Thomas Farm Open House Recap

Photo by the National Park Service. Used with permission.

Dear Friends,

We did it! The Monocacy National Battlefield opened the doors to the Thomas House last weekend, the conclusion of the Open House trifecta. I had a blast.

The Open House events this year were each a full weekend. For the Thomas House, Diane and I met at the battlefield on Friday night to make sure we had our bearings before we went in front of the public. Basically, we had a group meeting while hiking the Thomas Farm trail, which has to be my favorite kind of meeting. The park has opened the Thomas House a few times before, but it was restored into office space for the park's headquarters, which makes for a unique interpretation experience.

Last Saturday's weather was beautiful - sunny, warm but not crazy-hot - and we had several living historians camping outside. I never got a free minute to go talk to them, but a few came in at the end of the day and mentioned they had a non-stop stream of visitors. Yay! Most living historians I've met love talking to people about their areas of research, and I'm so glad they had a great day.

Don't think the outdoor historians were the only ones talking, however! The star of the show was the Thomas House itself: we had rangers and volunteers stationed throughout the house to talk about some of its historic features as our visitors wandered through, and Tracy had arranged to give the ranger program in the parlor. We had so many people interested in attending the ranger program that they all quickly became standing-room-only.

Since I was stationed in the entrance just outside the parlor, that gave me an opportunity to give an impromptu program each time. Ask me how happy I was to do that. C'mon, just ask me.

I was elated.

I was even happier when several people I spoke with mentioned they or others in their group grew up in either the manor house or the tenant house on the property. While we preserve the houses on the battlefield because they are witnesses of war, these houses were homes. Personally, I tend to avoid researching the modern families who lived in our historic properties because so many are still living and I want to respect their privacy. However, hearing about the Thomas House's more modern history as a home, and meeting some of the people who still consider it home even though they no longer live here, was so wonderful.

The park dates the manor house to about 1780, but acknowledges that it's possible that construction began several years earlier. James Marshall, the original owner, seems to have made Frederick County his home well before 1780, and had purchased the property even before that. He was a Scottish emigrant who made his fortune in tobacco trading and then dabbled in a few other areas like timber prospecting and land prospecting. Like my waistline, the house footprint expanded over the years and the style decor changed, but you can see from the photo above that the facade is styled to show its Federal origins. Diane's beautiful blue dress (in the picture at the top of this post) reflects the era the house was constructed. I'd love to show you the close-up photo the NPS took so you could see her dress more clearly, but the angle of that photo gave both of us double-chins - especially me - and I object to that.

My dress, on the other hand, is more appropriate for the Civil War battle that did so much damage to the  house. I talked about a shell crashing into the dining room and exploding in earlier posts, but my favorite part of letting the public into the Thomas House is that I can point out some of the smaller bullet scarring in the front entryway. A woman and her sons came in about 10 minutes until closing on Saturday, and I asked if they just wanted to explore or if they'd like me to talk. Mom voted to hear me talk, but when Al gave me the 5-more-minutes-until-closing signal, Mom told the kids they could go explore very quickly while she listened to more stories. I asked them to let me tell them one quick story before they explored; naturally, I chose the story that ends with the bullet hole in the door and the scarring in the panelling. Mom, with a big grin on her face, said, "That was so the right call. They loved that."

(Shameless plug: If you're wondering what story ends with the bullet hole in the door, etc., come ask us at Museums by Candlelight. It's usually the second Saturday in December, and we like to host it in the Thomas House.)

Getting back to last weekend's event, the weather Sunday morning was less cheerful than Saturday's weather.  Weather reports threatened all-day thunderstorms, and it was raining when I drove up to the Visitor Center. Fortunately, the rain stopped just before the event began so even though it was a slower start than Saturday, we still enjoyed quite a few guests.

I gave the formal programs on Sunday, and a few guests came up to me afterward to show me family photos taken at the Thomas House when it was a tenant farm.  One brought a wedding photo from the 1930s; it was very obvious that it had been taken in the L at the rear of the house. She told me she would email us a copy; I haven't seen it yet but really hope she does.

After giving my last scheduled program of the day, I was cleaning up the parlor when Kelly brought in a couple who wanted to know more about the history of the house. I started talking, they found seats and settled in to enjoy themselves, and, a couple at a time, more and more people wandered in and decided to stay to listen. I'm learning that I really like being able to give off-the-cuff presentations. I would have thought I'd like the safety net of having slides, but I'm finding that I get more interaction from the audience when it's just me and them, and I like the flexibility to adjust if I'm seeing cues that something either isn't resonating or is generating more interest than I expected.

Because I was downstairs all weekend and Diane was upstairs, we didn't really get to see each other. Naturally, after the event, Diane and I had another "group meeting" over dinner where we recapped the weekend and talked about ideas for the future.

I have so many ideas I want to share with you, so please stay tuned for some exciting new posts!

Thomas Farm Open House

Photo by Elizabeth Richardson. Used with permission.
Not bad for a photo taken through the windshield, huh?

"The house of Mr. C. Keefer Thomas, which was occupied by the Union forces, suffered severely from the fire of the enemy.  One of the shells striking it, entered the dining room and bursting, occasioned considerable damage." 1  

The Monocacy Living Historians are already getting ready for our next event, the Open House at the Thomas Farm. We are neck-deep in archeology reports and newspaper articles, working hard to understand the lives of the families who  lived here. The Thomas House is preserved on our battlefield as a Witness of War, and the Thomas Farm was the scene of some of the heaviest fighting in the battle. Both sides fought pretty vigorously for it and, of all our houses, it sustained the most damage. If you want to see scars from the battle, this is the event to attend.

That said, the day it saw battle was only one of many, many days in its history. I mentioned in my last post that it was believed to have been built circa 1780, which means the one day this house saw battle was only .00005% of its history. Mostly, it was someone's home, with all the love and security and emotion that our homes evoke.

For those who have been visiting us throughout the series, the Thomas House is the last of our series. It's the most restored of all the houses - it's now our park headquarters - so I encourage you to come out and join us. Together we'll learn more about the stories it has to tell.

Date: Saturday 8/20/2016 and Sunday 8/21/2016
Time: Open house from 11-4 with ranger programs at 11, 12:30, and 2.

Address: 4460 Baker Valley Road, Frederick, MD  21704
Also known as Auto Stop #4.

Tips:
1) Wear comfortable shoes. Even if you don't hike, the grounds are uneven.
2) Bring water and sunscreen. While you won't need those inside the house, the Thomas Farm has some surviving outbuildings that you may want to see more closely. In addition, the walking trail on the Thomas Farm is beautiful. For those with middle-school aged kids who are up for a trek, I have great luck spotting deer plus some other smaller wildlife. In addition, the Middle Ford Ferry has its own history and is beautiful to see.
3) I highly encourage you to attend the ranger program before going through the house, and I'm not just saying that because I'm giving the Sunday programs. They'll paint an overall picture so that as you go through the house, you'll know what you're looking at.

Please come join us. You'll have fun, and I could use some friendly faces in the audience on Sunday. Don't hesitate to come up and introduce yourself; I'd love to meet you!

---
1 Locals: Houses and Furniture Destroyed (1864, Jul 13). The (Frederick) Examiner, p. 3, col. 4. Retrieved from www.genealogybank.com.

Clifton/Worthington Farm Open House

Dear Friends,

Does anyone know what it's called when an artist has a smash debut album and then flops on the second? Me neither, and that's going to bug me, but the good news is that the Monocacy Living Historians did not experience that. Our second event, this time at the Worthington House, was great!

Photo by Liz Richardson, but not at this event.

The Worthington farm open house was the weekend after our big anniversary weekend, so we didn't get an opportunity to run through everything - or anything - in advance the way we did the Best House. I was so proud of us, though, because we just rolled with it.

Diane's mid-19th century wardrobe isn't ready yet, so she dressed in the park's official volunteer uniform. Tracy asked if I wanted to be upstairs or downstairs, and since I didn't realize that downstairs meant the cellar, I didn't speak up quickly enough and say, "Heck, yeah, I want the cellar!" As a result, Diane and I were on the main floor on Saturday - she in the parlor and me in the dining room.

Diane sounded like she was on a roll in the parlor. Diane has spent a lot of time as a docent for another park; she was in her element and it showed.

As for me, I enjoyed getting to talk about the dining room. There are some...er...idiosyncrasies in the dining room that are fun to talk about, but more importantly, the servant access between the cellar kitchen and the dining room was right behind me. The servant access up to the bedrooms was also right behind me, but I was most excited about access from the kitchen. It was so easy to see how the house's operating rhythm would have worked.

On Saturday, I wasn't in the house at all. Tracy offered me an opportunity to give the program on Sunday, and I had jumped at it. I had done spiels before, of course, starting with the 2014 Museums by Candlelight event, but I had never yet done a formal program.

I mentioned that we had limited time to prepare for this event, simply because the anniversary event was the weekend before, and it's all-hands-on-deck until that event is over. But during the week in between the two events, Tracy sent me a bunch of out-of-order bullet points, I organized them and added from my own research, and then she added some more points from the architectural reports, and from there we each massaged it into the story we wanted to tell. This house was a witness of war, but more than that, it was a home. It was a home long before Jubal Early marched his Confederate army through, and it was a home long after. I'm so grateful that Tracy gave me an opportunity to share that story with our visitors.

By the second program, I had lost my stage fright, and by the third one, I was really rolling. It helped that I got a lot of questions, many of them about items I had been actively researching. That told me that others are interested in the same questions I'm trying to answer, and gave me confidence about my program content. I have a lot to learn, but I thoroughly enjoyed myself.

Photo courtesy of Nicole Webb.
Used with permission.

I don't know for certain what I was talking about when my friend Nicole snapped that picture, but it would have been right around the time I started talking about the graffiti in the house added by its residents when it was turned into a barracks for migrant farm workers. Obscene graffiti would merit a grimace, wouldn't you say? (And clearly, I need to practice my programs more in front of a mirror.)

As you can see from the photos, the Worthington Farm has some beautiful scenery. I don't bring my camera when I'm dressed out because it spoils the illusion, but the Worthington Farm is one of my favorite places to go to practice my photography. The Monocacy River runs behind the tree line, and with the foothills behind that, I can easily imagine Mrs. Worthington and her family spending many a happy hour on the back porch enjoying the view.  When Mr. Worthington purchased the farm in 1862, it had been advertised as one of the most prosperous farms in the area; I can't help but think that a view like that would have helped to seal the deal!

L'Hermitage/Best Farm Open House

Dear Friends,

The Monocacy Living  Historians finally participated in our first official event, and I'm so excited to tell you about it!

Photo by Craig Kuhn. Used with permission.

There are three events on Monocacy's schedule this year during which we are going to open one of the houses on our battlefield. This is a big deal because, up until our sesquicentennial two years ago, the public had never been allowed inside the houses; even now these events are the only times this year the public is allowed inside 2 of the 3 houses. When we acquired these properties, they needed a lot of TLC - as, let's be honest, do all historic properties - and I suspect our team was eager to see what secrets these houses were holding about the families that lived in them. These houses are a reflection of the people who called them home, and some aspects of their lives would only be recorded in the structure and changes of the house itself.

Our first open house was at L'Hermitage, a.k.a. the Best farm. L'Hermitage is a particularly exciting house to interpret because it has a rich and unusual history for this region. There's still much we don't know, but maybe I'll do another blog post one day about some of the history we do know.

A couple weeks before the event, Diane and I met Ranger Tracy to go through the house and review talking points, and then we spent the rest of the afternoon in the park library with Tracy, asking questions and looking through photographs. Tracy would give three formal presentations each day in the stone barn, while Diane and I were responsible for guiding visitors inside the house and providing less formal interpretation. Since I'm still researching the family that lived there during the battle, I knew very little about the other families that had lived there. We were basically starting from scratch, and the park's reports were a huge help.

We knew that I would be dressed out in mid-19th century clothing, but Diane's Civil War wardrobe wasn't going to be ready in time. As luck would have it, Diane has also portrayed the time period in which the house was built. Sometimes things just fall into place, and  Tracy approved Diane dressing out in late 1700s clothing to portray the era of the original family while I dressed out in early 1860s clothing to portray the era of the family living there during our battle.

Both Diane and I had a grand time, and many of our visitors were vocal about being glad they came out. As you can see from the photo above, we had a lot of people come through! The counter tended to get stuck, but we think about 500 people came through the house each day that weekend. We had another living history unit that came out and set up little tents/booths, but we were so busy I didn't have much time to visit with them. I did notice that it was brutally hot under their tents, while it was wonderfully cool inside the house. The family that began L'Hermitage was from the Caribbean, and the house includes architectural features designed to keep the house as cool as possible. They may have regretted that in the winter, but I can attest that it's wonderful in the summer.

I mentioned earlier that part of the park's study of the L'Hermitage/Best house was to uncover some of its secrets. Unfortunately, one of those secrets was a massive termite infestation that had likely been eating away for years. Because parts of the house were in imminent danger of collapse, they redirected their efforts to stabilize the house and preserve what was left. As a result, we had to limit the number of people who could go through the house to about 10 at a time. The line got a little too long for comfort - a lesson for the next events - but with rare exception, everyone seemed very understanding of the wait.

More importantly, Diane and I showed the park staff that we could be a true asset to them when doing programs. We took away a number of ideas for next time, but we ended the weekend feeling very good about the contribution we made toward fulfilling the park's mission.

We're tackling the Worthington House next month, so wish us luck!

P.S. The photo above was taken by our park's volunteer photographer. He does incredible work, so I encourage you to click here to explore some of Craig's other photographs.