Place and Play at The Mill Museum

The Windham Textile and History Museum (or The Mill Museum of Connecticut) is a non-profit educational institution located in scenic Willimantic, CT. Their mission is to preserve and interpret the history of textiles, textile arts, and the textile industry, and to promote a greater understanding of major trends and changes in technology, immigration, society, culture, the economy, and the environment. Their primary intellectual goal is to compare and contrast the middle and working classes, as these class distinctions relate to the operation of the mills and their effect on the local and immigrant communities of Willimantic. They do this through their museum, library, and archival holdings, as well as through interpretive tours and lectures.
 

A Mill Worker's kitchen (left) and a Mill Manager's Parlor (right)

My analysis of The Mill Museum focuses on the concept of place in historic sites, through the lens of two competing theories of historic house conservation: preserving ‘history in continuum’ versus a ‘period of significance.’ In a 2001 UNESCO publication on historic house museums, Cabral states that a museum’s fundamental purpose is to “provide aesthetic pleasure, emotional delight, a space for daydreaming, the opportunity for evasion, imaginary entertainment” (42). Above and beyond any national or local mandates to preserve history and culture, the transfer of knowledge can occur most successfully in places that make space for these very things, and I think the folks over at The Mill Museum would agree.  Their institution runs on very strong undercurrents of place and play, and I think this is what has helped it develop into a successful medium-sized museum.

GENERAL OVERVIEW

There was continuous textile manufacturing on this site for nearly 130 years, beginning in 1857 and not ending until the last factory shut down in 1985. The Windham Textile & History Museum opened only four years later in 1989, through the efforts of a community group who wanted to preserve the history and identity of the town. In 2014, American Thread Company was added to the National Register as a Historic District, comprised of 14 buildings and 5 structures spread over 11.62 acres. As a private museum, The Mill Museum leases their two buildings from the town, and is governed by a 16 person Board of Directors. The 8 “regular” staff is headed by Executive Director Jamie Eves, who is on the History Faculty at the University of Connecticut and is also a Windham town historian; other staff includes an Educational Consultant, Collections Manager, a Gift Shop Manager/Asst. Business Manager, a Webmistress, a Volunteer Coordinator (who is also the Sunday Gift Shop Volunteer), and a Friday Gift Shop Volunteer. There are currently about 6 regular volunteers in the library and archive, and 1 intern a year on average. 

This dedicated team of almost entirely unpaid volunteers not only keeps the permanent exhibits up and running, with at least one special exhibit every year, but also engages in a variety of year-round educational and outreach programs, and performs archival and library work wherever possible. The Mill Museum’s collections encompass antique sewing machines, industrial machinery, furniture and home appliances, as well as small household items and tools. The archival and library collections cover printed material and maps, published books, photographs, oral history recordings, and artwork.

Besides the regular collections, the Dunham Hall Library itself is an important historical document: it was Willimantic’s first “public library” and continues to be the home of the current library and archive, in addition to being the regular meeting space for local history groups. The Dugan Mill (which at various times housed both the Mill’s fire brigade and its Engineering Department) currently provides exhibition space for the recreated Mill Floor (with equipment and machinery from the 1890s-1950s), with a reconstructed Machinist’s Bench, Print Shop, and Overseer’s Office. The Museum’s intellectual content includes a website with educational, documentary, interpretive, and primary source materials, including digitized archival documents and personal essays . The remaining granite gneiss mill buildings now accommodate both new industry and lower-cost residences for students and artists; they tower over and surround the two official museum buildings, adding to the sense of place The Mill Museum cultivates.

A repurposed mill now known as Artspace provides lower-cost housing for local artists and students, as well as gallery space. The mural shown here was painted in 1995 by local muralist Gordon MacDonald.

I’ve been living in Willimantic for a few years now, and grew up in other mill towns in northeastern Connecticut; the mills really do become a backdrop to daily life that has a definite visual and emotional impact (for good and bad). But they can just as easily fade into the background until they literally fall apart around you. After spending some time in the museum and library, then walking through the historic district again, I came to see how dedicated the Mill Museum is to preserving the history of the rise of the textile industry and its slow decline, along with the impact it continues to have on the mill communities that remain after the mills themselves are gone.

There was a smoke stack here not long ago, documented by local artist Harrison Judd before it collapsed.

DUELING THEORIES OF PRESERVATION: HISTORICAL CONTINUUM VS. PERIOD OF SIGNIFICANCE

‘HISTORY IN CONTINUUM’

Two dueling theories or approaches to preservation guided my thoughts on and experience of The Mill Museum: the tension between preserving ‘History in Continuum’ versus restoring a historic home to a ‘Period of Significance’. One of these emphasizes or only preserves original items of specific people or places, while the other recreates a distinct period of historical significance (Ponsonby 200). The coolest thing about the Mill Museum is that its identity and location allows and almost requires it do both! The histories of the mills cover a long period of growth and change, with multiple figures having prominent roles in shaping the industry of the area, as well as the social structures and living spaces of generations of people who lived and worked in Willimantic. The Criteria for Historical Significance applied to the district by the National Park Service notes the architecture, industry, community planning, and development that took place on the site. These elements encourage preserving a historic continuum, especially as it relates to the exteriors buildings and surrounding areas, many of which have been abandoned, destroyed or repurposed over the years. Remembering the mills’ decline is just as important as documenting its heyday. These changes in mill ownership, structures, and function have been and continue to be documented and preserved, but the museum also documents the shifting demographics and living standards of the people who owned and worked in the mills.

The Mill Museum is lucky in that it was created almost immediately after the mills ceased functioning, by community members with living memories of what life was like and a desire to preserve the entire (and continuing) experience of life with the mills. But they also recognized that it was equally important to document and recreate the period when the mill had its most significant impacts on society.

‘PERIOD OF SIGNIFICANCE’

The period of historical significance for The Mill Museum is 1857–1916, and their recreations depict life circa 1890. Latham describes how restoring to a period of historic significance often requires the use of both “Types” and “Token” museum objects (51). Their emphasis on documenting the working class more or less requires the use of replicas, because the items of daily life from that period didn’t typically survive. In this particular case, the company sold off most of their objects over time and destroyed or removed most of their official documents, so the number of original archival documents about the American Thread Company itself is incredibly limited. The period items the museum does have range from the late 19^th century to the 1940s, or later. These came from donors and locations around the state, no ONLY from the original mill building. Their only functioning machine (a spool tumbler) is made of an original drum a volunteer found on eBay, with mechanical parts fabricated by students from Windham Technical High School. Re-enactors and docents are careful to point out which items are original and which are replicas or rebuilt during tours. Even if they aren’t from the exact owners or workers, these original period items are still of the population, time, class, and community of the Willimantic area and NE Connecticut region.

Naumova maintains it is the role of “these [living] museums [to] offer a tactile experience of culture and history while creating both narrative and physical spaces for visitors to ‘insert’ themselves within the cultural production of heritage” (1). The recreations are important for teaching about a time period that has passed, but the environment of the place lends a lot of emotional heft to the importance of preserving ‘history in continuum’ and a space for visitors to project themselves onto the story.

AURA OF PLACE

“But if the essence of a museum is not to be found in its objects, then where? I propose that the answer is in being a place that stores memories and presents and organizes meaning in some sensory form. It is both the physicality of a place and the memories and stories told therein that are important” (Gurian 165).

Assorted views from the permanent exhibits at The Mill Museum, in both the main building and the Dugan Mill

The aura of the place is that feeling of emotional connection you have when you are in a specific place, an idea based on a 2015 article by Alevtina Naumova. In this article she describes an interactive and emotional role for historic house museums that traditional museums do not often get to indulge in, because “living house museums, on another hand, move past this [static] model of transmission of knowledge and strive to recreate that indefinable ‘sense’ or ‘aura’ of the time period, of what it could have been like to live back in the day” (2). When I walk the historic “district,” the remaining mill buildings loom over me; I see the old worker’s row houses, and on the way home I drive through the neighborhoods of Victorian houses where the middle class used to live; I stand on the mill floor next to a machine that dwarfs me and read about the 14 year old girl who wore high heels so she would appear the required working age of 16, as well as be able to reach a machine I myself cannot reach. I am able to absorb information about the history of the mills by feeling and sensing, by virtue of the physical environment, completely apart from the interpretive text and recreations that only tell me about what happened in the past.

Giovanni Pinna, introducing historic house museums in that same 2001 UNESCO publication, writes that a historic house museum “is highly evocative because not only does it contain objects, it also embodies the creative imagination of the people who lived and moved within its walls” (7). The Mill Museum achieves this by incorporating quotations from oral histories everywhere in the mill building, which personalizes the industrial experience, inviting and allowing you to imagine life at different times and from different perspectives (managers vs. worker; skilled vs. unskilled laborers; men and women; adults and children). All of this creates an environment of participatory play, or “wide awareness,” and offers patrons of all ages a chance to satisfy their imagination in ways they are not often allowed (Naumova 4-6). Naumova concludes her discussion with a call for historic house museums to enjoy and indulge in the possibilities that storytelling provides:

…the practice of heritage is, first of all, a practice of story telling…We weave the narrative using physical objects, a game of pretence [sic], urban mythology and physical urban spaces. It is an embodied process too, since a true story can never come alive if it is left encased in a glass ‘box.’ It needs to be forever flowing, it wants to be played with, repeated, told and re-told. Otherwise, it turns into just a ‘remembering.’” (7)

The Mill Museum definitely embraces this imperative of storytelling, using both their physical collections and location to tell the multiple narratives that exist in the history of the mill experience. The physical collections and environment are complimented by library and archival collections that add to the museum experience through their intellectual content and location in historic Dunham Hall.

LIBRARY AND ARCHIVE

The Dunham Hall Library was developed as part of the assimilation program for immigrant mill workers; open from 1878 to 1941, it grew from 600 books to 7,000 volumes before it closed. Open in the evening, the library was open to mill workers and the surrounding community, with additional space used for lectures, games, drawing & singing lessons, Sunday school, Episcopal services and English lessons. Although only about a dozen books from the original library remain (some are shown in the banner above; most were sold off when it closed in 1941), The Mill Museum has worked to build an artificial collection that intellectually supports their curatorial and interpretive work, and supports the needs of researchers. 

Dunham Hall Library

Physically, the library and archive are located on the third floor of the main building, the only space not accessible by ramps; intellectually, the collections are accessible but with assistance. The historic space is beautiful, and adds to that “aura of place” by letting visitors walk through, meet, and study in a room that was used for these same purposes over a hundred years ago. Unfortunately, the space is not energy efficient or preservation friendly, with temperature control being a serious issue, but efforts are underway to address the physical needs of the collections: past grants have provided for rehousing of many collections, as well as processing, description, and digitizing of others. 

The website offers up a huge amount of information to those who are physically or otherwise unable to visit in person, and gives researchers an opportunity to generally explore the museum collections before visiting.

The History page of the Mill Museum website

 However, there aren’t currently any organized information systems available online; they are working on digital infrastructure and collections are cataloged in Past Perfect. With donations remaining fairly steady since they opened, space is becoming an issue. Archival and library activities, like many other museum functions, are performed by volunteers, which has lead to a descriptive backlog that is typical of most archives (Jorgensen et al. 456). The most critical issues in terms of the collection would be to get the library collection into a catalog and to create inventories of archival material; both of these projects are in process, as are efforts to secure funding and support for further digitization of collections.

COMMUNITY

The collections and sense of place are incredible strengths, but it is evident that their biggest strength is the sense of community around The Mill Museum, and they are fortunate to have some amount of support at various levels of government. Even though the town and region are not wealthy, the museum receives support locally and from the state (if not always in money, in spirit) and the recent recognition from the National Register acknowledges their historical significance to our country. The local community and the state provide financial support for both the museum’s continued existence and special projects, ranging from capital improvements, grants and potential collaborations (like plans to join the Connecticut Digital Archive or CTDA), community outreach, volunteers, and interns.

Windham Mills Heritage State Park

 The community support helps maintain the exterior environments, which add to the ambience of what could be a very dreary area. Student volunteers from Eastern Connecticut State University (ECSU) do spring clean up every year as part of the Town Wide, Town Pride day, a joint program of the town and the college. The area around The Mill Museum includes the Garden on the Bridge, which is maintained by the Garden Club of Windham and the Windham Mills State Heritage Park, a part of the Willimantic River Alliance. Volunteers also staff the gift shop, are docents and re-enactors for special events and school groups, process collections, and help curate special exhibitions. Using the building for what it was originally intended—a store, a meeting place, a space to learn and socialize, even to assimilate—but in a new way, fosters an intense sense of community responsibility in volunteers and researchers, and encourages “the people” to be actively involved in creating the record of their cultural heritage.

This community-centered attitude is also evident in The Mill Museum’s web presence, both on their website and their Facebook page. 

The Mill Museum's Facebook page advertises events, documents the area, and shares historical content with their followers.

The Facebook page is very active and offers diverse content, from publicizing events, to showing archival materials being processed or images documenting the local area. They have been regularly posting original content as well as relevant stories about Connecticut textiles, textile history, museums, and historic houses for the last five years, and there seems to be a real back and forth between the museum and their constituents online.
 

This screen shot shows a public art project by Kenneth Saintonge, a museum volunteer and local artist, discussed below. This also illustrates the conversational tone of The Mill Museum's Facebook page, and the open attitude of the Hysterical Historicals, a local history group that meets at the museum.

In addition to offering formal programs, participatory experiences, and volunteering opportunities, The Mill Museum encourages activities like taking documentary pictures and using the archive for new creative artistic endeavors; this breeds loyalty in the community and helps pass on historical knowledge through the arts.

HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE & FUTURE TRENDS

The Mill Museum participates in a number of activities that have obviously helped it become as successful as it is, and they are sure to continue these even as they work to update their digital infrastructure. They already embrace some key elements of Carson’s “Plan B” in that they completely recognize the “reality that storytelling is the powerful medium in which modern learning takes place” (19). The intellectual content of The Mill Museum packs an emotional punch that traditional museums about the textile industry could not:

 ·      Walking between the workers and the managers living spaces reveal the stark differences in a way that contrasting items laid out in display cases don’t illustrate nearly as well;

·      Items like the scrap of cloth from Slater’s Mill (the first textile factory in the United States), or a 1903 union charter for the Loom Fixers Union, help to put the mill experiences in Willimantic into a broader context of manufacturing at these moments of past national significance; and

·      Comparing and contrasting the antique sewing machines and mill machinery from different periods of time helps to place a long period of textile history onto a continuum of technological advances, and helps visitors make sense of how these changes in industry affected and created new social structures.

The Mill Museum will also surely continue and expand the beneficial relationships they already enjoy with local artists and academics. Last year, a coalition funded by the Connecticut Office of the Arts launched the My Windham Project, which called on local artists to create public art as a path towards revitalization of downtown Willimantic. A volunteer at the museum participated in this project by creating a series of images from archival material that helped bring mill history to the main street, as way to connect residents to “the town as it is, and the town as it was.”

Encouraging this kind artistic project exposes members of the public to both the history the museum is attempting to preserve and to the idea of archival material as a link to the past. Visual reminders are an amazing way to draw people in and help them imagine themselves in a historical context. There are also multiple murals in town that depict industry and the role it has played in society. I hope town-wide public art projects continue to draw on material from The Mill Museum, and that museum material inspires other local artists; as a practicing artist myself, I definitely plan on spending some time there in the future!

The Mill Museum is sure to continue to capitalize on, and work with, their dedicated community through outreach events around town, in the natural environment, and in the surrounding areas.   

Some of these include: 

• Textile Trio 2016 (a series of June events revolving around Quilting, Knitting, and Weaving and Spinning); 
• Mill of Month tours around CT (led by the Education Coordinator);
• Museum Lyceums (monthly talks or other programs on historical subjects, for an adult audience); 
• Horse-drawn Wagon Rides at the Third ThursdayStreet Festival;
• Willimantic Nightmare on Main: The Horror of Confinement (October 2016 event and tour); 
• Snow Ball, their Winter Gala;
• Willimantic Chocolate Festival, Victorian Days, and Walktober participant; among others.

Despite all of this outreach, this organization could clearly benefit from a wholehearted jump into some kind of social tagging, transcription, or community annotation project: capitalizing on the supportive and engaged network of volunteers could enhance the work they already do and potentially pull in new users (Zorich et al. 14). Modern museum patrons want to see themselves reflected in the historical narrative, and want to insert themselves into history; using social media and Web 2.0 to facilitate this would engage users more thoroughly in the learning experience (Carson 26). The re-enactment events are a step in the direction of this idea, but launching additional social media platforms where guests are encouraged to photograph their visits and use those photographs in new interpretive ways could open up possibilities for novel outreach and educational campaigns.

The Windham Textile & History Museum is an important element of the Willimantic community and works tirelessly to preserve and make available the history of a small town that was at the center of the textile industry for a significant period of time. Cabral claims “the museum is a place of memory and a place of power. The museum is the ‘house of memory’ that preserves the objects of some of us mortals who, able to overcome the condition of being mortal, were immortalized. They will always be remembered, by the force of memory” (43). The Mill Museum ensures that those mere mortals that are documented and remembered include both the titans of industry that built our economy and social structures, as well as those immigrants and workers who made it all possible. More importantly, they work to put them on equal historical footing, so future generations can know and hopefully understand their important contributions to our culture.

TECH SPECS FROM NPS NRHP APPLICATION

https://www.nps.gov/nr/feature/places/14000434.htm

●      Added to National Register as a District in 2014 for statewide significance in two areas: “associated with events that have made a significant contribution to the broad patterns of our history” (A); and “embody the distinctive characteristics of a type, period, or method of construction, or that represent the work of a master, or that possess high artistic values, or that represent a significant and distinguishable entity whose components may lack individual distinction.” (C)

●      14 buildings and 5 structures (11.62 acres) - all extant mills, store houses, and other associated buildings, including the Stable, Office and Library & Company Store (current museum), plus bridges and other buildings and structures (Gate House, Wheel House, Machine Shop, Bleachery, Dye Houses)

●      Architecture: Late Victorian: Romanesque Revival and Queen Anne; 19th and 20th Century Industrial; Late 19th and 20th Century Revivals: Colonial Revival

●      Historic Functions: Industry: manufacturing facility, warehouse, waterworks

●      Significance: Architecture, Community Planning & Development, Industry

●      Period of Significance: 1857-1916

My more general review of the museum can be found here: http://432spr16cchi.blogspot.com/2016/03/final-project-part-i-intro-to.html

REFERENCES

Albanese, E. “Mill museum saves Willimantic’s hard history.” Boston.com. The Boston Globe, April 13, 2008. Web. Accessed April 27, 2016 at http://archive.boston.com/travel/explorene/connecticut/articles/2008/04/13/mill_museum_saves_willimantics_hard_history/

“American Thread Company.” National Register of Historic Places Program. National Park Service, 30 July 2014. Web. Accessed April 22, 2016 at https://www.nps.gov/nr/feature/places/14000434.htm

Cabral, M. 2001. “Exhibiting and communicating history and society in historic house museums.” Museum International (Unesco Paris), No. 210, 53(2): 41-46.

Carson,C. 2008. “The End of History Museums: What’s Plan B?” The Public Historian 30(4): 9-27.

“Edit-a-thon”. 2016. Wikipedia, April 2, 2016. Web. Accessed April 30, 2016 at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edit-a-thon

Gurian, E. H. 1999. “What is the Object of this Exercise? A meandering exploration of the many meanings of objects in museums.” Daedalus, America’s Museums (Summer, 1999), 128(3): 163-183.

Jorgensen, C., P. F. Marty, and K. Braun. 2012. "Connecting to Collections in Florida: Current conditions and critical needs in libraries, archives, and museums." Library Quarterly 82(4): 453-476.

Latham, K. F. 2012. “Museum object as document: using Buckland’s information concepts to understand museum experiences.” Journal of Documentation 68 (1): 45-71.

Macdonald, S. (ed). 2006. Chapter 6: “Collecting Practices.” A Companion to Museum Studies. John Wiley & Sons. 592 pp.

The Mill Museum. 2016. Facebook. Web. Accessed April 30, 2016 at https://www.facebook.com/The-Mill-Museum-184249887043/

Naumova, A. 2015. “‘Touching’ the Past: Investigating lived experiences of heritage in living history museums.” The International Journal of the Inclusive Museum 7: 1-8.

Pinna, G. 2001. “Introduction to historic house museums.” Museum International (Unesco Paris), No. 210, 53(2): 4-9.

Ponsonby, M. 2011. “Textiles and Time: Reactions to aged and conserved textiles in historic houses open to the public in England and the USA.” Textile History 42(2): 200-219.

Windham Mills State Heritage Park. n.d. Willimantic River Alliance. Web. Accessed May 1, 2016 at http://www.willimanticriver.org/recreation/pg_park_windham-mills.html

Windham Textile & History Museum: The Mill Museum. 2016. Web. Accessed April 30, 2016 at www.millmuseum.org

Zorich, Diane M., Günter Waibel, and Ricky Erway. 2008. Beyond the Silos of the LAMs: Collaboration among libraries, archives and museums.