History, costuming, and houses, oh my!

Before I arrived in SC, M got involved in the Pendleton Historic Foundation, which runs two antebellum farmhouses (not plantation houses; plantations were single cash-crop places) in the area, Woodburn and Ashtabula.  It seems Woodburn functions as more of a museum and Ashtabula as the reenactment headquarters.



They're big, graceful white Federal-style wooden manors (Woodburn at left, Ashtabula at right), and the collections are pretty incredible.  Woodburn has a ghost, it seems; the local police would check on the place at night and kept reporting seeing a woman or boy looking out the attic windows, but a couple of years ago a photographer for the National Register of Historic Places accidentally snapped a photo.  I can't find a copy online, but it's a striking one; there's a copy framed in the original entryway (there are two entryways.  The house's second owner turned the house back-to-front.  We are mystified as to why).

The other day we went in to do the tour training at Woodburn.  It's a remarkable place; in 1966, it was redone with 1830s reproduction wallpaper throughout.  Lovely stuff, nice touches of the Orientalism of the 1850s-and-on in one of the bedrooms, and we have much of the Adger and Pinckney families' original furniture, including a desk with tariffs and taxes still glued to the inside of the cabinets and the Adgers' exquisite Wedgwood china.  Upstairs is a wardrobe which is entirely filled with French-imported ladies' gowns.  We're not fully aware of the era yet; M is intended to be going through the clothing collection in the next few months.

Entertainingly, no one can agree on anything about the place.  Every historical society or local volunteer group I've ever worked with (there have been at least three) have "a person" for various things.  "We don't know about the clothing or quilts," says E, the president (I think), "but with Megan here we now have a clothing and textiles person," or, "Our genealogy person couldn't come today, but he thinks this."  No one is entirely sure of some things: They debate whether a room off one of the bedrooms was a closet or not, they debate whether the wall through the ballroom/drawing room-parlor in the Pinckney back/Adger front was original to the house or added, and they're pretty sure all the Oriental-style rugs are American-made and old-but-not-antique, but "we don't really have a rug person."  The major problem?  Everyone who originally worked on the home restoration in the 1960s is now dead.  These kinds of societies don't tend to draw the young.

I was quite pleased to hear that they've got all kinds of uses for my weird skill set.  There's an herb garden at Woodburn which I'm to be working in, and possibly a trail tour I might assist with and talk about native plants and ecosystem restoration.  They were quite excited to hear about my jewelry skills; I'm supposed to help Megan do a lecture on clothing at Woodburn, and there are also Mourning Tours at Ashtabula that could use someone to talk about jet and hair jewelry.  There's a Native American Heritage Day in March that could use a trained cultural anthropologist, and an African American Heritage Day which I will not be remotely an expert in but which I want to pick up on before I start guiding tours.  But mostly I'd like to be the "jewelry person."

Woodburn is literally across the street from the technical college (where I now officially work; hooray!), so I expect to spend a lot of time there.

M and I are happily talking about making me an 1840s-era dress in dusty rose (this would make my mom laugh; I refused to wear pink for years, and only now that I am a damn queer living with a woman have I reluctantly acknowledged that I look really good in it).  We're talking about the possibility of doing one full skirt and two bodices, one a sleeved day dress and one an evening gown with a deep off-the-shoulder decolletage.  This allows a lot of different types of jewelry display, always important to me, and since the houses tend to be in the mid-20s in the winter, I'll have something warm and daytime-appropriate for giving tours in.  The interesting part is the decolletage; we're planning to try making it snap-in/tie-in/velcro-in/something so that I'll wind up with 1.) a fairly standard 1840s evening gown, 2.) a steampunk 1840s dress by adding jewelry, a mini top hat, a slightly more daring decolletage, and a pocketed bustle belt similar to these, and 3.) a heavily lace-trimmed decolletage that, with accessories, could become a Fat Lady costume for our next Harry Potter conference or a "Porcelain Doll from Hell" sort of thing for Halloween.

So yeah!