In spring semester 2021, students in “Interpreting History in Public: Approaches to Public History Practice” (HIST 625) collaborated with the Boston National Historical Park and Revolutionary Spaces to create a web exhibit on the multiple social, political and cultural movements focused on equality led by generations of Bostonians on the same landscape where the events leading to the American Revolution played out in the 1760s and 1770s.
The team brought the methods and skills of public historians to the documentary, material, and visual historical evidence to narrate this history for NPS audiences. This web-based exhibition is installed on a WordPress platform created for and managed by the NPS. Corridor to Revolution connects a curated collection of historic artifacts and documents to social, political and cultural activism performed in the Boston landscape spanning the 18th to the 20th centuries.
This web exhibition explores the struggles for social and racial justice, political action, equality, and cultural change. Short articles on featured topics that draw on a wide range of primary source materials offer audiences new ways to consider the “revolutionary landscapes” of Boston, and the city’s role in inspiring social and political change.
Corridor to Revolutions encourages us to reconsider the meanings of “revolution” and how these meanings shape our lives, past, and present. In this project, our project team joined Boston’s 2020 activities in commemorating and interpreting the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution. The colonial town proved a crucial center to the events of the American Revolution, witnessing meetings, protests, and even violence in the 1760s and 1770s. Today’s Washington Street, leading from Downtown Crossing to Old South Meeting House, the Old State House, and Faneuil Hall at Dock Square, served as the core corridor of Revolutionary Boston. In 2020, another generation of Bostonians engaged in protests, gatherings, and even violent confrontations on the very same ground. The 250th anniversary of the American Revolution is not simply an occasion to remember what happened 250 years ago, but an opportunity to reflect upon the past 250 years that leads to our current moment. For 250 years, generation after generation of Bostonians came to this same corridor to protest, meet, and fight their own revolution.
When I first toured the Adams National Historical Park as an eight-year-old in 2003, it never crossed my mind that someday I would have the opportunity to help reshape the visitor experience there. Fifteen years later, that is what I am doing as a project intern.
The John Adams Birthplace Home. A panel-based, self-guided tour here will partially focus on John Adams’s transition from student to attorney and his early romance with Abigail Smith. (Courtesy of Kurt Deion, 2011).
Under the auspices of the National Park Service, the Adams National Historical Park maintains several buildings related to the politically-prominent Adams family, which are spread throughout Quincy, Massachusetts. These include the side-by-side saltbox birth homes of John and John Quincy Adams, the second and sixth presidents of the United States. The elder statesman spent his childhood at a plain, wooden structure on his parents’ farm at Penn’s Hill, and in his adulthood he moved to the neighboring house, where his son was born in 1767. This second home was where he established his burgeoning law practice, and where matriarch Abigail Adams raised their children alone when her husband was away supporting the American Revolution.
The John Quincy Adams Birthplace Home. Here, the tour will feature additional aspects of John Adams’ law career and his role in drafting the Massachusetts Constitution. (Courtesy of Kurt Deion, 2011).
The Adamses uprooted from the Penn’s Hill farm in the 1780s and moved a few miles north to a residence that became known as Peace field. Naturally their belongings followed them, and short of disturbing the interior of the Peace field estate, in modern day the NPS is faced with a dearth of original furnishings to display at the birthplaces. At present, however, the ANHP is in the process of rethinking its historical narrative; in this context, the lack of artifacts at the saltbox homes creates an opportunity to refocus on the lives of the family members, such as John and Abigail. My internship responsibilities include identifying and prioritizing the stories that should be told at the birthplaces, via a self-guided tour.
John Adams. Portrait by Gilbert Stuart.
Before I arrived at the ANHP, my supervisor had already outlined some general areas she wished me to investigate, such as John’s law career and his early romance with Abigail. Yet I was given much freedom within those parameters to prioritize particular stories at the birthplaces. In addition, because the Adamses were prolific writers, I had many primary sources as the foundation for content, for they left behind thousands of documents in the form of letters and diaries. And finally, the ANHP’s draft Visitor Experience Plan outlines their priority to implement the principles of inclusive history, which I learned about in the UMass Boston History MA program. My education at the university has emphasized the need to tell the accounts of groups marginalized by those in positions of power, which in the United States has historically been white Anglo-Saxon Protestant men. In my role at the ANHP, I must determine what stories are important that can also resonate with modern audiences regardless of age, race, and gender.
Abigail Adams. Portrait by Gilbert Stuart.
The correspondence exchanged between John and Abigail during their courtship and early marriage paint a picture of their thoughts as a young couple in 18th century Massachusetts. These letters also provide a good basis for any future research focused on Abigail’s maintenance of the farm in John’s absence, and her personal philosophies. I struggled more with discerning which of John Adams’s court cases to include in the tour. As I read through his annotated legal papers at the Boston Public Library, I found many of the lawsuits to be archaic and inaccessible in the 21st century. Some, however, revealed much about John Adams’s thinking about rights. In King v. Stewart, for example, Adams represented a loyalist whose home was ransacked in part because of his prospects as a Stamp Act collector. Adams also defended the British soldiers implicated in the Boston Massacre. These cases demonstrate Adams’s belief in the right to a fair trial and representation, even for those whose political allegiance differed from his own.
It was very rewarding to find those cases that resonate with current issues and principles of law. In Sewall v. Hancock, John Hancock was tried for smuggling in Admiralty Court, which deprived him of a right to a trial by jury. As his attorney, John Adams argued that British Parliament was depriving American colonists of a right granted to their brethren across the Atlantic. This allowed me to draw a line from John’s experience as an attorney, to his resentment for the British Crown at the dawn of the Revolution, and also to his draft of the Massachusetts Constitution in 1779. When he drafted the document in his law office, it included the right to trial by jury. This and other protections, such as freedom of the press and prohibition of cruel and unusual punishments, were subsequently included in the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights. I hope that the relevance of these documents in Americans’ lives today will help illustrate the importance and influence of John’s legal work.
As a Public History student pursuing an archives certificate, I have spent countless hours in various archival repositories. The cardboard cartons, steel shelves, and chilly temperatures can give off a utilitarian feel that contradicts the richness of the records they contain.
The Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site. Courtesy of the Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site, National Park Service.
Today, digitization projects have drastically changed the way researchers can access archival documents, enabling them to receive images of requested items via a website, zip drive, or email attachment. Thanks to technology, many researchers no longer have to travel to archives, such as the Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site, where I started working as an intern in February. However, the beauty and history of the location of this archive infuses the records stored here with a context that informs their meaning in ways I did not anticipate before I began working here.
FL Olmsted, Sr. writing in the Hollow, Fairsted. Courtesy of Olmsted National Historic Site, National Park Service.
Who knew an archive could be so beautiful? Frederick Law Olmsted, Sr., who designed the site which now houses the archive, is widely recognized as America’s premier landscape architect. His accomplishments in park design, town planning, landscape architecture, and conservation have earned international acclaim.
South Lawn with Olmsted Elm photographed circa 1900. Courtesy of Olmsted National Historic Site, National Park Service.
In 1883, he purchased a home in Brookline, Massachusetts, for both his family residence and professional office. He deemed the property “Fairsted.” Over the next decade, he designed the building and grounds to match his aesthetic vision, creating a space to celebrate nature and offer an oasis amidst an increasingly urban setting.
Fairsted continued to be a hub of landscape design far past Olmsted’s retirement in 1895. His son, Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., and stepson, John Charles Olmsted, continued the business as the “Olmsted Brothers Landscape Architects.” During the first three decades of the twentieth century, the work volume and staff of the firm increased significantly.
Image of ten employees of the Olmsted Brothers Landscape Architects in the upper drafting room at Fairsted in 1930. Courtesy of Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site, National Park Service.
By the 1940s, the volume of work had begun to decline; however, during the 1960s and 1970s, scholars, landscape architects, environmentalists and historic preservationists showed interest in the work of Frederick Law Olmsted, Sr. This academic and practical interest in Olmsted’s landscape architecture prompted individuals to collect and begin to preserve materials related to the firm’s history.
In 1979, when the firm’s landscape design activity formally ceased, Fairsted was acquired by the National Park Service (NPS) as a National Historic Site. The NPS became responsible for preserving and cataloging the documents, plans, and artifacts left behind by the firm and interpreting Fairsted’s history for the public.
The Olmsted archives contain more than 1 million original documents related to landscape design projects the firm took on between 1857 and 1979. The repository contains approximately 139,000 plans and drawings, as well as photographic negatives and prints, planting lists, lithographs, employee records, and office correspondence. Today, the majority of research requests the archives receives relate to the firms’ plans and drawings, which have been used for landscape restorations, academic publications, and historical exhibits.
In the early stages, the archives staff focused on preserving the plans, which were often brittle, dirty, and damaged. Next, the items were cataloged and made available to researchers, who, at that point needed to visit the site to view them physically. In recent years, reflecting archival trends and practices, a massive digitization project focusing on the plans and drawings began.
Plan for Prospect Park in Brooklyn, New York, created by Olmsted, Olmsted & Eliot in 1894. Courtesy of Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site, National Park Service.
Initially, the plans and drawings were scanned into black and white tiff files. But the Olmsted National Historic Site is currently undertaking a four-year project to re-scan plans and drawings into high resolution color images that meet current industry standards and research expectations.
Working, as many archives do, without an in-house platform and hoping to provide widespread public access to the materials, the archives staff have been uploading the items to Flickr. The availability of scanned images has been extremely popular, so much so that it has greatly diminished onsite research visits. Staff members are currently working out a system to include visitors to the Flickr page to meet the annual visitation expectations of the site.
The shift, along with an option of offsite storage, has brought up discussions on the necessity of archival storage at the Olmsted site in general. Fairsted is made of wood and highly susceptible to fire and other environmental factors. The plans are stored in a protected vault, but many other items remain in the open. For that reason, storage of the Olmsted firms’ archival items is split between the Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site and the Springfield Armory National Historic Site.
For now, the items at the Olmsted site will remain there, due primarily to a consensus that their presence adds visceral meaning to the site as a whole. The visitors on public tours experience, that intangible feeling familiar to historians who physically interact with meaningful historical records. This feeling is even stronger at the production site, in this case a beautiful home among gardens and wildlife. The researchers looking at files on their laptops will miss this experience.
Is it really worth researchers travelling miles and miles for a feeling?That depends on myriad factors. But, after working at the Olmsted site over the past six months it is clear to me that seeing, touching, and interpreting the plans while in the historic office delivers a powerful impact. If Olmsted researchers are in Boston, I hope they will make a stop at Fairsted.
