few self-reflexive private records.
Between 1953 and 1969, school groups dominated at least one day of every festival, usually the first day. On average, the folk programs listed between twenty and twenty-five school and children’s groups each year.182 Kids’ groups performed folk songs, spirituals, the
May Pole Dance, and square dancing, among other performances. School teachers and church leaders supervised most groups. The Suwannee High School chorus, for instance, performed
Stephen Foster songs in 1955. In 1959, children from the Live Oak School performed “washing songs,” which were designed to make the task of washing and hanging clothing more interesting.
In 1961, the fifth grade class from Lake Forrest Hills School performed the ‘Minuet’ as an example of an early American colonial dance.183 Some groups performed more than once
throughout the weekend and many of the same groups returned to the festival annually. Madison
Elementary, for example, sent their fifth-grade classes every year. This group led the May Pole
winding ceremony for more than a decade, which served as the opening ceremony for the
children’s portion of the festival.
Through written descriptions and oral introductions, the Florida Folk Festival emphasized
to audiences the intimate relationship performers had with their own heritage. In 1953, Annie
Tomlin from White Springs performed a variety of African American folk tales, which most
182 Some years, 1969 for example, have as little as 15 groups, but these groups performed more than once throughout the festival. This seems to be because of two things: weather or schedule changes. Some festivals started on Sundays, others on Tuesdays, and the years that started on Sundays had fewer school groups. 183 “Florida Memory - Florida Folklife Collection - Festival Programs,” Florida Memory, accessed January 8, 2015, https://floridamemory.com/collections/folklife/festival_programs.php. 56 people associated with Joel Chandler Harris. However, the festival assured the audience that
these stories “had been handed down in her family and in the families of many Negroes of
Florida for many generations.”184 While the Festival allowed Tomlin and other African
Americans to perform in the festival, the festival was segregated for the entire duration of this
dissertation’s study. Similarly, in 1969, the program described a singer named “Town Hall”
from Sarasota as having learned his craft by ear, “transmitted from generation to generation,”
and that his songs “represent the traditions he learned from his forebears.”185 A 1969 festival program described clogging as “indigenous to the Southern Mountain folk- they learn to clog
soon after they learn to walk!”186 In May 1960, Albert DeVane introduced one of “Florida’s
first citizens,” Billy Bowlegs III of the Seminole tribe by describing how ninety-eight year old
Bowlegs continued to grow sugar cane, grind the cane, and cook the syrup himself just as his
forefathers did. DeVane’s stress on Bowlegs commitment to maintaining traditional methods for processing sugar may have been in reaction to popular perceptions about Seminole and
Miccosukee Indians gleaned from some of their more famous commercial activities in the
Everglades. Seminoles regularly wrestled alligators and carved canoes to entertain tourists.187
Boltin showed a clear preference for the performance of older methods over contemporary ones. Many other Americans identified with Boltin’s preferences. While the
1950s and 1960s were awash with new technology, the space program, and suburbia; historian
184 “Florida Memory - Florida Folklife Collection - Festival Programs,” Florida Memory, accessed June 8, 2016, https://www.floridamemory.com/collections/folklife/festival_programs.php?year=1953&page=1. 185 “Florida Memory - Florida Folklife Collection - Festival Programs,” 1969, Florida Memory Website, State Archives of Florida, https://floridamemory.com/collections/folklife/festival_programs.php?year=1969&page=6. 186 “Florida Memory - Florida Folklife Collection - Festival Programs,” 1969, Florida Memory Website, State Archives of Florida, https://floridamemory.com/collections/folklife/festival_programs.php?year=1969&page=6. 187 Patsy West, The Enduring Seminoles: From Alligator Wrestling to Casino Gaming, Revised edition (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2008), 26–26; Andrew Frank, “Authenticity for Sale: The Everglades, Seminole Indians, and the Construction of a Pay-Per-View Culture,” in Destination Dixie: Tourism and Southern History, ed. Karen L. Cox, Reprint edition (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2014), 285–300. 57 Michael Kammen describes it as a time period of anxiety and what he calls “a profound sense of
historical discontinuity.”188 The Florida Folk Festival, with its deep fondness and beliefs that
older traditions repudiated the modern age, was a part of an American trend of nostalgia for a
time period of what the directors believed to be a slower-paced, simpler lifestyle. Historians know that was looking at the past through rose-colored glasses, but it was this nostalgia that motivated Thelma Boltin and others involved with the Florida Folk Festival.189 Boltin encouraged her audiences to actively seek out folkways to prevent their disappearance. Thelma
Boltin also believed that this preservation must be done in person from one generation to the next.
Thelma Boltin repeatedly commented on her preference for old traditions throughout the festivals.190 Boltin repeatedly assured audiences that singers, tale tellers, dancers, or other
musicians grew up with “the old ways,” a phrase she never precisely defined or explained.191 In the promotional paragraph on Anna Serianchik’s display of Czechoslovakian embroidery, the program described the artwork as “from the Old Country.”192 When Thelma Boltin described a
trio of Seminole Indian performers in 1955 she said they “still lived close to nature and still
followed the old ways.”193 On Sunday, May 5, 1955, Boltin made a very strong statement about these old ways: “I don't believe I'll apologize [for the hot weather and too few seats] because we
188Kammen, 550. 189 David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country - Revisited, 2nd edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Amy K. Levin, ed., Defining Memory: Local Museums and the Construction of History in America’s Changing Communities, American Association for State and Local History Book Series (Lanham: AltaMira Press, 2007). 190 The Florida Memory Project makes all of the Florida Folk Festival recordings available on its website. Consequently, readers can listen to Boltin’s introduction to hundreds of performers for the Florida Folk Festival. 191 “Florida Memory - Florida Folklife Collection - Festival Recordings.” 192 “Florida Memory - Florida Folklife Collection - Festival Programs,” 1953, Florida Memory Website, State Archives of Florida, https://floridamemory.com/collections/folklife/festival_programs.php?year=1953&page=3. 193 Florida Folk Festival Commission, “Florida Folk Festival Stephen Foster Memorial White Springs, Florida” (Florida Folk Festival, 1964), S1580 Box 2 Folder 6, State Archives of Florida. 58 wanted you- we needed you- to help prove a point that the old ways are valuable, I almost said
the best ways. They are good ways and dear to our hearts."194 Despite the fact that she corrected herself, later in the day Boltin stood by her original intention, that the old ways are the best ways but they had to be learned a certain way.
The folk festival expressed an animosity towards too much formal schooling. In 1955,
Richard Chase, “America’s Hans Christian Andersen,” told Floridians at the festival that
“‘folklore’ is an academic word, but that real folks know it is just the old ways.”195 In 1957, the festival program described Cora McKinney, a folk singer and retired teacher, as a trusted resource despite her professional education. The program stated that McKinney’s “book larnin’
[sic] has not smothered out her knowledge of folkways.”196 Having too much education or
formal training made one suspect. Thelma Boltin chose every performer who went on stage
starting in 1955 until the mid-1970s. In doing so she regulated and constructed the heritages of
others. At the same time, she also participated in constructing the ethnic heritage of herself as a
Florida Cracker.
In the 1930s, the phrase “Florida Cracker” emerged as a term of defiance, embraced by
non-elite white Floridians. In the nineteenth century that label was pejorative, but the word’s
meaning transitioned as more Floridians identified with it. Those who identified as Crackers
opposed the selling of Florida as a subtropical playground for northern tourists. People who
identified as Crackers felt that the tourist industries advocated policies that were in opposition to
their economic and social interests.197 Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ various novels, including
194 Ibid. 195 “Florida Memory - Florida Folklife Collection - Festival Programs,” State Archives of Florida, accessed March 12, 2015, https://floridamemory.com/collections/folklife/festival_programs.php?year=1955&page=5. Chase wrote about folklore and folk culture, but this statement was at the Florida Folk Festival. 196 “Florida Memory - Florida Folklife Collection - Festival Programs,” 1957, State Archives of Florida, https://floridamemory.com/collections/folklife/festival_programs.php?year=1957&page=3. 197 David Nelson, 227–28. 59 South Moon Under (1933) and The Yearling (1938), cemented the modern understanding of the
Florida Cracker as poor whites from Florida, often farmers free-ranging their cattle.198 Some people believed that the origin of the term came from the cracking sound herders made as they drove the cattle. Rawlings described the reaction of native Florida Crackers to northern involvement in Florida when one character, Kezzy, said “them pore leetle ol Yankees don’t know what to make of us Crackers.”199
In 1956, the Florida Folk Festival hosted its first “Cracker,” L.K. Edwards of Irvine,
Florida. The program described how Edwards used his whip to make the cracking sounds that
drove Florida scrub cattle southward to market.200 In 1960, the Florida Folk Festival ran an article in their program, “Origin of Cracker.” This article emphasized how men herding cattle not only used the cracking noise to move the animals but also to protect them as well.201 In
1957, the festival published a substantial essay explaining how the Cracker moved to Florida at the same time as wealthy planters. While the essay explained that the Cracker “is the real backbone of our state” it also said that it would be hard to “find a real Florida Cracker because the native born Floridians are just the same as the folks from other states.”202 This essay reads like a lament; a praise for a hardy character, but also sorrow for the loss.
Thelma Boltin and the Florida Folk Festival’s understanding of authenticity depended on several factors. They required artists to perform for free. They also demanded that the artists
198 David Nelson, 230. 199 Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, South Moon Under (S.l.: lulu.com, 2012), 189. 200 State Library and Archives of Florida, “Florida Folklife Collection - Festival Programs,” Florida Memory, accessed June 9, 2016, https://www.floridamemory.com/collections/folklife/festival_programs.php?year=1956&page=3. 201 State Library and Archives of Florida, “Florida Folklife Collection - Festival Programs,” Florida Memory, accessed June 9, 2016, https://www.floridamemory.com/collections/folklife/festival_programs.php?year=1960. 202 State Library and Archives of Florida, “Florida Folklife Collection - Festival Programs,” Florida Memory, accessed June 9, 2016, https://www.floridamemory.com/collections/folklife/festival_programs.php?year=1957&page=4. 60 had to have informally learned their craft from members of the older generation within their
community. Boltin and others used these requirements to ferret out those performers who she
felt might be using the craft for financial gain. Commodification of the craft and folk culture
was antithetical to authenticity. This chapter fits into the overall idea of history celebrations as performance and theatre because Thelma Boltin constructed, created, and maintained these
requirements for authenticity. The Florida Folk Festival produced a display of folk culture as
their own distinct kind of Southern celebration of the “old ways.”
61 CHAPTER 4
THE AGRIRAMA IN TIFTON, GEORGIA: BRINGING THE HISTORY OF RURAL LIVING TO LIFE
The Georgia Museum of Agriculture and Historic Village is on the northern edge of
Tifton, Georgia. As a living history, or open air museum, it presents life in the Wiregrass Region of Georgia and shows how the majority of farmers raised their crops from 1870-1910.203 It occupies more than 95 acres, which includes a manmade pond, 35 historical structures, and two separate buildings with large permanent displays. One, the museum, hosts a local folk art museum with rotating temporary exhibits and a history exhibit about farm equipment and cotton; the GMAHV uses the second building for hosting events and houses a peanut combine. The
GMAVH also has a working Vulcan Steam Train that gives rides to guests around the property and lake every Saturday. The staff regularly hosts seasonal events, like the Victorian Village by
Candlelight at Christmastime, a springtime Folklife Festival, and an autumn County Fair.
Additionally, the museum provides the only Fourth of July fireworks show for several counties.
The museum hosts workshops on period occupations and crafts such as cane grinding, hearth cooking, quilting, and sheep shearing. Different groups meet weekly to practice crafts such as weaving on a loom, knitting, and crocheting. Once a month the museum hosts an art group where those with art training can instruct hobbyists for free.
203 I use the phrase “Wiregrass Country,” “Wiregrass Region,” “Wiregrass Georgia,” and “the piney woods” interchangeably in this dissertation. These phrases refer to a 2,283 square mile area between southern central Georgia, southeastern Alabama, and the panhandle of Florida. This is an area that formerly hosted abundant long leaf pine trees (pine trees with needles twelve to eighteen inches long) and the ground is carpeted with a native tall grass (aristida stricta). Mark V. Wetherington, Plain Folk’s Fight: The Civil War and Reconstruction in Piney Woods Georgia (The University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 7-15. 62 The GMAVH focuses on a period of swift agricultural and social change that occurred in
southwest Georgia. The area transitioned from a place of subsistence farmers, who mostly raised
free-range cattle, sheep, and hogs, and who lived in the long-leaf pine forests; to a region rich in
lumber mills and turpentine stills; to, finally, a space of mostly sharecropping cotton farms on
recently cleared land.204 The museum teaches how these agricultural and industrial changes
shaped cultural, technological, and social shifts in the region, but the Agrirama puts significantly
more stress on how these changes impacted people’s domestic life. The space includes almost
three dozen buildings, some originals that were relocated to the property, and others the state
constructed, often using historically accurate methods. The museum uses topics to organize its
exhibit spaces: “a traditional farm of the 1870s, a 1890s progressive farmstead, an industrial sites
complex, a rural town, a national peanut complex, and the Museum of Agriculture Center.”205
At all locations throughout the historic village costumed interpreters explain the structures, describe who lived or worked in them, and demonstrate various activities including blacksmithing, plowing, planting, animal care, milling, printing, cooking, cleaning, barrel making, sewing, and spinning.
Despite being called the “Georgia” Museum of Agriculture, it focuses on the Wiregrass
Region. Located between various cotton belts spread across Georgia, Alabama, and northern
Florida, the area earned its name for the long, thick wiry grasses that grew among groves of longleaf pine trees. Before the Civil War and until around 1880 and 1890 the region in Georgia was home to largely subsistence farmers. These farmers often owned large plots of land, but regularly only developed a few dozen acres for their homesteads and food crops. The families
204 Harold D. Woodman, “From Piney Woods to Cotton Kingdom: Georgia’s Wiregrass Rediscovered,” The Georgia Historical Quarterly 79, no. 3 (October 1, 1995): 659–72. 205 “Museum,” accessed January 19, 2015, http://www.abac.edu/museum. 63 kept herds of cattle, sheep, and hogs but let them graze in the wild until time to shear, sell, or butcher. Many of the folks who lived there were devoted to a rhetoric of localism and white
supremacy and this inspired their commitment to the Confederacy and ideas of racial superiority
during Reconstruction.206 Mark Wetherington, one of the few scholars of this region, explained
that because a handful of families grew large amounts of cash crops, that people in the Wiregrass
created and maintained their own class system.207 Mostly these were white families, but a few
did have a small number of slaves before emancipation. Some grew small batches of cotton as a
way of getting cash in order to buy what they could not barter or make for themselves. They
lived largely in isolated communities and for the most part practiced the Primitive Baptist
religion.
The 1880s and 1890s was a period of significant capitalist and industrial transition in the piney woods. Wetherington called them “New South invasions.”208 Railroads, immigration changes, and lumber and turpentine mills moved into the region, buying large plots of land, and chopping down the trees. The final invasion was largescale agriculture, particularly cotton. As new industries moved into the area, the racial and economic make-up of the area changed as well. Piney woods folk, people who embraced a belief in white supremacy and racial hierarchy, struggled against an influx of African Americans and other outsiders. The conflicts were violent.209 Economic stratification became clearer and broader. Industrialization led to other
swift changes as farming became less and less of a way of living and supporting oneself to a business. Most of the original residents of the piney woods sold their lands for quick cash and
206 Jerrilyn McGregory, Wiregrass Country, Folklife in the South Series (University Press of Mississippi, 1997), 22– 28; Wetherington, 6–8. 207 Mark V. Wetherington, The New South Comes to Wiregrass Georgia, 1860-1910 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1994), 29. 208 Ibid., 249. 209 Wetherington, Plain Folk’s Fight, 253. 64 later ended up as tenant or sharecroppers. Wetherington concluded that “many yeoman found
the transition from self-sufficiency to a market economy to be a retrogressive journey into
tenancy and declining social status.”210 The GMAHV attempts to portray this period of
significant industrial, economic, and racial change.
This chapter analyzes the creation and early development of the Georgia Museum of
Agriculture and Historic Village between the mid-1970s and early 1980s. The creators and
developers of the GMAHV saw this space in Tifton, Georgia, as unlike other museums about
Southern history. They wanted to create something about the Wiregrass Region, a place and people that they saw as Southern in a unique way, not the depiction that might be found at
Monticello and other plantation museums.211 They also wanted to create a museum that showed a very positive history and chose to use living history as a vehicle to tell this story. The
GMAHV used a currency of authenticity to present audiences with an immersive experience about the turn of the twentieth century.
It is not hard to see why living history museums are so popular with the public. In 1982
Jay Anderson, one of the first historians to turn his lens to studying how people learned history outside of the classrooms, stated that the purpose of a living history museum was to “simulate life in another time.”212 These sites have the opportunity for camaraderie, community, education, family fun, and travel. They engage the curious, focus on learning through doing unusual activities, and inspire one’s imagination. Living history museums emphasize interaction
210 Wetherington, The New South Comes to Wiregrass Georgia, 1860-1910, xix. Wetherington explains this transition in detail as industrialization changes force land owners off their lands and into a poorer economic status of tenant farmers. He also traces how the influx of industries like turpentine change the ethnic makeup of the region because many of the mills bring in former black slaves to work the mills. 211 Lois E. Horton and James Oliver Horton, eds., Slavery and Public History: The Tough Stuff of American Memory (New York: New Press : Distributed by Norton, 2006), 35–56. 212 Jay Anderson, “Living History: Simulating Everyday Life in Living History Museums,” American Quarterly 34, no. 3 (1982): 291. 65 and immersive learning.213 They also encourage empathy with the historic past. They foster this empathy by helping audiences and guests to understand work, recreation, and living conditions of different historic subjects. In addition to offering visitors an immersive experience, some scholars argue that living history museums are unique opportunities for archaeologists, anthropologists, and historians to test research ideas about material culture; how people may have used different objects or machinery.214
A major impetus for creating living history museums has been the concern over the separation of people’s contemporary experience with the past, in particular the movement away from rural living.215 According to Jay Anderson, the first official living history museum was
Artur Hazelius’s Skansen in Sweden. Hazelius opened his museum in 1891 and his purpose was
to demonstrate Swedish life before the nineteenth-century industrial revolution. Hazelius presented Swedish folk culture using actors, musicians, craftsmen, and three-dimensional spaces where guests could walk into and see the objects working as people once used them.216 A few
decades later in the United States, Henry Ford and John D. Rockefeller adamantly argued that
historic houses and communities should be preserved and opened to the public for viewing. Ford purposefully based his Greenfield Village on Artur Hazelius’s argument that in order for a
contemporary society to understand its predecessors, they must attempt to reconstruct the older
ways of life; that only by immersing oneself in a culture can one begin to understand it.217
213 Jay Anderson, Time Machines- the World of Living History (Nashville: American Association for State and Local History, 1984); Jay Anderson, “Living History: Simulating Everyday Life in Living Museums,” American Quarterly 34, no. 3 (January 1, 1982): 290–306. 214 John D. Krugler, “Behind the Public Presentations: Research and Scholarship at Living History Museums of Early America,” William and Mary Quarterly 48, no. 3 (1991): 355. 215 John Shover, “On the State of Agricultural History,” American Quarterly 28, no. 4 (Autumn 1976): 505. 216 Anderson, Time Machines- the World of Living History, 244–46. 217 Warren Leon and Margaret Piatt, “Living History Museums,” in History Museums in the United States, ed. Warren Leon and Roy Rosenzweig (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 66–67. 66 Similarly, designers of Colonial Williamsburg wanted to create a “pure, eighteenth-
century atmosphere.” In the 1920s a team of preservationists, historians, and others, backed by
more than seventy-nine million dollars from the Rockefeller family, reconstructed Williamsburg,
Virginia, to create Colonial Williamsburg. The focus of the site was, according to John D.
Rockefeller, to display “patriotism, high purpose, and unselfish devotion of our forefathers to the
common good.”218 The homes and buildings on display included those of the Williamsburg elite,
the Governor’s Palace, and Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry even provided a Q&A some
afternoons. While Colonial Williamsburg focused on founding figures and other members of the
upper crust, the museum relegated the average colonial—minus enslaved peoples— as a background character. Writing in 1981, Cary Carson, former director of research for Colonial
Williamsburg explained that, “ordinary people embroidered a variegated and richly detailed background that was needed to lend credibility to those few whom [John D.] Rockefeller called
‘the great patriots.’”219 For Rockefeller’s purposes, great patriots were the key attractions while average citizens served as an aesthetic.
Between the late 1960s and early 1980s living history museums sprang up all over the
United States. While places like Colonial Williamsburg served as a model for future living history museums, these new museums developed with less focus on noteworthy individuals or sites and instead turned their attention to the everyday experiences of the working and middle classes, especially in an agrarian settings. J. Geraint Jenkins, former director of the Welsh Folk
Museum stated that he saw the “chief aim [of folk and living history museums was] to study ordinary people as they constitute an overwhelming proportion of every community,” and to
218 Anderson, Time Machines- the World of Living History, 30. 219 Cary Carson, “Living Museums of Everyman’s History,” Harvard Magazine, August 1981, 25–26. 67 “search for the key to the world of ordinary people.”220 Howard Wight Marshall, a historian who
focused on folk music and architectural preservation, saw the rise of the folklife museum as an
opportunity to present “honestly all levels of culture, be more complete than the accounts pictured by elitist history museums.”221 Living history museums desired to be temples to the
average citizen, not just the noteworthy citizen.
Those who developed and designed living history museums in that era wanted something
more democratic where the average American was ‘the great patriot.’ Historians who trained in
the 1960s and 70s wanted museums to tell the stories that other places, like Colonial
Williamsburg, ignored.222 Eric Gable and Richard Handler saw this shift as a move towards a more democratic museum, “opening it for diverse people who all want to be included in the
American story.”223 In 1965 Agriculture History quoted Marion Clawson, a federal director who
focused on public lands, forests, and parks, saying that living history museums should especially
focus on creating working farms, complete with residents, “a family or families would actually
live on them, operate them, and live as nearly as possible like the prototype.”224 She expressed
concern with the growing barrier between contemporary Americans and their rural roots believing that most visitors would “be so urban as to not understand the importance of what they
saw at the farm unless told about it,” thus justifying why agriculture and folk museums needed to be living history museums more so than traditional museums or historic houses.225 The
220 J. Geraint Jenkins, “The Use Artifacts and Folk Art in the Folk Museums,” in Folklore and Folklife: An Introduction, ed. Richard M. Dorson (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1972), 498. 221 Howard Wight Marshall, “Folklife and the Rise of the American Folk Museums,” The Journal of American Folklore 90, no. 358 (December 1977): 392. 222 Cary Carson, “Living Museums of Everyman’s History,” Harvard Magazine 83, no. 6 (August 1981): 22–24; John D. Krugler, “Behind the Public Presentations: Research and Scholarship at Living History Museums of Early America,” William and Mary Quarterly 48, no. 3 (July 1991): 353–54. 223 Eric Gable and Richard Handler, “The Authority of Documents at Some American History Museums,” The Journal of American History 81, no. 1 (June 1994): 119. 224 Marion Clawson, “Living Historical Farms: A Proposal for Action,” Agricultural History 39, no. 2 (1965): 110. 225 Ibid., 110–11. 68 Smithsonian and Department of Agriculture embraced Clawson’s ideas and jointly created the
Association for Living History Farms and Agricultural Museums (ALHFAM) in 1970. The
ALHFAM defined living history as a site where objects and places are used to tell the stories of people who probably used the objects on display.226
The ALHFAM continues to serve and support living history museums across the United
States, not only living history farms. Membership grew quickly and serves as a testament to both
the popularity of the living history museum and folk museums. In 1977 the Smithsonian
Institution published a bibliography of all members of the ALHFAM and estimated that by 1982
more than 800 presented various living history programs and could be considered “serious” open
air museums, 225 of which were farms.227 As the number of museums grew, professional historians devoted more time and research to studying them. That same year, the Smithsonian
Institution counted more than 830 books, pamphlets, papers, films, and articles on living history museums that appeared between 1970 and 1976.228 The field as a practice and as a theory was
growing.
The rise in the number of agricultural museums in the 1960s and 1970s, reflected a larger
fascination with and celebration of the American farm family as the paragon of American life.
Living history museums, like the GMAHV, celebrated a nostalgic view of farming and rural life,
claiming that they embodied “a heritage of personal responsibility and strong personal ties.”229
226 “So What Is Living History?,” ALHFAM, accessed June 9, 2015, http://www.alhfam.org/?cat_id=153&nav_tree=153. 227 Anderson, “Living History,” 295. 228 Sharon Enbanks, A Bibliography of Books, Pamphlets, and Films Listed in the Living Historical Farms Bulletin from December 1970 through May 1976 (Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1977). 229 G. Terry Sharrer, “Hitching History to the Plow,” Historic Preservation 32 (November 1980): 44. 69 The Agrirama argued that remembering the “nineteenth century values, which we hold in high
esteem,” was central to its educational mission.230
Since the age of the American Revolution, people had held the farmer up as the ideal
and most virtuous citizen.231 John Taylor, a Virginia planter and contemporary of Thomas
Jefferson, argued that an interest in agriculture was “natural” and resulted in “real” wealth in the
form of land, “fairly gained by talents and industry.”232 In comparison to banks or paper money, that some believed to be artificial and manipulated by markets, land and what it produced was real and farming was the work of moral, industrious, good people. Thomas Jefferson saw farmers as the ideal American citizens and once said “those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God.”233
Many people associate Thomas Jefferson and other figures from American history with what historian Richard Hofstadter called the “agrarian myth.”234 He described the agrarian myth
as the belief that farmers and their communities were somehow more virtuous than city dwellers
and that the health of the nation was proportionate to the degree to which the nation’s
agricultural class participated in and controlled state affairs and politics.235 Historian of the
230 Quarterly Report for the Third Quarter, Fiscal Year 1983, 1983, DOC 3488, box 4, folder: “Agrirama 1982- 1983,” GSA. 231 Joyce Appleby, “Commercial Farming and the ‘Agrarian Myth’ in the Early Republic,” The Journal of American History 68, no. 4 (March 1982): 833–49; Joyce Appleby, Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generation of Americans (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); Woody Holton, Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves, and the Making of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, N.C: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia, 1999); Thomas J. Humphrey, “Conflicting Independence: Land Tenancy and the American Revolution,” Journal of the Early Republic 28, no. 2 (Summer 2008): 159–82; Alan Kulikoff, From British Peasants to Colonial American Farmers (Chapel Hill, N.C: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). 232 John Taylor, Tyranny Unmasked, ed. F. Thornton Miller (Library of Economics and Liberty, 1992), 2.18, http://www.econlib.org/library/LFBooks/Taylor/tylTU4.html. 233 Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (New York, NY: Literary Classics of the United States, 1785), 179, http://www.thefederalistpapers.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/Thomas-Jefferson-Notes-On-The-State-Of- Virginia.pdf. 234 Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. (New York: Vintage, 1955), 23–24. 235 Ibid., 62. 70 Early Republic, Joyce Appleby, argued that historians and the general American public were
fascinated by the mythologized Early Republican “yeoman” farmer from the mid-twentieth
century to the Bicentennial.236 Yeoman, once associated with an economic class only one step above tenants, by the mid-twentieth became synonymous with simple tastes and sturdy independence.237 Appleby stated that this mythology was wishful thinking. It belied, she
argued, the very real economic motivators of the transatlantic needs for foodstuffs and other products that encouraged more people to farm than any commitment to virtuous living.238 David
Danbom built on Appleby’s thinking with what he called “romantic agrarianism.” He defined
“romantic agrarianism” as the idea that rural living conveyed moral, spiritual, and emotional benefits to the individual.239
Historians of agriculture who looked beyond the Early Republic noted similar themes. In
1964 Leo Marx, argued in his book, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral
Idea in America, that Americans yearned for a bucolic, simple life that preferred rural to industrial life, a life at odds with the very real needs and benefits of machine technology.240 John
T. Schlebecker’s research on eighteenth and nineteenth century farms demonstrated that farmers sought economic prosperity over any kind of quaintness and were just as enmeshed in the economic world as their urban counterparts.241 Despite historical evidence to the contrary, the
236 Appleby, “Commercial Farming and the ‘Agrarian Myth’ in the Early Republic,” 835–36. 237 John J. Waters, “From Democracy to Demography: Recent Historiography on the New England Town,” in Perspectives on Early American History: Essays in Honor of Richard B. Morris, ed. Alden T. Vaughan and George Athan Billias (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 222–49. This chapter traces the historiography of the American farmer and the Early Republic, developed between the 1940s and 60s. 238 Appleby, “Commercial Farming and the ‘Agrarian Myth’ in the Early Republic,” 836. 239 David Danbom, “Romantic Agrarianism in Twentieth-Century America,” Agricultural History 65, no. 4 (Autumn 1991): 1. 240 Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964),343-345. 241 John T. Schlebecker, The Use of the Land: Essays on the History of American Agriculture (Lawrence: Coronado Press, 1973); John T. Schlebecker, Whereby We Thrive: A History of American Farming, 1607-1972 (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1975); John T. Schlebecker, “The Changing American Farm, 1831-1981,” Material Culture 38, no. 2 (Fall 2006): 19–38; Fred A. Shannon, The Farmer’s Last Frontier: Agriculture, 1860-1890 (Plains, New 71 popular perceptions of the American farm and ideals of pastoral living in U.S. culture were a part
of the zeitgeist in the 1960s and 1970s.
Michael Kammen stated in his book, Mystic Chords of Memory, that a rise in nostalgia is
“most likely to increase or become prominent in times of transition, in periods of cultural
anxiety, or when a society feels a strong sense of discontinuity with its past.”242 Put more simply: the sundry of social and cultural upheavals of the 1960s encouraged Americans to look to their past as a source of comfort and continuity in times of change. It prompted the passage of the National Preservation Act of 1965, which encouraged preservation at the local level. State and local governments realized that cultural tourism had the potential to be not only educational and fun, but also profitable. In 1973, Martin Marty, professor emeritus at the University of
Chicago, commented that “Americans seem to want to see and touch anything old- the genuine old if possible, but even the hokey and plastic ‘old’ will do if nothing better is available.”243
Despite the movement to create spaces that told history from below rather than from above, Warren Leon and Margaret Piatt noted in 1989 that the majority of living history museums still presented “an unrepresentative sample of past Americans.”244 After completing a study they found that more often than not, living history museums focused on the lifestyles of middle and upper-class Protestants in a rural setting.245 Visitors saw either great patriots,
farmers, or settlers and the stories the museums told were almost exclusively white. Museums
rarely, if ever, focused on the experiences of the urban, immigrants, or slaves. In some ways the
York: M.E. Sharpe, 1977); Robert D. Mitchell, Commercialism and Frontier: Perspectives on the Early Shenandoah Valley (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1977); J.G.A. Pocock, “Virtue and Commerce in the Eighteenth Century,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 3 (Summer 1972): 119–34, etc.. 242 Kammen, 631. 243 Martin E. Marty, “Exploring America’s Past,” Newsweek, July 9, 1973, 25. 244 Warren Leon and Roy Rosenzweig, eds., History Museums in the United States: A Critical Assessment (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 65. 245 Leon and Piatt, “Living History Museums,” 65. 72 GMAHV told a story that would have resonated at other museums: the story of the individual
farmer and the story of working-class peoples.
In order to better understand what the GMAHV and other living history or open-air
museums do, it is important to understand some of their methodologies and practices, especially
interpreting. Living history museums attempt to “bring history to life” through period rooms and buildings, skill demonstrations, and costumed interpreters recreating scenes and people’s
experiences. Interpreters are the employees or volunteers who reenact or present history to
museum guests and visitors with the intention of promoting historical understanding,
entertaining, and providing a unique experience.246 There are a variety of approaches to
interpretation, including first and third-person interpreters, demonstrations, character
interpretations, and museum theatre. The two the GMAHV use most often are third-person
interpretation and skill demonstration.
Most living history sites prefer third-person interpretation. Interpreters wear some kind of costume or period-inspired clothing. Museum workers understand that the past was then and that, while dressed in period costume, they are still members of the present. They are an important part of living history museums because they provide the information that guides or docents might provide at other sites, but their costumes help guests to suspend belief and stay immersed in the landscape the museum creates. Skill demonstrators are usually crafts or trades people and their job is to perform a craft in a period manner, not all of these interpreters are costumed. Sometimes the demonstrators do this based on personal preference, other times
246 The following sources discuss various approaches to interpretation at museums, historic sites, and parks: Freeman Tilden, Interpreting Our Heritage, 3rd ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977); William T. Alderson and Shirley Payne Low, Interpretation of Historic Sites, 2nd ed. (Walnut Creek: AltaMira Press, 1996); Larry Beck and Ted Cable, Interpretation for the 21st Century- Fifteen Guiding Principles for Interpreting Nature and Culture, 2nd ed. (Champaign, IL: Sagamore Publishing, 2002). 73 because of modern day safety regulations. As an example, the blacksmith is the only interpreter and skill demonstrator at the GMAHV who does not wear period styled clothing.
In comparison, first-person interpreters act as a character from the time period and place the museum studies. Sometimes these are composite characters, other times they are based on actual people. Not only are they costumed, like third-person interpreters, but they also make a point to learn historical language and mannerisms. Stacy F. Roth, author of an interpreter handbook, states that first-person interpreters do their best to mimic the “behaviors, folkways, customs, beliefs, activities, foodways… dress, deportment, and contemporary perspective of the people they represent.”247 Perhaps the most famous example of an American living history
museum that relies on first-person interpreters is Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia. A first- person interpreter portrays a specific historic figure, such as Thomas Jefferson, thus performing a
character interpretation. Roth argues that first-person interpretation personalizes history and
helps to create empathy between the characters the actors portray and the museum guests.248
This empathy adds to the learning experience and can encourage guests to critically think and
relate to the past.
Since the 1980s, many historians and museum professionals have taken living history
sites to task, claiming that living history museums cannot attain their goal to recreate the past.
The chief criticism is that the atmosphere at these kinds of sites, with their intricate costumes,
living animals, and elaborate décor may sway visitors into a kind of uncritical complacency.
Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, professor of performance studies at New York University, argues
that any place that claims to bring history to life through living history or “living heritage” is a
247 Stacy F. Roth, Past into Present: Effective Techniques for First-Person Historical Interpretation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 13. 248 Ibid., 20. 74 falsehood that “signifies death” and that living history and heritage sites critiques should call this
“resurrection theatre.”249 Her point was that material objects meant something specific to a past people and interpreters cannot replicate their original meaning or use, in a modern setting.
Robert Ronshiem, author of the article “Is the Past Dead?” similarly argued that “the past is dead
and cannot be brought back to life.”250 Ronsheim contended that many museums present
imbalanced exhibits at living history museums: they focused too much on the material culture
such as architecture, machinery, or dress and little on the lived experiences of government,
economics, religion, or how people saw and defined themselves.251
Living history museums often tell stories that are pleasant or easy.252 Living History
Museums: Undoing History Through Performance, by Scott Magelssen, argued that living history museums encourage guests to become complacent and disengage from any critical analysis, feeding the wishful thinking that the past was an easier, happier time than current ones.253 Many living history museums focus on agricultural and domestic living. Michael
Wallace labeled the commodification of history for private purposes that left out evidence of
conflict as Mickey Mouse history.254 Studying the creation of the GMAHV demonstrates how and why living history museums made the decisions they did about who and what to present and why they believed their presentations were, in fact, authentic to the region and people whose history the museum displayed.
249 Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, “Afterlives,” Performance Research 2, no. 2 (Summer 1997): 4. 250 Robert D. Ronsheim, “Is the Past Dead?,” Museum News 53, no. 3 (1974): 62. 251 Ibid., 17. 252 David Peterson, “There Is No Living History, There Are No Time Machines,” History News 43, no. 5 (1988): 29; Ronsheim, “Is the Past Dead?,” 16–17; Thomas Schlereth, “It Wasn’t That Simple,” Museum News 56, no. 3 (1978): 37–40; Thomas Schlereth, “Causing Conflict, Doing Violence,” Museum News 63, no. 1 (1984): 45–52. 253 Scott Magelssen, Living History Museums: Undoing History Through Performance (Toronto: Scarecrow Press, 2007), 125–26. 254 Michael Wallace, Mickey Mouse History and Other Essays on American Memory, First Edition (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996), 133-158. 75 As the state shifted more towards a diversified-industrial economy in the second-half of
the twentieth century, it became clear to the state of Georgia that much of the public connected
less and less with agriculture or rural living. In 1970, only 5.5% of the state’s population resided
on farms and 4.3% of all workers were connected in some way to agriculture. This is a
significant drop: in 1900 40% of the state’s population lived on farms and between 1870 and
1900 between 60 and 72.5% of all workers in the state of Georgia were in some way connected
to farming, rural living, or the field of agriculture.255 Fearful that Georgians’ knowledge of the
state’s agricultural history, especially of its material culture, would soon be lost forever, the state of Georgia designed an agricultural living history museum to celebrate the role that farming played on the state’s cultural and economic development since its colonial period.
In 1968, Tifton and the Tift County Chamber of Commerce proposed to create a state welcome-center because of the city’s proximity to the interstate and other highways. Ford
Spinks, a Democrat state senator and agriculture equipment dealer from the area, led the project.
When Tifton got access to the first peanut combine, the city proposed combining the welcome center with a history and agricultural museum. The following year, Tifton collaborated with the
College of Agriculture, University of Georgia in Athens and the museum became an official project of the University Alumni Association.256
The University of Georgia Agricultural Alumni Association in 1969 began work towards
this project and the next year the state of Georgia officially authorized the creation of “the
Agrirama” and set aside funding for it. In 1972, the state General Assembly passed H.B. 1230.
This law provided for the creation of a state agency, the Georgia Agrirama Development
255 William K. Keeling and Adolph Sanders, Georgia Agrirama Development Plan (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1973), 1. 256 “Origin of the Agrirama,” The Sunny South and the Georgia Recorder, May 21, 1986, 1. 76 Authority, to supervise planning.257 The state moved quickly to be able open the museum in
1976 to coincide with America’s Bicentennial. The Board of Regents of the University System
of Georgia and the Coastal Plain Experiment Station were to work together to create the plan for
the museum. The state located a piece of property in Tift County and the size and scope of the possibility of this land encouraged the state and the University of Georgia Agricultural Alumni
Association to pursue the project as a museum complex. The Alumni Association also requested
that the state of Georgia be in charge of the project. In 1972 the General Assembly of the state
of Georgia created the Georgia Agrirama Development Authority (GADA) “to provide the
mechanism for reviving, and demonstrating certain aspects of the Georgia’s agrarian society.
Specifically the purpose of the Authority is to develop and maintain… a museum complex in
which selected aspects of Georgia’s rural past can be systematically and permanently preserved
and demonstrated.”258 The language of this statement suggested that the state of Georgia would be selective in deciding which aspects of agricultural history to display, but also what to exclude.
When defining the museum’s purpose, the Georgia Agrirama Development Plan stated the museum sought “to capture that part of the state’s agricultural past in such a way that people of this day and in future years can better understand and appreciate the past upon which today’s agriculture has developed.”259 Technological advances replaced and displaced many workers and also quickly changed how farming looked and felt to many Americans in the twentieth century. The authors of the development plan, Adolph Sanders and William Keeling, believed
257 Implementation of Georgia Agrirama Interpretive Program National Endowment for the Humanities Application, 2 February 1983, DOC 3488, box 4, folder: “Georgia Agrirama Developmental Authority,” Georgia State Archives. 258 Keeling and Sanders, 4. 259 Ibid., 3. 77 that Georgia was only one generation away from having any direct knowledge or “authenticity”
to the buildings, objects, or demonstrations.260
According to the GADA, the state chose the site in Tift County for several strategic
reasons. First, Tift County originally conceived the plan. Second, the site was and still is in the
agricultural heart of Georgia. Third, it is located near several University System of Georgia
facilities, including the Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College and the Coastal Plain
Experimental Station, whose faculty and students might be able to lend assistance and
knowledge for the museum’s betterment. Finally, the site is easily accessible by several veins of
local and interstate travel, including I-75. Tift County was also home to more than 400,000 people in a fifty-mile radius. A 100 mile radius placed the museum complex within range for
1,500,000 people.261
The interstate traffic to and from Florida was the site’s strongest draw. The state believed that the site’s proximity to the interstate would provide a broader market ensuring a greater chance of economic stability and independence. The Development Plan saw I-75 as a way to access the travel market. Different estimates stated that between 1970 and 1971 interstate and rural travel increased by roughly 7.2% from more than 29,000 vehicles on the roads to 31,000 vehicles. The state estimated that almost a third of all of this traffic was for recreation and travel and Georgia acknowledged the creation of Walt Disney World as part of this boost in recreation and automobiles on the roads.262 In addition to a valuable location, the Development Plan believed the museum’s unique attraction catering to special interest markets. The state saw the
260 Ibid. 261 GADA letter to Dr. Elizabeth Lyon, 11 January 1982, DOC 3488, box 4, folder: “Georgia Agrirama Developmental Authority,” GSA. 262 The Agricultural Alumni Association of the University of Georgia, Inc., “The Georgia Agrirama,” Ag Alumni News, Summer 1970, 3. 78 possibility for educational tourism as part of a market of visitors. Other special groups included those interested in antiques, agriculture, and history.263
Another aspect that GADA saw as uniquely important was the proximity to Abraham
Baldwin Agricultural College (ABAC). At the time ABAC was a two-year college with an emphasis on forestry, agriculture, and home economics. It had about 2,200 students and graduated classes of around 400 each year. Georgia estimated that through transfer programs and other outreach the college reached about 8,000 people each year. The state saw a relationship with ABAC as crucial to the museum’s success for continued development and the state viewed the 2,000+ students as a potential labor pool for part-time and summer help and as potential guests. Symbiotically Georgia saw the Agrirama as adding a unique opportunity for hands-on learning in many of ABAC’s classrooms.
The Agrirama had two major objectives in its public design: firstly, to preserve Georgia’s agricultural history; secondly to translate that history to museum visitors and to make that information useful to guests. The Development Plan described the objectives of the museum as telling “the basic story [as] one of the interrelationship between the people on a farm and people in a small agricultural town.”264 The story they chose to tell was one of the white farmer and his
family, the town with its craftsmen, and other professionals. It is clear from the development
stages that the Agrirama, which would become the GMAHV, focused on the white male worker,
casting those around him as his supporting staff, including his family, employees, and other
community members.
When Ford Spinks and the state chose Tifton for the museum, they did so not only out of
love for a local’s hometown, but also because they believed that Wiregrass people were different
263 Keeling and Sanders, Georgia Agrirama Development Plan, 13–23. 264 Ibid., 29. 79 from either wealthy Southern plantation elites or working-class Appalachians. The creators and
early directors of this museum were not historians, nor had they any historical training. They
were politicians, people interested in tourism, and those that saw this as a chance to create a local
attraction. It was not until several years after the museum opened that it asked for historians’
assistance with interpretation, archiving, library services, and training. Once the museum had its buildings, objects, and a directory, the GADA believed its work was finished.
The promotional pieces and fundraising letters that the GADA produced between the late
1960s and 1980s demonstrated the importance of tourism to the museum’s creation. GADA and
the state looked at Walt Disney World in 1971 and wanted to create an attraction that might lure
in some of those “Disney Dollars.” The Board of Governors openly said that they thought that
the location and topic would be popular in an area with no other attractions, but also that “it is
only logical that a large number of the tourists will stop at the Agrirama.”265 The Board of
Governors was not alone in thinking this. In 1973, three years before the museum opened, the
Associated Press (AP) published a piece, describing the Agrirama as a “tourist lure.” The AP went on to say that the museum would specifically bring in “Yankee tourists” on their way to
Florida, presumably to Orlando. The writer also described plans for the Agrirama as
“amusement park-like.”266 The AP wasn’t the only one to believe that the Agrirama would be a
visitor magnet. Frank Gilleland, a journalist for a Southwest Georgia newspaper, said that the
museum expected upwards of 600,000 annually; this was an estimate from the Agrirama before
it even opened.267 Other brochures described the museum as having a “festive atmosphere.”
265 The Agricultural Alumni Association of the University of Georgia, Inc., “The Georgia Agrirama,” Ag Alumni News, Summer 1970, 3. 266 The Associated Press, “Half Million Asked: State May Fund I-75 Tourist Lure,” The Atlanta Journal, March 7, 1973. 267 Frank Gilleland, “Agrairama- Doorway to a By-Gone Era...,” Gold Kist News, April 1974, 1. 80 Frank King, one of the early members of GADA and director of the Coastal Plains Experiment
Station, argued that the museum would be “good clean fun… a sort of yearlong County Fair.”268
Considering that one of the leading GADA members saw this as comparable to a fair, it
should not be surprising that the early plans for the museum emphasized attraction-type
entertainment. The museum wanted to create a space for tourists, but they also wanted a place
where local residents could go throughout the year. One example of those types of activities
would be the Fourth of July festivals that they continue to host. However, in the planning stages
and in the early years the museum directors proposed many features that seem unusual for a
museum. Plans included picnic tables and outdoor grills, paddle boats, and places to fish.269 A six-page spread detailed the different ways that the museum could charge their guests for refreshments, meals at a restaurant, camera and film supplies, books, and other period- appropriate knick-knacks. Now, it is common for museums to sell snacks, bottled drinks, and little gifts and trinkets as a way of making extra income, but when such a detailed plan outlined how “large amounts of cash” would shape layout and security while there were no mentions of educational goals, it suggested an inversion of priorities of what public historians might expect to see.270
In addition to these types of spaces in the museum, the Agrirama developers and other leaders in the state planned for the museum to host monthly and weekly events to encourage repeat visitors and also up-sale ticket charges. The Agrirama regularly offered different music programs because many people attended them. Annual Sacred Harp singers performed a few
268 How it Used to Be Agrirama brochure, circa 1971-1973, RCB-3315, box 1, folder: “Agrirama: University of Georgia College of Agriculture, 1969-1973,” GSA. 269 Ibid. 270 Visitor’s Center, circa 1969-1973, RCB-3315, box 1, folder: “Agrirama: University of Georgia College of Agriculture, 1969-1973,” GSA. 81 times a year and the public could join in the singing.271 Among the more popular programs were bi-monthly concerts for local musicians; organizers called it “Wiregrass Opry.” On Saturday nights the museum hosted performers “who specialized in family entertainment.” According to
Agri-Ramblins, the museum’s newsletter, hundreds of locals attended the performances.272
In July of 1972, Frank Sutton, member of the Georgia State Senate for Colquitt County, wrote to Roy Burson, a member of GADA and the state’s Director of Tourism, that the Agrirama host an outdoor play like Until These Hills in Cherokee, North Carolina. Sutton argued that “the economic impact of such a successful venture of this sort would be difficult to estimate but would be over-whelming [sic] based on even the most conservative efforts.” Sutton wanted to recruit nationally known musicians, writers, and directors to produce the play. The Senator explained that these professionals would “relate the drama of the struggle of our earlier settlers” and how Georgia’s early history offered “unlimited possibilities to be dramatized.”273 Sutton’s suggestion demonstrated that state boards and leaders understood this space as an attraction or at least money making. Unto These Hills started in 1950 and continues to play six nights a week, to a theatre of 2,800 people and makes a steady stream of revenue.274 Sutton’s comments, combined with the statements of others involved with the Agrirama, suggested that the historical purpose of the space was not a priority, that the museum’s creators saw history as a commodity and “tourist lure.”275
271 “Sacred Harp Singing Returns,” Agri-Ramblins, May 1983, 1. 272 “Wiregrass Opry: Entertainment for the Family,” Agri-Ramblins, November 1982, 1; “Wiregrass Opry Opens Season of Family Music,” Agri-Ramblins, May 1983, 1. The museum published these almost exactly word for word every few months; the articles changed the dates and a few other minor details. 273 Franklin Sutton to Roy Burson, 9 June 1972, RCB-3315, box 1, folder: “Agrirama: University of Georgia College of Agriculture, 1969-1973,” GSA. 274 “‘Unto These Hills’ Wowing Another Generation,” GoUpstate.com, accessed June 4, 2016, http://www.goupstate.com/article/20080710/NEWS/807100327. 275 The Associated Press, “Half Million Asked: State May Fund I-75 Tourist Lure,” The Atlanta Journal, March 7, 1973. 82 In the 18-24 months before the opening, the museum ran articles in various local
newspapers to solicit research and contributions from the Wiregrass Region in Southwest
Georgia. These pieces emphasized the efforts that museum staff made in order to bring
authenticity and accuracy to the displays at the Agrirama.276 They reveal that the museum
desired to replicate farming tools and hoped to find heritage livestock breeds and a variety of
flora that all were native to the wiregrass region of Georgia in the late nineteenth-century. These
same news stories also solicited help from the community at providing these materials and photographs or other primary sources that could assist museum staff.277 From its inception, this
was a museum that depended on its local community for support and information.
Before the museum opened, and for several years after, the museum wanted to present
farm life as accurate as possible by repeating the refrain, that the Agrirama was an “accurate
depiction, the barn will smell like a barn and pig pens would look like pig pens.”278 The
newspapers and other advertisements asked for donations of antiques, or older objects photographs, and old sewing pattern. They also requested for historic buildings and even an old train station.279 In these same articles and advertisements the museum asked the general public
to come and volunteer at the museum, share their stories, and demonstrate how to use certain
tools or objects. The Agrirama preserved the “way of doing things” more than anything else.280
276 “Editorial Etchings,” The Sunny South and the Georgia Recorder, Spring 1986, Vol. XI No. 2 edition, 3. 277 “Research Conducted for Agrirama Opening” (The Tifton Gazette, February 4, 1976), Articles About the Agrirama 1976, Georgia Museum of Agriculture and Historic Village Archive. 278 “Agrirama Receives Award,” The Tifton Gazette, November 10, 1975; Gilleland, “Agrirama- Doorway to a By- Gone Era...” 279 “Wanted: An Old Railway Station,” The Market Bulletin, 1978; “Information on Sawmilling Is Wanted,” The Douglas Enterprise, February 9, 1979; “Agrirama Wants Old Photographs,” The Waycross Journal Herald, May 20, 1978; Georgia Agrirama, “The Wiregrass Georgia Rural History Research Project” (Georgia Agrirama Development Authority, July 1980). 280 Quarterly Report for the Third Quarter, Fiscal Year 1983, 1983, DOC 3488, box 4, folder: “Agrirama 1982- 1983,” GSA. 83 The museum itself did not clearly document exactly what research went into the
museum’s knowledge of the era. Newspaper articles stated that much of the museum’s
understanding of the period came from the firsthand knowledge of elderly people “sharing this
knowledge with those interested...” that would “bridge a gap in agriculture history before personal experience vanished by inevitable visitations from the Grim Reaper.”281 The museum placed a particular emphasis on first-hand experience with tools and methods, as well as personal
stories. The oral histories that the museum collected focused on “the development of farm practices and day-to-day activities.”282 However, the museum failed to keep a comprehensive record of who participated or what specific information each person contributed.
In retrospect, there were some distinct disadvantages to the GMAHV’s reliance on oral testimony to construct its interpretations. First, without more information about the participants it is impossible to determine whether the anecdotes represented the general experiences of museum guests. Second, those who volunteered their stories or knowledge were a self-selecting group. They volunteered for this opportunity based on reading the advertisements in the paper.
That implied people who remained in the area, regularly read the newspaper, were in good enough health, and had interest in sharing their information.283 Third, and historians have made
the same comments about the WPA slave narratives federal workers collected in the 1930s,
many of these memories came from those that were children in the early 1900s and age and
distance colored those recollections.284 There is disagreement about how well the elderly
remember their memories. While there is evidence that the elderly remember important events
281 “Origin of the Agrirama,” The Sunny South and the Georgia Recorder, May 21, 1986, 1. 282 “Oral History Project Reaps Rich Dividends,” The Tifton Gazette, August 22, 1974. 283 Paul Thompson, “Problems of Method in Oral History,” Oral History 1, no. 4 (1972): 24–25. 284 John Blassingame, “Using the Testimony of Ex-Slaves: Approaches and Problems,” Journal of Southern History 41 (1975): 490; “Slave Narratives: An Introduction to the WPA Slave Narratives, p14,” accessed March 16, 2016, https://memory.loc.gov/ammem/snhtml/snintro14.html. 84 and can be “primed” to remember certain things, their memories are best from early adulthood
and if there is a special emotional tie to that memory.285 This may mean that some oral histories can be very reliable, others however, especially those from childhood, may not be. Finally, while some people may volunteer to tell their stories, other people may not and the museum may not think or know to ask those who either might have a contrary story or anecdote to offer. And, museum staff may purposefully omit stories that complicate the narrative or contradict the overall history the museum seeks to presents. As scholars have demonstrated, remembering the past can be highly subjective and susceptible to modification, distortion, and omission.286
However, despite the limitations of oral histories, sometimes they appear to be the only vehicle
for securing a record of the past.
While the museum did rely disproportionately on recollections from the elderly members
of the local community or their children’s retelling of what they heard growing up, the museum
also made some efforts after opening to conduct research utilizing other types of (particularly
written) sources and collected them accordingly. A year after the Agrirama opened ABAC made
a point to encourage its faculty to assist the museum staff and interpreters. Light Cummins, then
a young professor of American History and now a tenured professor at Austin College in
Sherman, Texas, was one of the faculty enlisted to help.
In the spring of 1977, the ABAC and the Agrirama staff came together to discuss
strategies. In this meeting the president of the college, Stanley Anderson, and the Dean of
Faculty, Frank Thomas, and other faculty met with Ford Spinks. Spinks approached the college
285 Alfred F. Young, The Shoemaker and the Tea Party: Memory and the American Revolution, 1st edition (Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press, 2000), xiii. 286 Michael Frisch, A Shared Authority: Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral and Public History (SUNY Press, 1990): 29-54; Studs Terkel, Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression (New York: The New Press, 2005); Lynn Abrams, Oral History Theory, 1 edition (London ; New York, NY: Routledge, 2010): 5, 6, 23, 46-49 ; Thomas A. Woods, “The Challenge of Public History,” The Oral History Review 17, no. 2 (October 1, 1989): 97– 102. 85 asking for research assistance and asked faculty to consider what kind of special services they
could offer the museum. Cummins remembered that they “discussed various ways to help the
institution and make it viable.”287 Cummins described a frustrated Spinks who knew that the
museum could be better. However, when Cummins offered his assistance as a part of an
“unofficial relationship” to the Agrirama he noted that the museum staff did not really
understand why Spinks asked for help or what historians could do for the place.
Over the next few months, Cummins researched two specific topics that he believed
would be an immediate help to the museum: general stores and grist mills. He noted that he saw
them as being the most popular places in the museum because of the odds and ends on display in
the store and because the grist mill actually worked. In the summer of 1978, ABAC paid
Cummins a summer adjunct salary so that he could go to the Georgia State Archives. Cummins
found the records of about a dozen general stores in Southern Georgia. He took note of the types
of things they carried, their transactions and prices, and also prepared a presentation explaining
their purposes as community gathering places. He also remembered that the Agrirama employed
at least two Florida State University graduate students for summers to do research on different
houses on the museum’s property. Cummins stated that museum directors did not know much
about the buildings other than that they were old and from where they came. Graduate students
did all the research on the provenance of the structures, when ownership changed hands, and
who lived there.288
Cummins described an overall disjuncture between professional historical research and what the museum thought they needed. Cummins and others at ABAC stressed to the Agrirama that research was key to providing a quality product at the museum. Cummins described` that
287 Light Cummins, telephone interview with Elizabeth Worley, October 16, 2015. 288 Ibid. 86 Ford Spinks and museum directors “were not against historical research, just that they had never
thought much of it.”289 Spinks and others at the museum seemed surprised and delighted that professional historians could offer them assistance in things like knowing what types of objects to display on general store shelves. Before Cummins’ research the only official requirement was that “they appeared to be old.”290 Cummins and other ABAC staff helped the museum put
together a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grant proposal to help pay for the
research that the museum needed. In the grant proposal Cummins and others described that professional historians were essential because the library was a just a collection of books some
“totally without historic value,” that the archives had no organization and were “in even worse
shape than the facility’s library,” and that the museum’s collection of antiques and artifacts was
without organization and just accepted anything anyone donated. This same document criticized
the Agrirama for excluding historians from this entire process.291
One thing that Cummins faulted the museum for was its periodization. The NEH proposal argued that “there did not seem to be complete agreement between staff members, the development plan, various interpretation materials, and public relations materials” about what exact time period the Agrirama presented.292 The museum publicly claimed that it covered the period from 1870 and 1900. However, several different newspaper articles and brochures gave a variety of possible dates including something as vague as the “late nineteenth century.”293 One fundraiser letter to a Judge Ronald F. Adams, in Brunswick, Georgia, quoted the museum’s
289 Ibid. 290 Ibid. 291 Consultant Report Sponsored by Preliminary Planning Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, June 1978, RCB-18899, box 3, folder: “Georgia Historical Society, Agrirama, 1977-1978,” GSA. 292 Consultant Report Sponsored by Preliminary Planning Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. 293 The Associated Press, “Half Million Asked: State May Fund I-75 Tourist Lure.” 87 period as being from 1880 to 1900.294 A brochure, “How it Used to Be,” stated that the museum depicted Georgia agriculture from 1890-1920.295 Sutton’s letter, proposing that the Agrirama
host an outdoor play, mentioned Georgia’s colonial history.296 Cummins argued that this kind of
inconsistency manifested in interpretation too. Sharon Gibson, lead interpreter of domestic sites
from 1980 to 1982, stated that she believed she presented the history of the 1890s.297
While the museum made no specific statements about ethnicity or whiteness, they did make some coded statements implying that while yes, this was a Southern museum, it was not to be Southern of a certain sort. Large parts of this definition responded to popular perceptions that
Southern white identity was about wealth and cotton plantations. One of the three NEH grant proposals explained that one of the purposes of the museum was to expose tourists to “a realistic portrayal of the South different from the romantic national stereotype of a large cotton culture plantation.”298 The Georgia Agrirama Proposed Development Plan explained that the museum should have a “typical family-size farmstead rather than a mansion type.”299 The museum directors believed that people of the Wiregrass Region were their own type of Southern.
Their idea of Wiregrass identity was not only reactionary to ideas of Southern elites.
Sharon Gibson noted that the museum did not want to present a stereotype of a hillbilly or hayseed Southerner either. In 1982 the museum paid for billboards along I-75 to help draw in tourists. They hired an outside firm to design the boards. The artist came back with a
294 GADA to Judge Ronald F. Adams, 9 December, 1972, RCB-33914, box 1, folder: “Agrirama: University of Georgia College of Agriculture, 1969-1973,” GSA. 295 “How it Used to Be.” 296 Franklin Sutton to Roy Burson. 297 Sharon Gibson, telephone interview with Elizabeth Worley, June 3, 2016. 298 National Endowment for the Humanities grant application, 1 March 1982, DOC 3488, box 4, folder: “Georgia Agrirama Development Authority,” GSA. 299 Georgia Agrirama Proposed Development Plan, circa 1971-1973, RCB-3315, box 1, folder: “Agrirama: University of Georgia College of Agriculture, 1969-1973,” GSA. 88 “cartoonish caricature” of a farmer.300 Gibson noted that the directors felt the drawings too
closely looked like Snuffy Smith. Snuffy Smith was a cartoon character that first ran in 1934 as
a part of Billy DeBeck’s Barney Google comics. This cartoon was of a farming moonshiner
from North Carolina from an Appalachian place called “Hootin’ Holler.” Smith wore overalls
without a shirt, was scruffy, lived in a shack, and had constant trouble with the law.301 Gibson described the museum directors’ reaction as horribly offended by the drawings: “We were insulted… and we really rebelled against that hayseed farmer, hick mentality that we felt that the billboards were putting forward.”302 When Gibson described the views of the original creators and workers at the museum, she emphasized that these people really saw themselves as very different from people of the Appalachian Mountains or Ozarks. Gibson stressed that “we really rebelled against a caricature of Southerness.”303 The Wiregrass people, according to the museum, were Southern, but not like mountain poor people, nor were they like the genteel plantation culture either.
The museum used the rhetoric of rugged frontier individualism to define the Wiregrass
Southerner. William Droze, director of the museum in the early 1980s, called the Wiregrass
Country a “forest frontier.”304 Agri-Ramblins described the time period of the museum as the
“frontier days of south Georgia.”305 In the spring of 1981 the Agrirama hosted a series of
lectures based on the NEH grant research for museum staff, interpreters, and the public. Jerry
DeVine, one of the scholars that the museum hired with NEH grant money to research the people
and region, repeatedly called the subjects of his work “pioneers.” DeVine compared the
300 Sharon Gibson, June, 3, 2016. 301 Anthony Harkins, Hillbilly: A Cultural History of an American Icon (Oxford University Press, 2003), 113–23. 302 Sharon Gibson. 303 Ibid. 304 Statement by William Droze, 9 November, 1981, DOC 3488, box 4, folder: “Georgia Agrirama Development Authority,” GSA. 305 “Saturday Night Sketches,” Agri-Ramblins, November 1982. 89 subsistence farming of the piney woods to be comparable to “frontier practice.” He spoke of the
isolation and difficult life of those in the Wiregrass Region as part of what made them strong, not
that they were poor or struggled to survive.306 He also described the Wiregrass people as “a
separate kind of people,” “pioneer stock,” and that their habits, skills, and lifestyles were
“survivals of old frontier customs.”307
DeVine was not alone in his description. Ann Malone, recent Tulane graduate and friend of Light Cummins, also worked on the NEH research, argued that the customs she studied were
“uniquely Wiregrass.” She compared the men of the piney woods to cowboys and their lives to
“typically frontier.”308 One of the museum’s newspapers described one of their buildings as a
“pioneer cabin.”309 The people in charge of the museum defined themselves and their region of
Georgia as uniquely Southern, separate from other stereotypes or ideas about what it meant to be
Southern. The researchers, DeVine and Malone, confirmed these ideas with their own rhetoric and phrasing that argued that all aspects of the Wiregrass Region culture and people were different from other areas; even their violence was different.
In presenting a Southern white identity as self-made, rugged, and individualistic, the museum also avoided difficult aspects of Southern history from the turn of the twentieth century; the rise of Jim Crow and segregation. The train station, for instance, has two waiting rooms, almost certainly for purposes of segregation, but the museum uses one space for storage rather than provide explanation for the two spaces. In addition, the general store was originally a
“company store” for a lumber and turpentine camp but there is no corresponding discussion of
306 The Cultural Heritage of the Wiregrass in South Georgia by Jerry DeVine, 2 March 1981, RCB 19227, box 1, folder: “Transcript Lecture 3 March 2, 1981,” GSA. 307 Ibid. 308 The Cultural Heritage of the Wiregrass in South Georgia by Ann Malone, 9 March 1981, RCB 19227, box 1, folder: Transcript Lecture 4 March 9, 1981,” GSA. 309 “Clark Cabin Finished,” The Sunny South and the Georgia Recorder, Fall 1977, 1. 90 Southern economic systems like sharecropping, tenancy, and peonage that created multi-
generational poverty to put the store into a historic context.310 Sharon Gibson commented that the story that the museum wanted to present was a pleasant, happy history, that “everything is nice and we’re good people and we work hard and this is what our parents did; our parents didn’t lynch, our parents didn’t burn crosses.”311 Gibson voiced an unspoken comment: that the
museum creators wanted to present a history of an ethnic identity separate from the
contemporary controversies raised by the Civil Rights Movement.
Throughout their publications and brochures the museum stressed that part of the draw
for this museum was learning through doing. For instance, the museum encouraged their student
guests to participate as much as possible in things like blacksmithing, sheep shearing, or hearth
cooking.312 While the GMAHV provided interpreters with information about each station, person, and skill they presented at the museum, the museum did not require interpreters to follow
a specific script; this ensured that no experience was exactly the same and that every interaction
with an interpreter was unique to that particular trip.
The GMAHV opened on July 1, 1976, as a part of Georgia’s contribution to the US
Bicentennial celebrations. Until 2010, the state called the museum the Agrirama. In 2010 the
state of Georgia assigned ownership and responsibilities to ABAC and renamed the museum the
Georgia Museum of Agriculture and Historic Village. (Locals still mostly refer to it as the
Agrirama.) Despite the change in name and in supervision, the museum remains shaped by its
origins.
310 Sharon Gibson, telephone interview with Elizabeth Worley, March 14, 2016. 311 Ibid. 312 “Students Experience Georgia History,” Agri-Ramblins, March 1983, 2. 91 The museum’s makers desired to present visitors with what it believed to be an accurate representation of the past. Using a common method of museum making in the 1960s and 1970s, the museum looked to their immediate community for information and resources. As a consequence, the methods the staff use to plow a field or shear a sheep replicate the same methods used in the late nineteenth-century. By collecting and displaying artifacts, the museum’s early directors crafted a historical narrative that presented a different representation of
Southern identity than that found at plantations turned into historic house museums. This representation was based on the oral histories that they conducted with the region’s longest- living residents and their children. The museum later looked to professional historians to authenticate the history being told and that archival research did not fundamentally alter the narrative the museum told. As a product of its time, it avoided topics that would have contradicted or upset a narrative of individual independence and progress.
92 CHAPTER 5
AGRIRAMA STUDENT WORKSHOPS: MAKING 19TH CENTURY FARMING FUN
Between 1976 and 2010, the GMAHV provided onsite programming for school children every year from September to May. Over the years, thousands of children, from fourth grade to high school, attended these programs as a part of their history, agriculture, and Georgia studies programs. However, the museum’s program had a relatively peculiar organization. At the start of every trip, adults helped the children dress in costumes- calico skirts and bonnets for the girls; suspenders, and hats for the boys- and then museum staff would divide the group by gender.
Each received a separate tour.
This chapter examines the Georgia Museum of Agriculture and Historic Village’s presentation of gender for school field trips. Museum staff believed that these divisions were historically accurate. Some staff also believed the structure functioned as feminist consciousness-raising experience for the girls by showcasing the unfairness of patriarchy in the past. The final portion of this chapter shows how the GMAHV changed their school field trips after ABAC took over in 2010 and what constitutes the museum’s current depiction of gender roles.
As women’s history as a discipline developed in the 1970s and 1980s, more museums began to think about expanding their presentations of gender. However, museums struggled to present material culture that focused on women and their experiences.313 Many museum
directors and others had previously rejected objects that women typically used or those
313 Helen Knibb, “Present but Not Visible- Searching for Women’s History in Museum Collections,” Gender and History 6, no. 3 (1994): 352–69. 93 associated with women. Feminist scholars mined collections, looking for the voice of women in
the absences and silences.314 Additionally, some scholars insisted that museums should attempt
to use gender studies’ methodologies, such as evaluating a topic for performative or culturally
constructed ideas, and theoretical approaches to retrofit existing exhibits as well is in developing
new ones.315
As women’s history began to gain ground in museum and public history sites, scholars offered their analysis of these presentations. Gaynor Kavanagh found that most women’s history exhibits focused on women as victims of oppression and exploitation, and that these exhibits often concluded with examples of how women overcame these obstacles through resourcefulness and knitted communities.316 Gaby Porter argued that museum professionals could insert women’s voices into existing exhibits by redefining what counted as work, stressing women’s personal experiences, and refocusing on skills and labor previously devalued as female.317
Scholars such as Barbara Melosch contended that museums should work to emphasize the diversity of women’s experiences by accounting for racial, economic, regional, religious, class, and other divisions.318 A number of other historians concluded that while many museums
regularly did make an effort to include women as a group, they avoided discussions of how
communities and cultures created or shaped gender.319
314 Elizabeth Carnegie, “Trying to Be an Honest Woman: Making Women’s Histories,” in Making Histories in Museums, ed. Gaynor Kavanagh (London: Leicester University press, 1996), 54. 315 Kerridwen Harvey, “Looking for Women in the Museum: Has Women’s Studies Really ‘Come a Long Way’?,” Muse 11, no. 4 (1994): 24–27; Sharon Reilly, “Setting an Agenda for Women in Museums: The Presentation of Women in Museum Exhibits and Collections,” Muse 7, no. 1 (1989): 47–51. 316 Gaynor Kavanagh, “Looking for Ourselves, Inside and Outside Museums,” Gender and History 6, no. 3 (1994): 373. 317 Gaby Porter, “The Women’s History Approach,” in Social History in Museums- a Handbook for Professionals, ed. David Fleming, Crispin Paine, and John G. Rhodes (London: HMSO, 1993), 78–80. 318 Barbara Melosh and Christina Simmons, “Exhibiting Women’s History,” in Presenting the Past- Essays on History and the Public, ed. Susan Porter Benson, Stephen Brier, and Rosenzweig (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986), 221. 319 Reilly, “Setting an Agenda for Women in Museums: The Presentation of Women in Museum Exhibits and Collections,” 49; Thomas A. Chambers and Davey, “‘A Woman? At the Fort!’: A Shock Tactic for Integrating 94 In response to what they saw, scholars began producing suggestions for altering practice.
Paige Putnam Miller, for instance, argued that states and the nation should make a focused effort
to preserve historic landmarks of particular interest to women and gender history and perhaps
even redefine what should count as historically significant in order to include not only more
women but other minorities as well.320 Other works served as manuals for museum professionals regarding how to better incorporate women’s stories and how to train interpreters, volunteers, and employees. One book, Restoring Women’s History through Historic Preservation served as
a demonstration of what women had already done for public history and how to follow their
example.321
The most recent scholarship continues to examine how museums include (or exclude) the
subjects of women and gender from their museum exhibits. In 2010 Amy K. Levin edited a
collection of essays that studied the continuing struggle. One contributor, Barbara Clark Smith,
implored museum professionals and public historians to examine how they interpreted objects
and spaces through the “impact of masculinism.”322 Smith also asked museums to make a more
concerted effort to analyze objects and how they shaped the experiences of both men and
women. Several pieces in the anthology addressed not only gender but sexuality and
heterosexual and homosexual representation; their overall conclusions were that many museums
depict gender as either a nonquestion or inherent, heterosexuality is normative, and that people’s
Women’s History in Historical Interpretation,” Gender and History 6, no. 3 (1994): 468–73; Debra A. Reid, “A Story to Pass on: Interpreting Women in Historic Sites and Open-Air Museums,” History News 50, no. 2 (1995): 13; Amy Sheldon, “Gender, Language, and Historical Interpretation,” The Oral History Review 17, no. 2 (1989): 92–96. 320 Paige Putnam Miller, “Landmarks of Women’s History,” in Reclaiming the Past, ed. Paige Putnam Miller (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 1–26. 321 Polly Welts Kaufman and Katherine T. Corbett, eds., Her Past Around Us (Malabar, FL: Krieger Publishing Company, 2003); ibid. 322 Barbara Clark Smith, “A Woman’s Audience: A Case of Applied Feminist Theories,” in Gender, Sexuality, and Museums, ed. Amy K. Levin (London: Routledge, 2010), 70. 95 homosexual activities are almost always excluded, for what Smith assumed was often for the
majority of the museum guests’ comfort.323
Since the 1970s and 1980s many American museums and public history sites made a conscious effort to include ethnic minorities, the working class, labor issues, and women’s history. However, despite these very real improvements, many historians, including those I discussed above, argue that museums are still not doing enough regarding women’s and gender history. The overall critique is that few museums display women beyond two-dimensional characters and almost none of them discuss the complexity of women’s lived experiences, relationships, or how some people created and manipulated the gender expectations of women in connection to one another and men. This chapter fits into and complements that literature by analyzing how the Agrirama represented Georgia women and men’s experiences in the
Wiregrass Region at the turn of the twentieth century. The Agrirama field trips largely tell a story of valuable contributions of both sexes, but strictly divided labor between men and women.
This chapter explains the logic behind the decisions to give two separate tours based on gender, what the interpreters believed they accomplished with this method, and how images of rural
Americans as the ideal Americans fed into a belief of nostalgia.
Beginning in the spring of 1977, the Agrirama began offering workshops to students in
the surrounding areas. In June of 1977, Agri-Ramblins, a self-published museum newsletter
designed to inform supporters and those interested in museum events, reported that more than
10,000 children participated in workshops between March and May of 1977. According to the
323 Stuart Frost, “The Warren Cup: Secret Museums, Sexuality, and Society,” in Gender, Sexuality, and Museums, ed. Amy K. Levin (London: Routledge, 2010), 163–71; Robert Mills, “Queer Is Here? Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Histories and Public Culture,” in Gender, Sexuality, and Museums, ed. Amy K. Levin (London: Routledge, 2010), 80–88; Angela Vanegas, “Representing Lesbians and Gay Men in British Social History Museums,” in Gender, Sexuality, and Museums, ed. Amy K. Levin (London: Routledge, 2010), 163–71; Joshua G. Adair, “House Museum or Walk-In Closets? The (non) Representation of Gay Men in the Museums They Called Home,” in Gender, Sexuality, and Museums (London: Routledge, 2010), 274. 96 newsletter, the museum struggled to handle those kinds of levels of attendance and only barely
managed.324 Two years later, the museum reported that nearly all of their workshops were full and that they were experiencing between 200 and 300 children per day.325 Workshop attendance continued to grow and be a dominant part of the museum’s method of community outreach and meeting their education goals. Additionally, by booking school field trips, the museum could depend upon a regular income stream especially in those first few years when otherwise sporadic attendance made ticket sales uncertain and while museum staff were still learning guest and attendance patterns.
The experience of a typical workshop varied by age and school groups, but what ultimately shaped the experience of each child was their gender. 326 The museum started the day by taking in groups of kids, usually capped at around 30 children, and the first thing each child
would do is put on a period costume. The museum asked the boys to wear white shirts and jeans
or slacks and then the museum would provide suspenders and straw or country hats for them to
wear during their visits. The museum staff and teachers would help the girls change into calico
skirts or dresses, aprons, and bonnets.327
After the children put on their costumes, they spent part of the morning at the school
learning about how teachers ran a nineteenth century school house. Often they participated in a
spelling bee, maybe had a math lesson, and then a short recess playing period games.
324 “School Visitation,” Agri-Ramblins, June 1977, Georgia Museum of Agriculture and Historic Village Archive. 325 “School Group Visitation,” Agri-Ramblins, May 1979, Georgia Museum of Agriculture and Historic Village Archive. 326 There is no evidence that any school groups were ever divided by race. Tift County schools integrated in 1969. Also, in my observations I saw all kinds of ages and ethnicities working and volunteering at the museum. Race does not appear to be a dominant factor in the elementary field trips as far as interpretation, however, only white people owned the houses on display. 327 Feril Cosper, interview with Elizabeth Worley, GMAHV, January 15, 2015. 97 Afterwards, the staff divided them into groups of boys and groups of girls and each group would
go to their stations for the rest of the day.329
In an interview, Gene Richardson, head male interpreter for the museum between 1978
and 1982, described a typical tour for a group of boys: after touring the grist mill or print shop,
the boys devoted the rest of their time to farm and barn chores. Depending on their age and
abilities they would do things like chop, split and pile firewood, pull weeds, tote water to the barn, with the help of museum’s interpreters boys would guide plows attached to mules across a
field. The boys also curried and brushed mules, sheep, and cows. Richardson stated that both
the boys and the animals loved this. Richardson also had the boys muck and clean out the stalls, bale the hay, and husk the corn. After husking the corn the boys went to the grist mill to watch
interpreters grind the corn into meal and grits; the boys would then help to weigh, fill, and tie off
each bag.331
The museum staff took the girls to the various homesteads and cabins around the property. Once there, the girls scrubbed clothes with a washboard, washed, and then hung laundry on a clothes line. Next they straightened and fluffed the feather or straw beds.
Sometimes the girls swept the cabin or the dirt yard.332 Other activities included practicing hand stitching, carding wool or cotton, spinning the material into thread, making cornhusk dolls, or other crafts. This experience usually depended on the interpreter and whether or not she felt comfortable teaching this skill.
The GMAHV field trips highlighted that for girls and women sewing was not only a skill, but also a testament to their thrift, hard work, and ability to prevent waste. The workshops
329 Ferol Cosper. 331 Gene Richardson, telephone interview with Elizabeth Worley, March 17, 2016. 332 According to Gene Richardson, sweeping the yard was a piney woods peculiarity. They cleared the yard of all rocks, grass, shrubs, and other plants to discourage pests and rats from getting close to the home. 98 almost always included sewing sessions that taught girls how wool went from sheep to thread to
cloth, then the cloth went to garment, to blankets, then to rag rugs, and finally bed stuffing.333
The image of the ideal American woman as a private seamstress comes from what Laurel
Thatcher Ulrich describes as a Victorian Era myth that New Englanders created when they wanted to celebrate women’s contributions to Early America.334 Nineteenth-century Americans began to associate women’s contributions to Early America and the Revolution with one of a
woman sewing, symbolizing a connectedness to home and the virtues of piety, thrift, hard work,
and a dedication to the caretaking of children and husband. No depiction showed women as
sewing for money, as professional tailors, or public seamstresses; all of their efforts were purely
for their family. By doing so, Victorians created a memory of Early American women as being
distinctly separate from the market, politics, or any other parts of the public sphere.335 The image of women sewing became symbolic with all that Victorians associated with the positives of a pastoral life and antithetical to the industrial revolution and other social changes. There is also evidence that this imagery was popular in nineteenth-century American literature as well.336
Once their sewing was complete, the girls began preparing the lunches for the day. All
workshops included a lunch that the interpreters and girls prepared for themselves and their male
counterparts. If the girls were at the Clark Traditional Homestead or the Simons Cabin, both
homes from the 1870s-1880s period, the girls would make lunch over a fire hearth. If the girls
were at the Progressive Farm (late 1880s-1910) they made lunch using a wood stove and oven.
Ferol Cosper, one of the interpreters, stated that while the “cooking” consisted mostly of stirring
333 Sharon Gibson, March 14, 2016. 334 Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of the American Myth (New York: Vintage Books, 2001), 20. 335 Ibid., 23–25. 336 Ozzie J. Mayers, “The Power of the Pin: Sewing as an Act of Rootedness in America Literature,” College English 50, no. 6 (October 1988): 664–80. 99 eggs and milk into cornbread or rolling and cutting biscuits, the girls enjoyed this activity the most. Lunch usually included cornbread, biscuits, chicken and dressing, and some type of vegetable. The girls set the tables for themselves and their male classmates while the food cooked and took turns making sure the food did not burn. Female interpreters supervised all of this. The boys would then come to the cabins, share the meal with their female classmates, and after lunch all groups would help to clean the kitchen before either leaving for the day or participating in other activities.337
When preparing this chapter, I interviewed Ferol Cosper, a 99 year old white woman who
still works for the museum, drives, and boasts of recently getting pulled over for speeding. (She
said she got out of the tickets by telling officers that if she did get a ticket, her children would put
her in a nursing home!) She started interpreting at the museum when it opened in 1976 and
continues to work for the museum as a greeter. The descriptions of the earliest school field trips
largely comes from this interview, but different museum staff including Clint Tyson, the Interim
Director of Interpretation and Education and museum curator, and Polly Huff, confirmed Ms.
Cosper’s memories and descriptions. I also interviewed Gene Richardson and Sharon Gibson
who also confirmed Cosper’s descriptions. Richardson was lead interpreter at the museum from
1978-1982. Sharon Gibson was lead interpreter for domestic sites between 1980 and 1982. In
addition to this, I performed archival research on site where I accessed the museum’s publications Agri-Ramblins and The Sunny South and the Georgia Recorder, period handbooks,
and scrapbooks.
When researching the museum’s workshops and field trips, I found nothing in the
archives that really explained why the museum organized the workshops the way that they did.
337 Ibid. 100 There was no memo or program outlining the overall objectives of the workshops, why the museum chose this particular setup, or projected goals. I came to the same conclusion at the
Georgia State Archives as well. Originally I saw this as the museum’s assumption that the stories and narratives they portrayed through their interpreters that men were farmers and women were homemakers, were so obviously true as to not be challenged, bolstered by recent scholarship that emphasized separate spheres even if there is no evidence that the museum took this academic work into consideration or even knew it existed. I asked the curator, Polly Huff, why the museum organized its school field trips this way and she had no explanation because she only joined the staff in 2010. When ABAC took over the museum they replaced almost all of the previous staff so no one currently there had any administrative connection to the Agrirama.
Ferol Cosper, one of my interview subjects, the longest running employee at the museum, had never been a part of administration and so while she proved an invaluable source to describe the workshops, she was not privy to knowing why staff made their decisions in the 1970s.
Despite the lack of a clear paper trail or explanation in either the state archives or the museum’s archives, I was able to follow some different leads from Light Cummins, the ABAC professor who helped the Agrirama apply for research grants in the 1970s, and track down the male lead interpreter, Gene Richardson, and the female lead interpreter, Sharon Gibson.
Richardson connected with the museum in 1978, after he lost his job as a fertilizer salesmen; a member of his Sunday school class, Agrirama director Charles Hall, suggested he apply to the museum. Richardson, with a PhD in entomology and background in fertilizers became a very valuable asset to the Agrirama. He originally worked in grant writing, but the museum quickly transferred him to be the lead male interpreter because of his interest in and knowledge of agriculture, soil, and insects. He preferred this work; he got to be outside and discovered that
101 leading museum tours and teaching were things he was good at and enjoyed. He credits the museum with helping him find his true passion; he and his wife are now a professional story telling team at the Dallas Heritage Village.338 His job at the GMAHV was to organize volunteers
and employees around the rural town and parts of the farmhouses, train them, and also lead boys
on their portion of the class trips.
Sharon Gibson remembered going to work for the museum as an interpreter when she was 25 years old in 1979. She had only recently moved to Tifton with her husband and thought working at the museum would be a good way to fill her time and utilize her degree. Gibson had received a bachelor’s degree from Oklahoma State University (OSU), where she majored in political science and history. She described herself as being interested in her coursework, but also frustrated with it. Her coursework revolved around American history, political science, and religion. She felt there was a disjuncture between her classes that she said focused on “dead white guys” and the political activism she experienced and participated in on campus. OSU also offered very few women’s history classes despite the growth of women’s and social history.
While a student, Gibson went and saw feminist and civil rights speakers like Angela Davis. She also volunteered for George McGovern’s political campaign and started the first official women’s group on campus, Women’s Senate.
When Gibson moved to Tifton she continued her political activism. In 1979 she was one of the original members of the Southwest Georgia Women’s Political Caucus. She stated that
“I’ve always just been interested in women’s issues… it was just a personal interest of mine.”339
She also quickly became friends with a woman, Eunice Mixon. Mixon, a lifelong resident of
Tifton who volunteered with the Agrirama, was politically and socially active in Tift County.
338 Gene Richardson. 339 Sharon Gibson, June 3, 2016. 102 She mentored Gibson and encouraged her political activism and continued education.340 A few months after Gibson started working at the GMAHV, the museum promoted her to lead female interpreter.341
When I interviewed these two former interpreters, Richardson and Gibson, it became clear to me that that I misunderstood what the museum was trying to create with their school trips. I initially believed that the decision to divide the groups based on gender was a way to reinforce the idea of separate spheres, that some people assumed this as a hegemonic truth; obvious and without academic inquiry. My research into the Agrirama’s creation that demonstrated to me a lack of engagement with historical scholarship only affirmed my initial view. However, Gibson and Richardson made it clear that their ideas about dividing the workshops were much more complex, thoughtful, and purposeful, even if still perhaps problematic.
Gibson believed that what they were doing by dividing the school workshops into groups of boys and girls was carving out a space for women’s history. Gibson believed this path was the best way to ensure both the use of social history and, more specifically, a way of making sure the museum did not ignore women’s history as a part of workshop curriculum. Gibson felt very strongly that a space for women’s contributions to agriculture and domestic life needed to be thoroughly documented and said “my main reason- it was social history. That would be the reality that those girls would experience, except the really rare situations when the girls would be the only labor on the farm, then they may be out there plowing also.”342 Gibson also believed that “on the farm itself I tried to make sure that the girls had a real experience.”343 While Gibson
340 Ibid. 341 Ibid. 342 Ibid. 343 Ibid. 103 did not call this a feminist act, it certainly did seem to be a feminist moment where educators fought to be more inclusive of different experiences and to make sure that the museum did not present the male experience or gaze as the only perspective.344
Gibson and Richardson also both described the division of these trips as a way to protect
the girls’ modesty and allow them to ask questions without feeling inhibited. Gibson described
how girls wanted to know about dating, menstruation, marriage, and childbirth. This justification of the separation of boy and girls was almost ironic because on one hand, Gibson
separated the boys and girls as a way of ensuring women’s history, rooted in her feminist
interests, on the other hand Gibson and Richardson saw it as a way to protect the girls’ modesty
and perhaps from the boys’ judgment as well.
Gibson’s understanding was that separate spheres was a historical truth. She knew that
women and girls’ agricultural work centered itself on the home and she wanted to make sure that
the workshops told that story. Gibson also understood that while sometimes girls and women did participate in plowing and other work that were usually men’s work, she argued that boys and
men rarely traversed the line into doing domestic work. She stated that “very seldom would you
see a boy come back into the house and be responsible for things other than bringing water,
chopping wood, maybe retrieving something from the smokehouse. Their [the boys and men] job was working away from the farm [house].”345
Richardson’s understanding of why the boys and girls were split up into different groups was distinctly different from Gibson’s. While Gibson saw this as a chance to make sure women’s history played an important part in the school field trips and workshops, Gibson
344 Tamar Katriel, “Pioneering Women Revisited: Representations of Gender in Some Israeli Settlement Museums,” in Gender, Sexuality, and Museums, ed. Amy K. Levin (London: Routledge, 2010), 115–28. 345 Sharon Gibson, March 14, 2016. 104 believed this was more about teaching girls and boys about the limitations of separate spheres
and oppressive feelings of patriarchy. Richardson described the privilege of being male in the
1800s: “the whole idea of being a boy in that era where boys will be boys and men ruled the
world with an iron fist- women were not allowed to vote, not allowed to own property in many places, were abused and mistreated with impunity.”346 Richardson claimed that by limiting the choice of girls, and boys by extension, he purposefully designed the tour to help young girls understand the limitations patriarchy placed on women and girls in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Richardson reasoned that “the real brutal object lesson was that the women had no choice and the girls needed to see that, not that they wouldn’t be able to do it physically or mentally, but that they were prohibited by society.”347 Even having the children wear costumes was a choice
Richardson and Gibson made together, not just to immerse the kids in the period, but that the
skirts forced the girls to have restricted or limited movement appropriate to late 1800s fashion
and customs. For Richardson, allowing young women to participate in the plowing or chopping
wood might have been acceptable since Gibson demonstrated examples of women who did those
things. However, he argued, “it would have been interpretively inappropriate to have boys in the
kitchen” even though he believed the boys might have benefited to learn about some of the
domestic chores348
Richardson and Gibson’s arguments for why they divided the workshops into groups of boys and girls were both rooted in contemporary scholarship and a desire to teach a point of view that might have been difficult to fully appreciate simply through discussion or traditional
346 Gene Richardson. 347 Ibid. 348 Ibid. 105 museum presentations. Also, by encouraging the girls and boys to face the realities of limitations that many women experienced, the kids saw firsthand what patriarchy may have felt like to women between 1870 and 1910. However, while the ideas of these two interpreters were interesting, they were somewhat problematic. The idea that girls needed someone to take away choices over what they could or could not learn or have access to so that the girls could empathize with nineteenth-century women ignored that many, if not most, young women of the
1970s still lived in a system in which patriarchy largely dominated their lives.
Beginning in the mid-1980s, the Agrirama started to offer different kinds of school trips.
The “Living History Workshops” continued in the same manner as the workshops from earlier years. Additionally, the museum started to offer an experience titled “A Day in a One-room
School.” In this program, children still dressed in period costumes of the late 19th century but spent half or their whole day doing lessons in the one-room school house in the historic village learning lessons and using materials similar to those used in the late 1880s and 1890s. Both of these programs met the requirements of the Georgia Basic Education Act and counted towards in-class instruction.349 A third option allowed for a short tour of the historic village and
discussion with interpreters about the lifestyles of people living in rural Georgia in the late
nineteenth century. The different programs allowed the GMAHV to offer workshops and trips
that met a variety of time commitments and budgets, giving classes more flexibility.
When analyzing the Living History Workshops and the school children’s experiences,
one of two significant themes emerged in my analysis: while these workshops were historically
accurate they were not entirely true and understanding this is quintessential to understanding the
349 The Georgia Agrirama Developmental Authority, The Georgia Agrirama 1989 Annual Report (Tifton, Georgia: The Georgia Agrirama Development Authority, 1989), 8, Georgia Museum of Agriculture and Historic Village Archive. 106 concept of “currency of authenticity.” By emphasizing the authentic material culture, the museum fostered trust with the guest. The museum then either directly stated or implied
(through language, portrayal, and other methods) that a strict division of labor based around gender existed for Southwest Georgia at the end of the nineteenth-century and the beginning of the twentieth-century, but also that these “chores” were fun and exciting. By emphasizing the accuracy of objects and methods, the museum lured in the guest- in this case children who were especially sensitive to the power of imagination, play, and theatre- and sold them the rest of the narrative, which is largely false. Yes, the methods in which the interpreters used to spin yarn, grind corn, or make barrels were all true to the time period, yet the overall narrative they told- that these types of activities were fun and easy, was not true.
The idea behind splitting the boys and girls into groups so that boys learned technical and
farming skills while girls learned domestic skills was based on something scholars called the
metaphor of separate spheres. This notion that men worked in the public sphere, while women
remained in the private sphere, or the home, was based largely on an idealistic interpretation of
middle-class, white, urban life. Beginning in the mid-1960s- at the same time that some people began to develop the idea of the Agrirama- three major historians analyzed the nineteenth
century rhetoric of separate spheres: Barbara Welter, Aileen S. Kraditor, and Gerda Lerner.
Welter focused on the phrase “the cult of true womanhood” to describe how, in the Victorian era,
a woman’s virtue was directly connected to domesticity, submissiveness, piety, and purity. This
idea about womanhood, which historians also sometimes called the “cult of domesticity,” was
the idea that the public sphere was a dirty, cruel place that men subjected themselves to so that
women would not have to bear that shame and embarrassment. A true, good, and virtuous
woman was a submissive homemaker and mother, “conscious [of her] inferiority, and therefore
107 grateful for support.”350 All of these writers argued that this binary in American women’s
history made it so that men dominated some spaces and that other spaces either allowed women
to be present or became associated with female space.351 This scholarship was strongest at the epitome of Gibson’s classes, political activism, and work at the Agrirama.
Beginning in the 1980s, a small field of women’s historians began to analyze women’s labor on farms and the rural experience. Joan Jensen demonstrated that women did, in fact, work in both the home and in the fields.352 Scholars like Mary Neth argued that smaller farms, like the
ones on display at the Agrirama, only survived because they more effectively used their labor
supply, meaning women did the same jobs as men in order to make the family business profitable.353 Additionally, scholars found that even when women were working in the home, they still provided goods to the market place or public sphere. Women made and sold butter, cheese, yarn, cloth, and other goods that helped cash-poor farm families survive.354 In sum the
literature proved that women plowed, cooked, did laundry, and pulled cotton either alongside
their fathers, husbands, and sons, by themselves, or with other women. If there was work to be
done people worked; no one, male or female, waited around until the right person came along to
do the tasks. However, while historians’ understanding of women as workers, citizens, and
farmers changed, the museum’s story of women and men did not change with it.
350 Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860,” American Quarterly 18 (Summer 1966): 159. 351 Aileen Kraditor, ed., Up from the Pedestal: Selected Writings in the History of American Feminism (Chicago: Quadangle Press, 1968); Gerda Lerner, “The Lady and the Mill Girl: Changes in the Status of Women in the Age of Jackson",” Midcontinent American Studies Journal 10, no. 1 (Spring 1969): 5–15; Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860.” 352 Joan M. Jensen and Anne B. W. Effland, “Introduction,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 22, no. 1 (January 1, 2001): iv–v; Joan M. Jensen, With These Hands: Women Working on the Land (Feminist Press at CUNY, 1981). 353 Mary C. Neth, Preserving the Family Farm: Women, Community, and the Foundations of Agribusiness in the Midwest, 1900-1940 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998). 354 Thomas L. Dublin, Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826-1860, 2nd edition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), 4; Professor Sally A. McMurry, Transforming Rural Life: Dairying Families and Agricultural Change, 1820-1885 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 43–46. 108 While the Agrirama embraced the images of ideal Americans as rural citizens, the museum did not provide a truly accurate portrayal. There are many historic or anachronistic issues at this museum, some of which I discussed in the previous chapter. However, that is not what I am referring to here. What I want to get across here is that the “work” this museum asked of the school children did not expose those children to the realities of nineteenth century subsistence farming. A boy might find plowing a field to be fun and exciting, if the child only has to encourage the mule to go about twenty feet before trading places with another child or going to a new station. A girl might feel as though she was truly doing the work of hearth cooking, but the reality was that the museum only had her stir a few ingredients or cut dough from a larger batch that the interpreters already prepared. These experiences did not replicate nineteenth century realities when women spent large portions of their days cooking over a fire or wood burning stove, clearing and cleaning the dishes, and then repeating that process at least two more times each day. The museum did not expose the students to the beleaguering, monotonous, sweat-inducing labor of pulling up well water five times a day or mucking mule stalls twice a day, every day, for years. The field trips emphasized that rural living was virtuous and inspiring, but left out the dirty, exhausting reality of farm work in the 1880s.
In 2010 Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College, ABAC, took control of the Agrirama from the state. ABAC changed the name from the Agrirama to the Georgia Museum of
Agriculture and Historic Village.355 The college replaced all previous staff with new ones. The
state charged the museum with gross management and then handed control to ABAC.356 As a
355 “ABAC to Take over Agrirama,” accessed January 20, 2015, http://www.walb.com/story/11831279/abac-to-take- over-agrirama; Agrirama to ABAC may be good move, “Agrirama to ABAC May Be Good Move,” The Tifton Gazette, accessed January 20, 2015, http://www.tiftongazette.com/opinion/agrirama-to-abac-may-be-good- move/article_26907808-5d57-5ee3-abe1-43b4d1d83aad.html. 356 Georgia Department of Audits and Accounts Performance Audit Operations Division, “Follow-Up Review- State Museum of Agriculture (Agrirama)” (State of Georgia, June 2009). 109 part of this change, a new Director of Interpreters and Education, Theresa Ryan, began to receive
requests from teachers and parents that the trips no longer be divided by gender.357 There are no
records about how many people requested this, but within months the workshops stopped
dividing their groups by boys and girls. Now, school classes are divided into groups between
five and seven students that go to different stations around the museum throughout the day.
Children no longer spend their entire day at one place; now all children learn a little bit about
several areas of the museum. The trips still include lunches, but staff members now prepare
them off-site. The museum tours now rarely interact with ideas about gender and understanding
the different roles and responsibilities of men and women.
The willingness to change programs after a more than thirty year history in response to teacher and parent requests demonstrates that the new directors at the GMAHV welcomed shared authority and shared inquiry. Shared authority is the willingness of museum operators to allow the public to participate in museum decisions, to consider the public’s wishes, and that museum curators make a genuine effort to include different members of their communities.358 Shared inquiry is when museums are reflexive and responsive to the public’s interests, suggestions, and requests.359 In this specific situation, the GMAHV responded to parent and teacher requests to
dictate a significant change in how they shaped school children’s experiences. It also allowed
ABAC to give the workshops and field trips a fresh start. While children still do not entirely
control what they see at the museum or direct their own learning, they do get to see and participate in a greater range of experiences. The museum continues to host thousands of
357 Clint Tyson, interview with Elizabeth Worley, GMAHV, January 15, 2015. 358 Janet C. Marstine, Routledge Companion to Museum Ethics: Redefining Ethics for the Twenty-First Century Museum (Routledge, 2012), 11. 359 Katherine Corbett and Howard Miller, “A Shared Inquiry into Shared Inquiry,” The Public Historian 28, no. 1 (Winter 2006): 18. 110 children a year through field trips and it is one of their greatest sources of outreach. Now, the
GMAHV demonstrates that they are not only keepers of history but see their guests as participants in a conversation about history and its role in the development of Tift County.
This chapter demonstrated that the museum divided the field trips according to gender, based on lead interpreters’ understanding of both historical accuracy and to historical empathy.
Their choices were largely historically accurate; farms did divide their labor by gender as much as they could. However, they did not complicate the story of rural living by showing girls and boys where girls labored alongside boys. Moreover, they made the grueling tasks of farm labor fun. The Agrirama changed their fieldtrips in 2010 as a result of the change of museum management and public pressure. The GMAHV continues to be an interesting museum for research for both its content and display of Georgia history.
111 CHAPTER 6
CONCLUSION
“A finished museum is a dead museum and a dead museum is a useless museum.”360
In 2008 I traveled to White Springs, Florida, to see the Stephen Foster Memorial for the first time. When I walked inside, I saw a series of intricate dioramas. I fell in love with the quaintness of them: the moving parts like smoke rising out of a slave cabin, the racing horses, and a group of people singing around a shimmering campfire by their covered wagons. They were detailed miniature works of art. I had seen dioramas before at the Florida Museum of
Natural History in Gainesville, Florida, and loved those too, but these were different. When the images combined with Foster’s song lyrics, they became much more of a storytelling device.
Over the next eighteen months or so as I continued my graduate training, the idea of these dioramas repeatedly came back to mind when I considered the many purposes of public history and museums. Dioramas, while very popular in the past, were no longer a common museum tool. Unlike other objects that are either original primary sources or recreations of a primary source, dioramas were secondary sources. Museums sometimes used them as a way of setting a scene or a moment. When museum curators display a map or a piece of jewelry in a case, curators create a narrative with the object simply through selecting what is and is not important enough to exhibit. A diorama presented the narrative entirely unto itself. I began to struggle with how much I enjoyed the dioramas while also learning that they were constructed narratives and the narratives they portrayed were not complete representations of recent scholarship. They did not adhere to current research for the best museum practices. My understanding of these
360 G. Brown Goode, The Principles of Museum Administration (New York, NY: Coultas & Volas, 1895), 10. 112 dioramas changed as I began to think about all that was wrong with them especially regarding their depictions of slavery. I started to research the history of the memorial and its creators and that is really where my dissertation work started.
I wanted to write about all that was wrong with these dioramas even though I knew that would not really solve any problem. This was a state park in the midst of a recession with a fiscally conservative governor. I knew that if the dioramas came under serious criticism it was much more likely that the state would close the museum, not change or fix the exhibits. I changed my strategy and instead focused on how the museum could make subtle adjustments to the dioramas and acknowledge the issues. I argued that the museum needed to change their plaques and face the problem head on; acknowledge the dioramas are outdated and focus on teaching the public about what some white people in the 1930s-1950s believed about slavery. I still come to that conclusion when I think about what might be the best solution for the dioramas and the museum.
The Stephen Foster Memorial and those dioramas were the starting point for this entire project. I began to consider how small and local museums presented their versions of history
and the history that they believed was the most real and the most deserving of preservation. I
also saw that many local museums did not start with the benefit of historians or their research as
a part of that process. I saw what Amy Levin saw: this trend of professional scholars devaluing
local museums as hokey or not real.361 I saw what Tammy Gordon saw: that local museums
were the manifestation of communities preserving and protecting themselves, proving that they
mattered.362 They helped me see that there are many approaches to museums, and just because
361 Amy K. Levin, ed., Defining Memory, 2. 362 Tammy S. Gordon and Harold Skramstad, Private History in Public: Exhibition and the Settings of Everyday Life (Lanham: AltaMira Press, 2010), 5. 113 professional public historians or the American Association of Museums rarely study them this
does not diminish their importance to their local communities. The Agrirama taught me that.
That museum showed me how promising local museums can be when they focus on serving their
immediate public and demonstrate a willingness to adapt their programming.
In this dissertation, I provide a framework for understanding the concept of the “currency of authenticity.” This idea, that public history sites and museum staff emphasize the authenticity or accuracy of objects as a way of gaining the public’s trust, while providing problematic or incomplete narratives, is my unique contribution to the field of public history. Because museums are so ubiquitous in American culture and because the public trusts them so much, public history sites have a unique opportunity to acknowledge that relationship and work to better serve the public.
Steven Conn argued that Americans museums use objects differently in the twenty first
century than in the nineteenth and twentieth. He stated that as museums changed to places of
narrative, community outreach, and public consumption, museums shifted their use of objects as
well.363 They became secondary to narrative, interpretation, entertainment, etc. In the case of smaller museums I disagree. In these local museums, objects are just as important as they ever were; maybe more so because with some local museums that is all they have. In a time when communities and the public expect small museums to employ the same kinds of presentation strategies and exhibits that big, well-funded museums use, these smaller museums and history sites place great emphasis on their objects.
Museums like the GMAHV prioritize objects, material culture, and the use of those pieces of history as evidence that they are participating in the same methods of narrative and
363 Steven Conn, Do Museums Still Need Objects? (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 6–7. 114 interpretation as larger museums. What is different, however, is that while larger museums do research and then provide that research to the public using objects to support their conclusions, smaller museums do not always have that luxury. In fact, museums may not have any historians on staff to help them with this process. Neither of the museums in Tifton or White Springs have any kind of historians on staff. So, as a way of bridging that gap, some museums employ what I call the “currency of authenticity.” This idea is that smaller museums emphasize the authenticity, accuracy, or truthfulness of their material culture, either in the object, its use, or its creation and construction, in an attempt to convince the audience that the narrative and interpretation they provide is just as truthful and well researched as any larger museum. Guests trust museums. They trust them because of this interaction with objects, so if a museum emphasizes that the object is what makes their story true, then many guests are going to believe it or at least not question it. For Conn, objects become the (unnecessary) proof of a museum’s interpretation or narrative. His idea hinges on the idea that museums do research, create narratives, and then use material culture as evidence. For places like the Stephen Foster
Memorial, who only have objects and little to no opportunity for new objects, displays, or research, they provide the objects and then create a narrative around them. However, because of the lack of professional historians, these places may not even be aware that they are creating a narrative or what it is. Their use of objects is the reversal of what Conn argues.
Another significant theme in this dissertation is the relationship of white Southern identity and Southerness. I did not see it at first because I kept treating each museum and chapter like its own isolated case, however, as I looked to them as a whole I saw a pattern emerging. I saw that each museum and the Florida Folk Festival were attempting to define why and how they represented Southern people. However, while they all wanted to emphasize their
115 Southern roots, they each did so differently. The Stephen Foster Memorial wanted to emphasize
Florida’s place in the Old South, but they did so not by connecting their own people or region to actual plantations, antebellum lifestyles, slavery, and cotton, but instead to a songwriter. Stephen
Foster wrote songs about what he believed was Southern culture, and by connecting itself to him, the museum connected itself to the Old South in an unexpected way. Because the state helped create and fund this museum, it was an endorsement of this museum’s display of Florida’s
Southerness as the official state depiction of Southerness.
Thelma Boltin and the Florida Folk Festival affirmed their authenticity as folk culture but also as Cracker culture. She did this not exclusively through region, but through folk culture like music, dance, and craft. To Boltin, White Springs and North Central Florida were very much
Cracker country while, ironically, the exact same museum that hosted that festival saw itself as belonging to a different kind of Southern culture. This is evidence of the class subtleties of
Southerness and how it can be less about region and more about economic structure and work or leisure culture.
The Georgia Museum of Agriculture and Historic Village, or Agrirama, did something similar. It wanted to present a Southern heritage and culture that did not identify with Southern mansions or plantations, but they didn’t identify with Cracker or hillbilly mountain culture either. They believed that the Wiregrass Region was its own kind of Southern identity and saw the Agrirama as a place to preserve that legacy. Their Southern identity was largely about subsistence farming, self-sufficiency, and the image of pioneer and frontier living. The
Agrirama saw that as being the ideal expression of gender and family values. What is truly remarkable is that this museum, which represented a very local and specific idea of Southern culture, became the symbol of all Georgia agriculture. In a way, by making this museum the
116 agriculture museum of the state of Georgia, the state argued that this image, the image of the piney woods pioneer, was the real Georgian farmer, not those of the “romantic national stereotype of a large cotton culture plantation.”364
All of these chapters highlight how sometimes people identify their ethnic and regional heritages in reaction to what they know or see themselves not to be. They traded in one construct of Southern identity for another construct. The Wiregrass Region’s identity of the pioneer or frontier farmer was as much about identifying himself as it was in reaction to knowing what he was not. Both the Stephen Foster Memorial’s emphasis on Old Southern tradition and the Cracker identity that the Florida Folk Festival celebrated were very much reactions against other images of Florida as a tropical playground.365 People like Thelma Boltin portrayed themselves as Crackers because that was what they believed represented an authentic Floridian.
Because the states of Georgia and Florida sponsored and created these museums and the festival, the public could interpret these portrayals of Southern identity to be official.
Authenticity is a social construct of Western culture.366 It is a quest for a genuine cultural experience. Many people desire to find something real in a world that they feel is increasingly fake or commercial. Despite the fact that authenticity, and connected ideas of truth or accuracy, are ideas that culture creates, objects and artifacts are tangible mediums. They are physical creations and periodically museums use the objects, which are not constructs, as a stand-in for the construct of truth or authenticity. This applies as much to ideas about museum narrative as it does to the construct of ethnic heritage.
364 National Endowment for the Humanities grant application, 1 March 1982, DOC 3488, box 4, folder: “Georgia Agrirama Development Authority,” GSA. 365 David Nelson, 225–28. 366 Richard Handler, “Authenticity,” Anthropology Today 2, no. 1 (February 1986): 2. 117 The Stephen Foster Folk Culture Center in White Springs, Florida, has a variety of dioramas on display in their museum. The uniqueness of the dioramas as a secondary source among other primary sources makes them worthy of their own analysis. When a museum uses a diorama to depict a scene, habitat, or event, the directors and staff make decisions about what type of narrative they want to present beyond general organization and display. The dioramas at the Stephen Foster Memorial use construction methods and materials employed in the creation of the displays as evidence of their authenticity and believability. The Stephen Foster dioramas hinder the general public’s understanding of slavery; specifically by portraying that slaves were either contented with their lot in life or happy and carefree. This does a disservice to both the threat of the regular occurrences of violence and abuse that slaves reported as their more general experience. This museum also uses the twentieth century interpretation of the imagery of
Stephen Foster’s songs to cement the museum’s idea that Florida is a part of the Old South.
In comparison to the dioramas, the Florida Folk Festival and Thelma Boltin emphasized
ethnic lineage, who taught the performer, and the fact that the performers provided their services
free of charge as evidence of their authenticity. Boltin had to believe in a person’s authenticity
in order to include that person in the festival. The Florida Folk Festival’s definition of
authenticity was less about a literal object and more about a metaphoric object: they used ideas
about ethnicity and heritage, and Boltin tied a person’s ethnic authenticity to their ability to be a
folk performer at her festival. In either case, Boltin and festival personnel still used ideas that
some perceived as more static and entrenched as evidence of authenticity in place of recognizing
that the festival constructed and shaped the history the festival presented. This festival also
reinforced and contributed to a definition of the Florida Cracker and saw the idea of the Florida
Cracker as the true Floridian.
118 In 1976, the state of Georgia opened the Agrirama which would later become the Georgia
Museum of Agriculture and Historic Village. Southwest Georgia and Tifton wanted to create a
museum that preserved their local history, but several of their documents also reflected a desire
to preserve the history of the piney woods people as well and as their own kind of Southern
identity. This museum demonstrated that history museums are not always created with historians
or professional researchers. The GMAHV was not even aware of their services; this reflected a
significant break from what the public knew about historical scholarship and what it had to offer
museums or states. The state of Georgia wanted to create an attraction, demonstrating a
commodification of history, but then struggled to provide a quality or authentic product.
Starting in the 1970s and continuing until 2010, the museum divided up its school field
trips by gender. Boys got a tour that emphasized the public sphere such as the barn, plowing, the blacksmith shop, the grist mill, the print shop, the general store, etc. Girls spent their trips
learning about domestic farm life. Cleaning, preparing meals, and sewing were the themes that
dominated the trip. The two lead interpreters, Sharon Gibson and Gene Richardson, divided
these trips with distinct purposes. Gibson did this because she believed it helped to carve out
space for women’s history, a topic she experienced as too often omitted in history classes and
she wanted to make sure the girls saw a history that belonged to them. Richardson’s
understanding of why the museum divided up the trips was about the recreation of patriarchy for
the purposes of experience. He understood patriarchy as historically accurate to the nineteenth
century and wanted to make sure the girls understood what it felt like to have other people make
their choices. This was a flawed perspective because patriarchy was not over in the 1970s and
1980s. Gibson’s justification was well-meaning and fit her overall feminist approach to history
119 and politics, but Richardson’s recreation of patriarchy, as if it no longer existed, limited both girls’ and boys’ experiences at the GMAHV.
One of the ways that public history sites and other museums could help to self-correct the issue of a problematic narrative is to make a concerted effort to explain to the general public more about what historians do and how history changes as a result. A large part of what an object is or used to be is static and unchanging. A bowl is a bowl is a bowl. Museums that place too much weight on objects, metaphoric or literal, emphasize to their guests that history itself is static and unchanging and there are certainly themes of this in Tifton and White Springs.
However, history professionals know that the field continues to evolve not only because of new sources or materials but also because of new approaches, theoretical concepts, or the new questions historians ask. Public history sites could demonstrate to their audiences that the subject of history responds to new information and ideas. When museums and educators better communicate what historians and other museum professionals do with data and scholarship, they help the public better understand that history develops and the public cannot insist that it remain static.
When I think about where my contributions fit in the historiography of public history and museum studies and the future of this project, I believe that my idea of authenticity as a currency is solid and it deserves more attention. It fits into other scholarship that history is a commodity.
In these cases, authenticity is a commodity as well. I would like to continue to examine how local history sites use this currency as a way of drawing audiences to smaller sites. However, some of my overall content probably works best as a chapter in a book or dissertation, not its own research project. Thelma Boltin is fascinating and some scholar could turn the Florida Folk
Festival into a fantastic project, but Boltin herself is largely finished. She left few personal
120 papers so any researcher trying to know her apart from the festival would struggle as any potential oral history subjects are aging or have already died. However, if one wanted to broaden
the project and focus their research on how the festival shaped its own ideas of ethnic or performer authenticity, the Florida Memory Project is a ripe source.
The future of my own research will focus on the Georgia Museum of Agriculture and
Historic Village, Southwest Georgia, and the Piney Woods region. In the 1980s, the museum
collected a significant amount of valuable research but did not do much with it. NEH grants paid
for historical scholarship, but once the research was done and historians left the museum, the museum did not seem to know how to incorporate it into their existing displays and exhibits. I would like to study that. Additionally, I would like to continue my relationship with the museum, mine their archive, and publish research on Southwest Georgia as well as the history of the Agrirama. There are still stories to be told there. Historians like Wetherington did great work on the region, but it seemed undeveloped as its own vein of historiography. While this work focused on narrative and authenticity from the perspective of museum theorists and public history, examining what visitors take away from a place like the GMAHV is something I did not evaluate. That is problematic because visitor experience should be as important as a museum’s intention or goals. ABAC will support me in my research of the museum and they want me to extend my services to the museum as much as possible. I recently accepted a position as an assistant professor at ABAC and part of my responsibility will be to offer support and assistance to the GMAHV.
Public history sites and museums continually remind me that local communities very much own their histories and want to portray and present it to the public. They present this history to preserve it as much as they also want to cement the desirable memories. When states
121 endorse and support these spaces, they have the potential to change their meaning and that deserves more scholarship. The chapters in this dissertation confirm the importance of local museum, but also their continuing importance to historians’ discussion about authenticity, ethnicity, gender, and culture.
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140 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
Elizabeth Worley finished her BA and MA at the University of Florida. She specializes in gender and public history as they apply to American history. She completed an internship at the Georgia Museum of Agriculture and Historic Village where she successfully designed and installed an exhibit, “Cotton: the Art of the Everyday.” After graduation, Elizabeth will join the staff of Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College in Tifton, Georgia as an assistant professor. She will also serve as a liaison to the GMAHV.
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