Consuming Tradition, Manufacturing Heritage Starr, Kevin, Americans and the California Dream 1850-1915, New York, Oxford University Press, 1973. Taber, Isaiah West, Hints to Strangers, San Francisco, I.W. Taber, 1890. Taylor, Benjamin F., Between the Gates, Chicago, S.C. Griggs and Company, 1882. Tiffany, O.F. and A.C. Macdonald, Pocket Exchange Guide of San Erancisco, San Francisco, Tiffany and Macdonald and Central Pacific, 1875. Towner, John and Geoffrey Wall, 'History and Tourism,' Annals of Tourism Research, vol. 18, no. 1, 1991. Towner, John, 'Approaches to Tourism History,' Annals of Tourism Research, vol. 1.5, no. 1, 1988, pp. 47-62. Upton, Dell, 'The City as Material Culture,' in A.E. Yentsch and M.C. Beaudry (eds.), The Art and Mystery of Historical Archaeology: Essays in Honor of fames Deetz, Boca Raton, FL, CRC Press, 1992. Urry, John, The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies, London, Sage Publications, 1985. Vivian, Henry Hussian, Notes of a Tour in America, London, Edward Stanford, 1878. Wylie, A.H., Chatty Letters from the East and the West, London, Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1879. 190 renter 7 Re-Presenting and Representing . i » 0______________1______ "»"I-___10^____:____ A ! — trcs? werridLuicii. me vspen-Mii Museum Paul Oliver 'History,1 the car manufacturer Henry Ford is reputed to have said, 'History is bunk.' Bunk, or bunkum, means verbal rubbish, tinged with deception. Actually, what Ford said was 'History is bunk, as it is taught in schools.' Ford's concern was so genuine that he founded the Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village near Dearborn, Michigan, to introduce Americans to the material facts of their history.1 However, Ford could be cavalier in his methods. Wishing to demonstrate that many American families came from rural England, in the mid-1920s he tried to purchase a row of Cotswold cottages to transport and rebuild in his open-air museum of Greenfield. But, alarmed at the impending demolition of Arlington Row, Bibury, the local community alerted the Gloucestershire Archaeological Trust, who succeeded in preventing Ford from going through with his plan. In 1929 Arlington Row was bought by the Royal Society of Arts, and twenty years later it was given to the National Trust for safe keeping. Even though he failed to transport Arlington Row, Ford later bought a Cotswold house and blacksmith's forge from another village, and had all 500 tons of stone and timber shipped to Michigan. Whether Americans learned much more of their history as a result is open to question, even if, by default, Bibury was the richer for the preservation effort set in motion by Ford's plan.2 The Skansen Movement Henry Ford's Greenfield collection demonstrates how a single influential, affluent and motivated person, with a certain perception of history, can arrange for the location, demolition, transfer and re-erection of a collection 191 Consuming Tradition, Manufacturing Heritage of buildings (in Greenfield, about a hundred) ostensibly for the benefit of present and future generations. A number of open-air museums started this way. Artur Hazelius in Sweden was responsible for assembling the buildings which, as 'Skansen' on Djugarden Island, Stockholm, opened in 1891. Hazelius believed that 'getting to know and falling in love with the past is the essential basis for all kinds of new production - a tree is the stronger the deeper are its roots." Skansen in Swedish means 'fort', and though the word referred to the former function of Hazelius's site, it came to symbolize the enclosed, contained character of the 'open-air' museum. Others soon followed, with the Lillehammer dentist Anders Sandvig building a collection which was adopted by the municipality and opened in Maihaugen in 1904. 'In my opinion Maihaugen should be a collection of homes, where it is possible to come close to the people who lived in them, to learn to know their way of life, their tastes, and their work,' Sandvig wrote, though he had more comprehensive ideas in mind. 'My aim is not merely to preserve a haphazard collection of old houses. No, I would like to include the whole parish, as a complete entity, in my picture-book.'4 Known henceforth as skansens in Scandinavia and Eastern Europe, some forty-four open-air museums had been established by World War I, many at the instigation of passionate collectors, but others under museological or institutional, provincial or national auspices. The Seurasaari Open-Air Museum, for example, situated on Seurasaari Island near Helsinki, Finland, was founded in 1909 by Professor Axel Olai Heikel, whose declared aim was 'to collect typical buildings from the different regions of Finland in order to display folk architecture and how Finnish people lived.'5 His purpose was at least in part nationalistic, symbolically using the museum to distance Finland from its Russian and Swedish neighbours. The site, which was part of a public park, was rented from the City of Helsinki by a newly formed company in 1911; however, two years later it was acquired by the state and operated as a national museum under the auspices of the National Archeological Commission (later, the National Board of Antiquities). Other such collections were similarly adopted, for example the Nederlands Openluchtmuseum, Arnhem, which was founded by a small private group in 1912 and opened in 1918, operating independently for thirty years until the state assumed overall responsibility in 1941. Its declared purpose was to 'present a picture of the daily life of ordinary people in this country as it was in the past and has developed in the course of time.' In producing a 100-page guide, the group 'concentrated on the social and economic background rather than overburdening the visitor with technical terms or local names, or giving detailed accounts of the past history of the buildings, which in any case have mostly found their way to the museum more or less by chance.'6 Such museums grew in number, and many in size, between the wars, with Muzeul Satulut in Bucharest, Romania, which opened in 1939, eventually 192 Re-Presenting and Representing the Vernacular displaying well in excess of 300 buildings. After World War II open-air museums continued to proliferate, with Norway establishing an association to unite more than a hundred in that country. Typical was the Trondelag Folkemuseum, Sverresborg, Trondheim, which was privately founded in | 9 13. Staffed voluntarily and subsisting on private funds and later by grants, it has retained its independent status. By 1980 the Polish historian of the skansen movement, Jerzy Czajkowski, could write that 'there are iinnroximately 500 big and small, ready or being built, skansen museums in Europe at present.'7 Skansen, Village Museum, Freilichtmuseum, Openluchtmuseum, Musée de Plein Air, Open-Air Museum, whatever the term used, they all conserve buildings within outdoor museum compounds. Or so it appeared, until notices of a Freilichtmuseum near Stadthagen in north Germany led to a park inhabited by full-size concrete dinosaurs! There is no agreement on terms, and often little on what is preserved, how buildings are relocated and restored, what form the museum may take, and even why they are assembled. This may be regarded as inevitable, bearing in mind the vast range of terrains, resources, materials, periods, traditions, functions, and building types which may be considered to merit preservation. During the past century the incursions made into the rural landscapes of countries on all continents have been of a scale which is almost beyond measure. The expansion of cities, the growth of suburbs, the migration of peoples, the construction of superhighways, the decline of small agricultural economies, and the growth of agribusiness are among the manifold factors which have contributed to the irreparably changed face of the world's rural landscapes. Such a summary may be platitudinous, but it is undeniable, nonetheless. Falling victim to such physical changes have been countless fields, farmlands and forests, among which have been untold rural buildings, sometimes of considerable age, that have been lost forever. Sometimes this loss has gone virtually unnoticed, as farm properties have fallen to the auctioneer's hammer along with the farmlands. But in certain other instances their destruction has been part of deliberate policies, motivated by industrial greed or political ideologies, of which the planned programme of village elimination and 'rural systemization' of the Ceaucescu regime in Romania was the most notorious.8 Their loss has been paralleled by the destruction of innumerable urban buildings of all kinds and often of considerable quality, that have obstructed industrial or commercial expansion and the exploitation of land values. Though the safeguarding of certain examples of architecture has been assured through the efforts of individuals and conservation groups since early in the century, the period following World War II has witnessed a redoubling of efforts to do so. The 'listing' and grading of buildings, devising of heritage trails, establishment of eco-museums, declaration of World Heritage Sites, and other measures have been taken to ensure the 193 Consuming Tradition, Manufacturing Heritage protection of significant buildings. Some are of archaeological importance; others are of unquestioned architectural merit - singular buildings, whose scale, architectural quality, prominence in their urban or landscape context, historic record, and, in most cases, religious significance are justification enough for their conservation. Yet many buildings are conserved for their historic associations rather than their intrinsic value as architecture. For example, it is its function as a national symbol and the home of the first President of the Union, George Washington, that is the primary reason for the preservation of the seventeenth-century Virginian mansion, Mount Vernon. Its conservation might also be argued on aesthetic grounds, but this could not be said of the modest homestead at Johnson City near Fredericksburg, Texas. Yet the conservation of the Sam Early Johnson Log House, the reconstructed birthplace and restored Boyhood Home of Lyndon Johnson, whose memory is preserved with the building while emphasizing his rural background, could be justified as examples of regional, vernacular architecture. Distinguished from free-standing chateaux, churches and country houses, monasteries and mosques, by their rural and largely domestic character, the majority of open-air museums display examples of what their publications variously term 'regional', 'folk', 'traditional', 'peasant' or 'vernacular' architecture. Such assemblies were suggested as early as 1790, and a number of precursors date from the nineteenth century. Though some of these consisted of only a few structures, as was the case with the buildings relocated on Norway's Bygdoy Peninsula on the orders of King Oscar II in the 1880s, a few were larger. Among these early efforts was the Ethnographic Village of twenty-four houses, a church, and several farm buildings from the Carpathian Basin re-erected in 1896 as part of the Hungarian Millenary Exhibition. Dismantled the following year, it nevertheless inspired the formation of a number of open-air museums in Hungary a lifetime later. Museums in the Open Air Though it has been in international use since the 1950s, it remains uncertain at what date and to which location the term 'open-air' museum was first applied. The vagueness of the term means that it can embrace a variety of situations, though it is generally employed to identify a museum of buildings located in a territory often approximately equivalent to that of a provincial zoo. The unifying concept of the 'open-air' museum refers to the dispersal of the buildings within the territory and not to the inherent nature of the exhibits themselves. This permits the display not only of domestic buildings but of cart sheds, hayricks, farm outbuildings, and unique structures such as the chain-maker's shop at Bromsgrove (England) or the water-powered laundry at Arnhem. 194 Re-Presenting and Representing the Vernacular t errain such complexes could be on open access, but for the purposes of this discussion the open-air museum is defined as one in which diverse buildings have been relocated in a physically, if artificially, defined landscape M'tiing to which access is gained by payment of an entrance fee. Encompassed u ithin the concept are village museums, such as Old Sturbridge Village, Massachusetts; folk artefact collections, like the Welsh Folk Museum, St. l'as'an"s; museums of building, such as Avoncroft near Bromsgrove, Fnuland; ethnographic museums, for instance, the Park Etnograficzny W Sanoku, Poland; and heritage centres like the Isle of Arran Heritage Museum, among several other more or less synonymous designations. Within its territorial confines the open-air museum may conform to one of a small number of specific types. In much of Europe the term 'park museum' denotes an arrangement in which buildings are dispersed at intervals that are sufficiently distant so as to preserve their distinct identities, whether in function, period, method of construction or region of origin. The Niedersächsisches Freilichtmuseum at Cloppenburg, north Germany, is a representative of this type. By contrast, the term 'village museum' is applicable to those where a number of buildings have been clustered in village form, simulating, for instance, the relationship of domestic buildings to church, windmill, smithy, and village green, as at the Provincial Open-Air Museum, Bokrijk, in Flanders, Belgium. The disposition of elements may depend upon the intentions of the museum authorities. For example, the last-named was founded within the Bokrijk Provincial Domain in 1958, with its objectives 'based on Culture, Nature and Recreation'. Commenting that 'earlier open-air museums erected their buildings with little thought to their actual inter-relationship,' the 'museum village' of Bokrijk was constructed 'so that visitors feel that they are stepping into the past and entering a snapshot of life in former times.'9 It is unusual in that it includes a simulated Brabant 'Old Town' comprising buildings transferred or partially reconstructed from Antwerp, now located around the 'Antwerp Square', with additional streets of buildings from Leu ven and Diest. Future plans include clusters of urban buildings from Limburg and Flanders. A regional approach to the organization of the open-air museum is particularly evident in 'national' collections that seek to illustrate the local or provincial traditions within the frontiers of a country. Such is the Swiss Open-Air Museum at Ballenberg near Brienz, founded in 1978, where some eighty farmsteads from all cantons are 'arranged in thirteen architectural units, on the basis of their regional origin.' About 80 hectares have been devoted to buildings in clearings on a mainly forested total site of some 200 hectares. Here the visitor can 'discover a realistic representation of the peasant style of living. Ballenberg does not just consist of ancient dwellings that have been rebuilt, but represents a vivid reconstruction of rural Switzerland of the past centuries. Truly a dream . . .'"' 195 Consuming Tradition, Manufacturing Heritage Founded earlier, in 1967, but still far from completion, the Hungarian Open Air Museum in Szentendre, near Budapest, was more ambitious. Within a space of 46 hectares, its master plan envisaged 'the relocation of about 300 buildings to the Museum for re-erection in nine groups, each representing a region in Hungary.' The regional groupings, of which four are completed, 'show[sj the pattern of settlement characteristic of each region,' and with furniture and demonstrations of customs, give visitors 'a comprehensive picture of life in the villages and market towns of Hungary in a defined segment of time.' Similarly, while the director of the museum at Szentendre is committed to the authenticity of the depiction of the chosen periods, he also emphasizes that 'authenticity also means authenticity of material and structure. The buildings chosen are usually not exhibited in the form they were found. They have to be restored to the form, material and structure they had at the time to be represented."1 Smaller museums may also opt for the 'village' structure, either by arranging the component buildings that they have acquired in a village format and obtaining others that would complete the notional ensemble, or by assembling from scratch the representative buildings necessary to create the preconceived village considered to be typical of its locale. Old Sturbridge Village, 'a bit of past history come to life,' is pre-eminently such a museum. It began when Albert and Cheney Wells of Southbridge, Massachusetts, purchased a tract of some 250 acres on which stood just two buildings. Relocating and re-erecting over thirty additional buildings, including several around a green, they opened the village in 1936. Private and non-profit, it was 'chartered by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to carry on its work of instructing and entertaining visitors, giving them a brief glimpse into rural New England that existed in 1800 or in 1820."2 More eclectic still is the Harold Warp Pioneer Village at Minden, Nebraska, the buildings of which were drawn mainly from Nebraska, but the contents of which and other exhibits were chosen and purchased in the United States, Canada and Mexico to illustrate 'Man's Progress'. In spite of its name, a Nebraska village form is not simulated, the buildings being arranged in a cartwheel plan permitting the visitor to 'see everything, by walking less than one mile.'13 Open-air museums whose stated intentions are fundamentally architectural are fewer than might be expected. In England the Avoncroft Museum of Buildings was initiated by a group of people, led by F.W.B. Charles, the architect specializing in timber framing, who endeavoured to prevent the demolition of a fifteenth-century timber-framed building in Bromsgrove. Though they were unsuccessful in this, they saved the framing timbers and re-erected the building on a 10-acre site in 1967. Other projects were commenced with the aim 'to encourage interest in buildings of architectural and historical value, where possible to prevent the demolition of such buildings when they are threatened, and to give advice on their 196 Re-Presenting and Representing the Vernacular restoration."4 Buildings that could not be restored in situ have been rebuilt u this museum, their value being the criterion for inclusion rather than ,!, .;,- .•ol.itionship to others within an ensemble. Perhaps the most notable ri'viR' is the early fourteenth-century roof originally of the Guesten Hall at Worcester Cathedral. Of similar date and intention is the Weald and Downland Open Air Museum at Singleton, near Chichester, England. Founded by J-R- Armstrong in 1967, and opening four years later, its u,,;i,iln