Harriet Beecher Stowe Center Assessment

            The way an institution uses its resources to convey information can come in not only multiple formats for the resources themselves but also how these items are used to present information.  With historic house museums there is a standard format that tends to be followed: come look at this old house filled with old stuff that belonged to person X and Y, and hear a bit of history about the person, place, or thing.  As the times change many of these presentations are beginning to move into new territory.  There is the standard tour and collections of the institution, but public and educational programming, as well as a social media and web presence, are key to a museum’s visibility.  For this study I returned to the museum that gave me my “in” to the cultural heritage world, the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center in Hartford, Connecticut.  Currently, the home of Mrs. Stowe herself is undergoing a massive interior preservation, restoration, and reinterpretation of the author’s story.  This study will examine how the Stowe Center is delivering its information to the public with its arguable main attraction “out of commission” and how it may differ from the presentation when the house was still open.  This will include public and school programs, the tour, media (digital and analog), partnerships, and collections access.  Finally, we will see how well these various aspects fall in line with the Stowe Center mission statement that it “preserves and interprets Stowe's Hartford home and the Center's historic collections, promotes vibrant discussion of her life and work, and inspires commitment to social justice and positive change.”

            The first portion that we will examine is the programming portion of the Stowe Center.  Over the years, this has become a driving way for the Center to present on its mission in conjunction with the more typical house tour.  These take various formats between public and school focused, but the Salon series has been highly dominant.   Billed as a “safe place for hard discussions” the Salons at Stowe are conversation series’ with a moderator and guest that has a level of expertise on the topic.  These can vary from discussions on race, sex, and gender to juvenile and environmental justice and there popularity can’t be denied since attendance rose 150 percent in 2015.  A tremendous amount of information is conveyed during these two hour events, but a Program Assistant I spoke with stated that the mission connection for all of these are very loose and can be connected to Stowe herself in a relative way.  Did the author speak about gender? Sure she did, but what about modern topics like trans people? Nope.  When I inquired about whether a person attending an event would glean anything about Stowe herself and why this institution is hosting an event on certain topics, it was met with an emphatic no.  The Salons have been a great success and helped with the museums visibility, but is it delivering on its mission?  The second part perhaps, but if there is a lack of public understanding about the person whose legacy is being used to deliver this type of information (while ignoring a lifetime of her story) can it really be fully accomplishing its mission?  The Center is doing well in the public eye so there is success, but there is also compromise.

The Salons have grown to lunchtime lectures and an increasingly popular school program, both of which cover more recent topics such as the Flint crisis and other social justice oriented stories.  These are increasing awareness amongst a younger audience of social justice issues, but when asked if they teach that crowd about Stowe?  Another no.  Now the Stowe Center does offer a variety of school programs that could be delivered on or off-site, so the situation with the house renovation has not had a tremendous impact other than space with really big groups, I was told by some staff.  Therefore the information could be delivered in the same way, but the bad news is that the more historical Stowe oriented programs that use primary sources and have a deliverable expectation from the students (so you know, it’s still school and not a field trip/day to slack off) have been marginalized.  The school programs being pushed and ordered by teachers are the Salon and modern day social justice oriented programs that are light on history according to staff.  The more history oriented program that is delivered the most is actually done in partnership with the Mark Twain House and Museum next door.  Effecting Social Change (ESC), a personal favorite program, basically tells the story of slavery and racial prejudice prior and during the respective authors’ lifetimes and paints a contextual picture of their major works, and finally their legacy.  It is through this collaborative program that the Stowe Center appears to deliver most on the entirety of its mission.        

Partnerships like the one that exists between the Twain and Stowe museums are another way that an institution conveys information to the public.  One of the most respectable aspects to the Stowe Center is its focus on forging local relationships to further their mission.  Since the mission is rather broad, the collaborations can serve on any purpose that the Center sees fit.  If it is more along the lines of books and history there is the Twain House and the local branch of the public library, if it is on race, gender, or other social justice topics there are multiple partnerships that they have forged with the YWCA, the Amistad Center, Aurora Women and Girls Foundation, Community Partners in Action, CT Juvenile Justice Alliance, Metro Hartford Progress Points, Organize Parents Make a Difference, local church organizations, universities, and the city of Hartford.  While all of these partnerships help the Stowe Center to deliver information to the public about itself, it does show which part of the mission has been a priority focus.  Of the seventeen official Stowe Center Partners in 2015 only six fall under cultural heritage or historic organization, which seems par for the course.  During my time at the Stowe Center I was told to stop pursuing a relationship with Connecticut League of History Organizations because they are too small and do not help the museum.  There is the impression that social justice is what the Stowe Center wants and the historic or traditional museum aspect is used for convenience when necessary.  This is even more evident when looking at the Stowe Center 2015 in review brochure where the mission statement was broken into its 3 main parts and then reconstructed to put social justice first, preserver and interpret second, and leave the vibrant discussion of Mrs. Stowe’s life to the bottom.

One of the oldest ways that an institution communicates information about itself is through mailing brochures and newsletters like the one mentioned above.  However, technology has marginalized these in favor of the “e-blast” and social media strategies.  The Stowe Center social media has become a more visible presence with not only live tweeting during programs, but also retweeting relative topics, and posting more frequently about its own events on Twitter and Facebook.  This year alone has seen more activity on social media than the almost two years prior to it.  My discussion with a Program Assistant informed me that the new Marketing Director is making sure that the Center’s social media strategy is in line with best practices and more importantly, is not withholding access to the accounts.  This allows Programming to post about their events before, during, and after they happen in a more timely fashion.  One aspect that has been lacking in their use of digital media is any mention of the house being off limits due to the preservation project.  A retweet from April 21, originally by History at Play, tells people to visit the Stowe House when in Hartford with pictures of her, the home, and then an interior shot of another house on the property.  There is no indication given about the status of the house and what a site visit now means.  This lack of information is deceitful and comes from a place of fear.  During two years as Visitor Services Manager, we discussed terminology to use so that we never had to say closed.  Three years later and the Center still refuses to call a spade a spade.  The most recent e-newsletter received from the Stowe Center, also on April 21, is from the Executive Director and this is how the Center is explaining the situation of the house to the public:

“It's an exciting time in Harriet Beecher Stowe Center's history. For the first time since opening in 1968, the 1871 Stowe House is undergoing extensive interior preservation including new climate systems, state-of-the-art fire suppression and historic windows restoration.  The Stowe Center remains open while work is completed. Through spring 2017, our interactive tour takes place in two other buildings on campus: the 1873 Stowe Visitor Center and 1884 Katharine Seymour Day House, featuring significant artifacts and furnishings from the Stowe House.” [emphasis original]

It then goes on to ask for donations and to spread the word.  What word?  If I was a casual visitor and saw this it would not be clear that the house of Harriet Beecher Stowe, famed author, that Bob traveled all the way from Texarkana to see is closed and he cannot see it.  And this is only if Bob from Texarkana is on the email list; if he visited the museum website, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, or Tumblr he would not know that the house is closed since the Center has decided not to make this terribly important information for visitors one hundred percent public.  This is what it says on the website: “During Stowe House preservation, Stowe Center admission includes two historic buildings on the property: the 1873 Visitor Center and the 1884 Katharine Seymour Day House…an architectural gem rarely open for tours.”  I think this would make Bob think that he gets two more tours than just the Stowe House tour.  This summer when the largest number of casual visitors come to the museum will prove how wise this strategy is.  There is already early evidence on Trip Advisor from March 7 that read: “The house was closed but nowhere does it say this on their site. They charged us $14 to get a tour of two rooms in another house. It was not very informative and only lasted 30 minutes. What a rip-off.” This review and my visit to the site led me to believe that withholding information and not clearly explaining a situation like this may be a mistake.

The Tour is the biggest way that historic homes deliver information about themselves.  It is usually seen as forty-five minute history lecture about the person, place, and things, and is a big source of revenue for the institutions.  The Stowe Center currently bills the visit as a “site tour” and the price given by the review above is actually a two dollar increase from when the home was open and full of collections.  On the day I visited the first floor of the Stowe House was still being shown, though it was completely void of anything historic other than the reproduction wallpaper from the 1960s; the main part of the experience was in the Visitor Center and the Chamberlain-Day House.  I will address each of these through my experience from arrival to the end of the tour and all the ways, obvious or not, that the Stowe Center is conveying information about itself.

The most important information to a visitor is where is this place and what do I do when I arrive.  The Stowe Center sits on the corner of Farmington Avenue and Forest Street with large signs on each proclaiming that you have not only arrived at the Stowe Center but the first home is the Day House, the second one is the Stowe House, and then the all-important parking.  At each of the foot exits of the parking lot are little mailboxes containing site guides that have a map and tour, programming, and other institutional information.  The front is all about the new experience and informs the visitor of the preservation work, but again does not outright state the condition of the house being closed!  It is only when entering the Visitor Center and inquiring about a tour that an individual is clearly told about the access level to the house being zilch, but the other aspects were well highlighted to manage expectations.  Basically it was “you can’t go in the House, but you can still learn and see some cool stuff over here” speech that is a basic of museum customer service and very important to learn.  There were several guests I saw engage with employees and when the word closed was used or what was available was not highlighted, people left. The visitors that I spoke with were not aware of the Stowe House being closed and the new experience, but for the most part they did not care because when they arrived it was clearly explained to them.  This is more evidence that not declaring outright what is happening to your main attraction is a bad move. The tour experience then begins in the former gallery space, with a brief reasoning on the new experience, and is loosely set up for the discussion points of Social Justice, Inspiration, Relevancy, and Biography.  The first two are covered heavily in the first ten minutes as a way to establish the new focus of Stowe’s work Uncle Tom’s Cabin (UTC) and how that can be used to inspire change.  Then the visitor is directed toward a wall of famous people’s quotes relating to UTC from its publication to present day before being shown a panel with Stowe’s quote on why she wrote it.  At this point it is twenty minutes in and I have learned nothing about Harriet Beecher Stowe’s life.  The last ten minutes are used to quickly convey Stowe’s early life and what led to her writing UTC in the first place. 

Next, visitors are whisked over to the Day House to learn more about Stowe’s time, Uncle Tom’s Cabin and its cultural impact and lasting legacy, and more inspiration.  This portion was about thirty minutes and had three rooms on the first floor of the Day House.  First visitors are sat in a reproduction parlor with repro documents of broadsides, pamphlets, and books about slavery and abolition from Stowe’s period and then the visitor is asked to discuss them and their reactions.  Very little information about Stowe’s life, or the mission, is conveyed during this time.  Honestly, the only information I got out of this time was how ignorant people are of the past.  We are then moved to a larger room with several writing desks, cases with Uncle Tom memorabilia in them, and it is here that the cultural impact of the book and its material culture are discussed.  The aim here it seems is to show how big a deal this was and then show how society warped the character of Uncle Tom into a racial epithet (basically the feeling is that they are trying to “take back” the term Uncle Tom).  The final stop is a case with gifts Stowe received from overseas and a table in the main hall with other visitor’s writings about how to pursue social justice today like Stowe did in her day.  The experience, for now, finishes in the empty Stowe House where the preservation project is discussed in greater detail and ends with a donation plug.  Even this information is not clearly delivered since another Trip Advisor review was under the impression that the two buildings they visited were “complete” and that the Stowe House was still under construction. 

There is a ton of information covered in the hour or so tour experience, but the Stowe Center represents itself as being lacking in collections and heavy on modern issue.  The overall impression I received, having never taken this tour but knowing her life, was that Stowe did nothing after Uncle Tom’s Cabin, it was tremendously successful, and this museum exists only to show how this one book should inspire others to take up a pen, or whatever, and change the world.  All of this information given does fall in with the mission of the museum, so in that sense the tour is a successful fulfillment of the mission; more so than the public programs discussed earlier according to the Program Assistant and Guides I spoke with.  However, not providing historical context by withholding information is something I find egregious.  Certainly the average visitor does not know, or maybe even care, but when they have a strong reaction (meaning their reaction is informed by modern ideas) that is not discussed in context people get a wrong idea about history.  Some examples were portraying Stowe writing as a struggling mother scraping together time between nursing, womanly duties, and child bearing to write UTC; she had money, help, and even writes about all the assistance she received to free up time to write her books.  Another even worse misinformation is leading visitors to believe that Uncle Tom’s Cabin ignited social justice sentiment in England, a country that had abolished slavery and was at the time working to fix societal ills that America still hasn’t corrected.  Stowe’s own racial ideology is not fully explained or contextualized.  The Stowe Center shoots these down as cultural misinterpretations when it is widely recognized across multiple fields that Stowe’s characters are racial stereotypes, just not the ones we are accustomed to from the Reconstruction era, but of a less covered period in US racial history.  It almost seems like the Stowe Center’s mission as it relates to history is passive.  Aspects of her biography like marriage, her children, and the other twenty-nine books she wrote that seem like normal topics to cover in a tour of an author’s home, were only addressed when visitors asked.  The final insult is that the twenty-three years Harriet Beecher Stowe lived in this home, and the thirty plus she lived in Hartford, are not discussed at all.  In comparison, a visitor to the Mark Twain House and Museum need only walk through the two exhibits, for free, in their visitor center to answer these types of questions; the tour there is for the historic house enthusiast and “Twainiacs.”

The Stowe Center attempts to meet its mission statement in various ways, but one of the driving parts of why the institution exists in the first place is the collections it holds.  The collections are not on heavy display since the house is closed, but that portion of the collection was less than half of the total assets held by the museum.  There are over 200,000 items in the research collections that are not used for the current delivery on the Stowe Center site.  These items though can be accessed by anyone as long as they make an appointment for Monday to Friday between 9:30 and 4:30 and bring photo identification.  This isn’t the best level of access nor is the above information clearly stated online, but this is pretty typical for a research collection at a museum of this size.  There are some collections that can be found online: the library catalogue can be searched only and Uncle Tom’s Cabin Collection materials (decorative arts, ephemera, printed materials) are exhibited on the website “Uncle Tom’s Cabin and American Culture”.  The lack of an online collections presence is not surprising as the Stowe Center is somewhat behind on the digital technologies; David Williams would find them to still be in the early history of use of computers and digital tools for museums.  It should also be noted that while the Stowe Center has many partnerships there is not semblance of a MOAC situation emerging any time soon.

When you look at the variety of the collections available, one may get the impression that the information being shared by the Stowe Center in terms of public offerings is dwindling.  The highlights given by the Stowe Center website are:

·         Broad collection of Harriet Beecher Stowe's personal correspondence, including the E. Bruce Kirkham Collection of annotated Stowe letters (1822-1895), sketchbooks, diaries, journals, and literary manuscripts.

·         First editions of Harriet Beecher Stowe's works, and the Uncle Tom's Cabin collection which includes most American and foreign language editions, interpretation and criticism, pamphlets, broadsides, and images of Stowe's most famous anti-slavery novel from 1851 to the present.

·         Extensive collection of Beecher/Stowe family correspondence and works by Lyman Beecher, Catharine E. Beecher, Henry Ward Beecher, Isabella Beecher Hooker, Thomas K. Beecher, and Calvin E. Stowe, among others.

·         Personal correspondence, diaries, journals and literary manuscripts by Stowe's Nook Farm neighbors.

·         Specialized collections on: 19th-century women's history, especially the votes for women movement; 19th-century slavery & 19th-century architecture and decorative arts, especially of the Greater Hartford area.

·         Letters from William Lloyd Garrison, the Duchess of Sutherland, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony.

·         Rare works by Hartford's Lydia Huntley Sigourney

·         Photographs associated with Stowe, Nook Farm residents, Katharine Day, members of the Beecher family, and 19th- and 20th-century Hartford architecture

The modern take on the Stowe experience only addresses the first two bullet points, and the Kirkham Collection actually walks a fine line in terms of ethics since it is transcribed letters from other institutions (they are research only, cannot be used in publication).  Speaking from experience, the Stowe Center at one time offered a differently themed tour each month to address the rest of the rich and culturally valuable collection.  It is sad that the collections have been marginalized to a degree since they are a department that does a lot with a little.  The collections are governed by a collections policy adopted in 2010, which guides acquisition, accession, cataloging, inventory, loans, deaccession, planning, access, conservation and care.  Within the policy the major duties are divided between the Executive Director, Collections staff, and Board’s Building & Collections Committee who are responsible for broader acquisition, deaccession, and planning decisions, while Collections staff is responsible for maintaining day to day activities like accession, cataloging, inventory, loans, access, conservation, care and storage. Almost ninety-five percent of the collection is in adequate housing (HVAC, Moisture control, acid-free, etc.).  The rest is kept in unconditioned environments and those are a concern, however care has been taken to store more robust collections items in uncontrolled storage areas. To stay up on best practices the collections staff regularly attends  workshops, maintains memberships/subscriptions/listservs with national museum/library organizations, and as the Collections Manager said, talk to former colleagues that have gone to other organizations.  They also have a well maintained disaster plan that is reviewed annually and training is done before natural events and/or after the annual review.  I asked the Collections Manager if the plan had been altered considering the changes to the storage areas, the house, and their contents and unfortunately no plan is in place officially, but she and the assistant have been preparing contingencies just in case.  Unfortunately internal access has declined due to a new Visitor Services Manager stating that Visitor Center staff is not to go to the Day House (where all the collections are) unless summoned.  This is an ultimate sin because it is a clear example of the institution stifling internal information sharing to limit what can be shared with the public so as to ally more closely with social justice portion of the mission.

            Examining the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center to see how it conveys information to the public in cooperation with its mission statement has been frustrating at times because of how they pick and choose what part of the mission to focus on when it seem most convenient.  When an institution is holding important cultural collections in the public trust, at what point do we look at them and judge how well they are sharing that information?  We have best practices and professional standards for most everything, but there is not yet a point at which we look at historic museums and say they are failing to deliver to the public the full potential of information held in their collections.  However, with that said, the Stowe Center does deliver information to the public as it relates to their mission and for now it seems that is good enough.

           

References

Chandler, Robin. “Museums in the Online Archive of California (MOAC): Building digital collections across libraries and museums.” First Monday 7, no. 5 (2002).

Harriet Beecher Stowe Center.  “Preserving the Past, Shaping the Future, Hartford, Connecticut Special Tour During Stowe House Preservation.” Brochure, Hartford, CT, Winter 2016.

-. “Harriet Beecher Stowe Center uses Stowe’s life and work to inspire YOU to change your world.” Brochure, Spring/Sumer 2016.

-. “Harriet Beecher Stowe Center 2015 Year in Review.” Brochure, Hartford, CT, 2016.

-. Site Guide, Hartford, CT, April 2016.

-. Institutional websites, www.harrietbeecherstowecenter.org, https://twitter.com/HBStoweCenter,   https://www.facebook.com/HarrietBeecherStowe

Harriet Beecher Stowe Center and the Mark Twain House and Museum. “Two National Historic Landmarks, One Great Field Trip: Field Trip and School Program Guide.” Brochure, Hartford, CT, 2015.

Interview with Maura Hallisey, Program Assistant, Harriet Beecher Stowe Center.  Conducted April 18, 2016.

Interview with Elizabeth Burgess, Collections Manager, Harriet Becher Stowe Center. Conducted via email, April 26, 2016.

Notes from Site Visit conducted April 23, 2016. Includes observations, tour notes, and interviews with staff members Anastasia Thibault, Christina Rewinski, and Katie Doe and four anonymous visitors.

Trip Advisor Reviews of the Stowe Center, https://www.tripadvisor.com/Attraction_Review-g33804-d105003-Reviews-Harriet_Beecher_Stowe_Center-Hartford_Connecticut.html.

Williams, David. “A Brief History of Museum Computerization,” in Museums in a Digital Age, Ross Parry, Ed. (Routledge, 2010), 13-20.