Our Summer with Teenagers

Take over two dozen teens (including a few tweens) and a very old, dark, and evocative historic house museum.  Put them together.  What will you get?

OK, we don’t really know yet.  But we are finding out!

This summer, Connecticut Landmarks has partnered with Writers Block InK to delve into complex issues regarding history, slavery, race, and the modern implications of all three on individuals, communities, and museums.  As part of an eight-week summer program, these youth are tackling these issues as they think about the Joshua Hempsted House and their own New London community.  

CTL staff, exhibitions designer Robert ,and I have been spending two days a week with the youth as they sort through the many complex stories of the Joshua Hempsted House and New London’s early history.  To help them consider how they would share these stories via a historic house museum, we have led or hosted workshops (e.g., exhibition design, museum theatre, a visit with Joshua Hempsted's diary - check out this video!), and have been taking them to other museums to learn more about what they like, or simply ignore, in museum settings.

The culmination of this summer’s work will be two-fold:

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• An open house the evening of Tuesday, July 30, where they will be presenting the stories of the property, and New London, by sharing the Joshua Hempsted House with community members and stakeholders.  Reach Advisors will be conducting follow-up interviews with some attendees to learn what they think about the stories chosen and the methods for telling the stories.
• An original dramatic production on slavery, developed by the youth and their leaders, to be presented in mid-August.

We are having a fascinating time observing the youth, asking questions, and finding out their preferences.  Over the next few blog posts, we’ll be sharing more details about the museum visits and workshops, and give you a better sense of where the youth are heading for their open house.  

Susie Wilkening is a Senior Consultant and Curator of Museum Audiences at Reach Advisors.  She will be leading several phases of audience research for this project.

Photo:  Many of the youth at the New Bedford Whaling Museum. 

Getting Into the Minds of Audiences

To rethink how the Hempsted Houses might engage visitors differently, we have to be very much aware of what visitors, and potential visitors, might seek in a historic house museum experience.

In 2008, Connecticut Landmarks partnered with Connecticut Humanities and Reach Advisors to gain an initial read on museum visitors, and found that nearly half do not like guided tours.   (To read more on that subject, and that study, go to the Reach Advisors’ blog and peruse the category “CT Cultural Consumers.”) 

Additionally, in Reach Advisors’ broader work with regular museum goers, as well as more infrequent museum goers, it is clear that guided tours are not the preferred method of experiencing a museum.  Given that the Joshua Hempsted House is shared with the public by guided tour, as are the other Connecticut Landmarks properties, clearly a rethinking of the overall interpretation of historic house museums was in order.

Our audience research for the new Hempsted Houses interpretation plan is thus predicated on the hypothesis that guided tours cannot be the default option for experiencing this property, though it can certainly be an option for those who enjoy them.  But if not guided tours, then what?  Additionally, what about the difficult issues this property presents, and the opportunities to consider social justice issues as they continue to percolate today?  And, how can we create a meaningful experience at this property, but do so with limited staffing that still addresses security concerns?

Fortunately, Reach Advisors’ extensive research on museum goers, including history museum visitors (some frequent and some not-so-frequent), gives us a significant advantage going into this research phase.  Based on that work, we decided to focus on four primary audience segments and conduct extensive qualitative research to dig deeper and learn more. 

• Regular visitors to history museums and historic sites.  Although we had a good base of knowledge from previous research, we still had a number of very complex, meaty questions we wanted to ask regular visitors to history museums.  We wanted to understand how open they were to being challenged intellectually or philosophically.  How open they were to discussing rather difficult issues in a public setting.  Finally, we wanted to gain some understanding of different ways they might enjoy a historic house museum . . . beyond a typical guided tour.  This is the core audience for many historic house museums, and understanding how they might respond to something different, even unexpected, is crucial for continuing their engagement. 

• Elementary School Teachers.  There is a lot of competition out there for fewer and fewer planned field trips.  What makes a trip to a historic site stand out and desirable?  Why would teachers pick a historic house museum over other options?  And, when they do, how can we create the most meaningful and fun experiences possible for young children?

• Teens.   To turn the historic house museum experience on its head, we turned to one of the most under-served audiences for historic house museums:  teenagers.  Partnering with Writers Block InK, over two dozen youth are spending their summer thinking about history, slavery, and modern implications not only for their community but for museums.  As part of this project, these youth will be given the opportunity to reinterpret the Joshua Hempsted House in a manner of their choosing, and share it with the public.  We are curious how they will do so!

• Community.  Community members, including families of Writers Block teens, neighbors, regional residents, as well as the panelists from our research on regular visitors are all being invited to attend the teen reinterpretation of the Joshua Hempsted House, and then provide feedback to us on what the teens did and their response to it.  In the follow-up feedback, we will also be asking questions about the role of this property, and its complex history, in the community, and what possibilities the community sees for it as well.

All four phases of audience research are crucial building blocks to understanding, and rethinking, this property and other historic house museums.  Over the next few weeks you will see many posts about the teens, as they are already at work at the Hempsted Houses property.  We’ll describe that project in more detail and share our observations.  Other findings will be shared later in the summer and into the fall.

 Susie Wilkening is a Senior Consultant and Curator of Museum Audiences at Reach Advisors.  She will be leading several phases of audience research for this project.

John Jackson never lived here

“Not until the first hours of May 29, 1711, could they finally act. On that day, Jackson stood watchful and uneasy on his master’s boat, as he and John Rogers maneuvered it across the dark waters of the Sound." - Allegra Di Bonaventure, For Adam’s Sake, p.153 

In was the middle of the night when John Jackson, father of Hempsted slave Adam Jackson, sailed from New London, CT to Long Island, NY with his former owner, John Rogers, at the helm. Once on Long Island, John would sneak into the home of his wife’s owner and, without waking the other occupants, find his wife, Joan Jackson, and their two children inside. The group would leave the house, return to the boat and sail back to New London undetected. The next day Joan and the two children would be spirited away to Rhode Island while John Jackson and John Rogers faced an angry New London court– where no one doubted who had done the daring deed.

At the time of this dramatic event Adam Jackson was 11 years old. It will be nearly 16 years before Adam will be enslaved at Hempsted House.

So here is the question – Is this amazing tale an appropriate story to tell at the Hempsted House?  By the definition of many historic home interpretations the answer is clearly no. The story did not take place within the Hempsted property and had little impact on the occupants at the time. Yet if you were visiting the Hempsted House in New London and wanted to learn about Colonial slavery wouldn’t you want to hear this story?  

Certainly the story and its aftermath must have helped to form Adam Jackson’s view of his world. Adam would have heard of the later capture of Joan, his mother, and two of his siblings within months of the dramatic rescue and their immediate sale to yet another family. He may have gotten regular updates of his father’s extraordinary efforts to gain Joan’s freedom over the next 6 years and even longer to regain the freedom of Jack, his little brother, and Rachel, his little sister, in the Massachusetts courts system. He would also see his parents and siblings struggle with the limits of freedom for free men and women of color in Colonial America.  For Adam the idea and reality of freedom must have been complex.

Joshua Hempsted himself chronicled the murder of a 9 year old slave named Zeno. Whipped to death by her master, Zeno’s death and the heavily attended trial of her well-heeled master grabbed the attention of all of New London. While clearly the community disapproved, in the end her owner, the upper crust Nicholas Lechmere, would escape punishment. Joshua and Adam would have known all of the players in this drama personally, and it is hard to image that this life experience did not shape both their views as a slave owner and a slave – yet none of this took place within the Hempsted House nor involved its occupants.

Which leads to our question:  is this an appropriate story to share at the Hempsted House?  What do you think?

Robert Kiihne of RK Exhibits will be participating in the teen audience research this summer and will draft the exhibitions component of the interpretive plan in the fall.

The Writers’ Block students first impressions of the Hempsted House

[Note:  As part of our interpretive planning process, the planning team is working with a group of young students from The Writers’ Block, to learn more about their impressions about museums and how they would prefer to experience them.  On July 30 they will be presenting the stories of the house with the public during an open house, the details of which will follow in an additional blog post.] 

The students gathered at the house for the first time on June 25th. Many knew very little about the House, so this was our opportunity to hear their preconceptions. From the beginning they understood that the House is very old, but they had no idea how old. Anywhere from 1640 to 1850 would have made sense to them. Some had heard that the House was haunted and some knew that a slave had lived there.

We asked the students about their past museum experiences. In retrospect this was a trick question since many did not think of a historic house as a museum. In fact the students’ answers suggest that they do see historic houses in a different category. While the kids had gone to science museums and art museums, they also gave examples of monuments – the Statue of Liberty and Lincoln Memorial.

The kids are right.

Many historic houses are presented as monuments and not museums.  How often have you been to a historic house interpreted through:

• Discussions of the architecture
• Lists of who lived here when
• What they might have done in each room
• How the house’s occupants would have used this antique candle holder that the curator bought last year

Often what is lacking is a broader context: community, moment in history, theme – the basic building blocks of a museum exhibition.

As the students explored the Hempsted House, they enjoyed playing- “what is that?” and, “Can you uncover the story of this house?” Then it was time to give  them some historical context. It was 11:30 in the morning, 92 degrees and humid outside. We told them the basic history of the house, who lived here and when.  We tried to add a little variety into the program with a timeline activity. I brought a bright red 8’ by 1’ board on a stand with a lot of stickers and asked the kids for help. They could put what every dates they wanted between 1630 and 2013. We helped identify dates of major events the kids brought up. My hope had been that the kids might see this as theirs. They might put their own birthday or 9/11 or some anything that had meaning in their lives. It was not to be. While they participated, the students, from 11 to 17, did not include any dates with personal meaning. I then realized that, for them, so far, this was school without air-conditioning.

Many of the kids did start to participate in a discussion, or at least ask some questions when it came time to talk about Colonial slavery. The story is complex and different from place to place. Many students and Writers Block staff had made assumptions like – there must have been a number of slaves at this house, they would have lived outside of the main house, the slaves would have eaten different food. While none of these are true at the Hempsted property, they might have been true right down the road in 1730.

So what is the difference between the life of the Hempsted family and the life of Adam Jackson? To me (a father of two in his mid 40’s) it is family. Joshua Hempsted does everything he can to provide for his children, while denying Adam Jackson even the hope of family. Even if Adam could have children, his offspring would be born into bondage. We know that in the coming weeks the students and Writers Block staff will pull apart slavery, and there are many directions they can choose to explore. My hope is that at some point this will no longer feel like school.   

Robert Kiihne of RK Exhibits will be participating in the teen audience research this summer and will draft the exhibitions component of the interpretive plan in the fall.

Three Different Starting Points

African American families may bring very different attitudes about slavery to the Hempsted House. In my last post I talked about the young man that felt ashamed of slavery until he came to know Adam Jackson. Recently, I had the opportunity to hear two other local African American perspectives on slavery. 

Megan Sandberg Zakian, Danny Glover (who performed in "Roots of Liberty"), Debra Wise, and Catherine Carr Kelly. Photo: A.R. Sinclair Photography.

The large and active Haitian community in greater Boston recently provided a very different perspective. On Saturday, May 4, 2013, a theatrical performance produced by Underground Railway Theater entitled, "Roots of Liberty – The Haitian Revolution and the American Civil War" made connections between Haiti’s successful slave rebellion and the American Civil War.  The Tremont Temple Baptist Church was packed with over 1400 people, with the performance in presented in both English and Creole. For Haitian Americans, the history of slavery is linked to freedom and self-determination.

A family friend provides yet another perspective. This young woman is the daughter of immigrants from Uganda. While attending high school here in Concord, Massachusetts in 2008, she sat in a classroom one day and learned about American slavery. The teacher that day kept looking at her and addressing the content to her as if this was a very personal story. After a short while she had enough and interrupted, “Why are you looking at me? I am from Africa and my ancestors were not slaves. You should know that.” She relayed the event that night to my family. Remembering that story I asked her recently: Was she interested in learning about slavery in the United States? Was it relevant to her in some way? She told me that it was interesting to her, and that some of her friends had asked her to go to the theatrical presentation on Haiti's history on May 4th with them.

The interpretation of the Hempsted house must make room for visitors coming with very different perspectives of slavery.  What is also clear is how powerful telling that story could be.

Robert Kiihne of RK Exhibits will be participating in the teen audience research this summer and will draft the exhibitions component of the interpretive plan in the fall.